Arrival

You know when you go to the movies with a friend and the film has an interesting premise but is ultimately not very good, so afterwards you sit and discuss what you would have done differently to make it better? A pointless exercise unless you happen to be filmmakers, but we all do it, right? Well, Arrival is what would've come from that discussion if Stanley Kubrick and Kurt Vonnegut had just watched Independence Day.

When twelve giant spacecraft appear in random locations across the world, linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) are hired by the US government to decode and translate the alien's language in order to communicate with them and discover their purpose on Earth. Solid turns from Renner as Donnelly and Forest Whitaker as a keen-for-results yet sympathetic Army Colonel, but the real standout performance is from Amy Adams herself (sadly overlooked at the Academy Awards for both this and Nocturnal Animals). Louise is a complex character dealing with her own feelings of loss and sadness, undertaking the job of a lifetime, trying to actively decode an utterly alien language from scratch. With delicate facial expressions and body language Adams manages to convincingly balance wide-eyed wonder and the weight of expectation from the government and media.

Director Denis Villeneuve follows up the sublime Sicario with yet another sumptuous looking film full of tension that leaves you guessing right until the end, and composer Jóhann Jóhannsson's score only serves to heighten that tension. The fact that they shall reunite for this year's Blade Runner sequel is very exciting indeed.