Arrival

so arrival opens with a woman watching her daughter grow up and die. and you think you know what kind of film you're watching. you don't. twelve enormous alien spacecraft appear at twelve locations around the world, and a linguist named louise banks is recruited by the military to figure out how to communicate with them before tensions lead to war. amy adams plays louise, and her performance is so quiet and so precise and so completely devastating that the academy's decision not to nominate her remains genuinely baffling. denis villeneuve shoots the whole thing in cool greys and blues, deliberately making it look grounded and slightly mundane, which makes the alien sequences even more unsettling when they arrive. the heptapods communicate through circular ink patterns that bloom in the air, and watching louise slowly decode them is genuinely thrilling in a way that has nothing to do with explosions. and then the film reveals what it has actually been about the whole time. and if you haven't seen it, nothing should be said beyond this: it is one of the most emotionally intelligent twists in modern science fiction, and it reframes everything you just watched in a way that makes you want to go back and watch it again immediately. it is more about grief, time, communication and compassion than warp speed, and it is one of the finest science fiction films made this century.