"Arrival" Review

 Arrival is a sci-fi mystery drama thriller film directed by Denis Villeneuve, written by Eric Heisserer from the short story "The Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, and starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, and Michael Stuhlbarg. The film follows linguistics professor and former government translator Louise Banks (Adams), who is recruited by a US government official (Whitaker) to attempt to translate the conversations with an alien race who have positioned twelve ominous monolithic "shell" spacecraft at different landing points across the globe, including one in a field in Montana, to try to interpret whether they have visited Earth for peaceful or hostile purposes. What follows from Louise learning their written language while trying to subvert any aggression on the part of foreign governments is something I'll leave you to find out for yourself. With Arrival, what begins as a perfectly well-realized and thought-provoking foray into modern science fiction filmmaking soon turns into an emotional, enthralling mindfuck whose believability and effectiveness can be credited primarily to the realization of the concepts in Chiang's brilliant short story by Eric Heisserer, and the performance of Amy Adams.

On a technical level, Arrival is a consistently impressive work. Cinematographer Bradford Young utilizes director Denis Villeneuve's penchant for heady examinations of humanity being photographed in incredibly naturalistic ways that Roger Deakins perfected in Prisoners and Sicario, and while this is by no means Villeneuve's best-shot film, Young's camerawork is still sumptuous and even breathtaking at times, particularly a sweeping reveal shot of the alien spacecraft and the military base camp surrounding it toward the beginning. Johann Johannson's ominous score packs an emotional punch, especially when the film takes a turn for the surreal.

Heisserer's script and Villeneuve's direction are also carried out in a way that emphasizes grounded realism mostly to the film's best ability. Villeneuve has a particular talent for making his twists and tension feel earned and easily found crawling under the viewer's skin by setting up his worlds and characters in very grounded and believable ways. The story's handling of the minute details, both in feeling and in action, of an alien invasion on Earth is believable enough that we accept with open arms the times in the story that the film becomes more surreal and mind-bending, and also begins to bring up its more challenging concepts. The scenes at the beginning of the film of the immediate aftermath of the landing is one of the most memorable and effective in the film for me, as are some of the developments in the months following, such as news of a cult group lighting their compound on fire in a case of mass suicide in response to the aliens, and the rantings of a right-wing anti-government conspiracy theorist on talk radio blaming the problem on the president. These details are mostly relegated to the background, and indeed only serve as added bonuses in the story of Louise, but they're noticeable and make the world of Arrival seem that much more authentic.

This isn't to say the film doesn't have its moments of breaking from believability, oddly enough very few of them having to do with aliens. Not to spoil anything, but there's one scene involving the actions of a few unnamed soldiers that doesn't make a whole lot of sense and is sort of improperly built up, and the film does have its share of lines that cross into the realm of moderate cheese ("What happens now?" "They arrive."). These aren't film-ruining problems, but when the rest of the story and technical aspects of the film make the world so lusciously believable, they are noticeable. Such issues are relatively few and far between, though, and the script, on a thematic and tonal level, is rather airtight.

The emotional complexity of Amy Adams's performance, which is one of the very best of her impressive career, couples with the most brilliant aspects of Heisserer's script to create a sci-fi filmgoing experience that's rich and thought-provoking, even dipping its toes into the realm of mind-bending toward the end of its second act. Arrival really is a film about Louise and about communication, and while the film's marketing may not give you that idea, the script is filled with several slyly hidden and subtle hints from the very start of the film to the themes and concepts that unfold following the revelation of the film's slow-burning twist. And not to be that guy all the time, but at its core, the film's message, which is rather simple but is unfolded in an original, complex, and interesting way, is one that I feel is rather timely and important - that is, it is a film about the importance of diplomacy and communication. In a very bizarre and trippy way, Arrival is the story of a woman teaching the world how to try and understand foreign ways of thinking in order to better communicate for the betterment of both parties rather than initial hostility at anything different. I know this election season has a brutal one so the politicization of anything is particularly likely to flare up emotions right now, but art doesn't exist in a vacuum and I found the movie's underlying message to be refreshing and appropriate for the current political climate.

Overall, Arrival is sort of the stuff of sci-fi classics. I can easily see it sitting up with the likes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind or 2001: A Space Odyssey, science fiction that is thoughtful and challenging, but ultimately gets to the core essences of humanity and examines them through fantastical, yet scarily plausible, scenarios. It explores communication, perception, and problem solving in such a fascinating way that I feel bad keeping you in the dark on how it does - it makes a lot of my praises sound very vague and odd, but I truly want you to unpack this movie step by step as you watch it like I did. Especially if you're unfamiliar with the short story as I was, watching Arrival is like an engrossing puzzle. Is it straightforward? Yes. Does that make it any less engaging? Absolutely not.

And if you'd rather bypass all that, you'll still get an entertaining and intriguing sci-fi story (though, be warned, one that is not filled with action or disaster sequences - spoilers?), a terrific performance from Amy Adams, and some beautiful camerawork and a haunting musical score. Ex Machina - and to a lesser extent Interstellar - now have company as thinking man's sci-fi movies of this generation.

Grade: A

"Moonlight" Review

Moonlight is an independent drama film directed and written by Barry Jenkins from a story by Tarrell Alvin McCraney. It stars Trevante Rhodes, Ashton Sanders, Alex Hibbert, Andre Holland, Jharrel Jerome, Jaden Piner, Naomie Harris, Mahershala Ali, and Janelle Monae. Told in three distinct parts, the film highlights three moments in the life of Chiron, a gay black man living in a rough neighborhood of Miami, during his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Through these snapshots, we see the quiet and subdued Chiron attempt to make connections with his best friend Kevin, his drug-addicted mother (Harris), and a kind trap couple that takes him under their wing (Ali, Monae). What follows is a poignant examination of the human condition virtually peerless in modern cinema.

I kind of don't know where to start with this film, which just brims with emotional complexity from its structural simplicity. Evoking the neo-realism of 1960s Italian cinema for a decidedly postmodern audience, there really is no other film like Moonlight. This film has had praise dumped on it since its premiere, and I'll only be adding to it. I've only seen it once, but I can't think of a single flaw.

To get the surface level elements out of the way, the film is stunning from a technical standpoint. Cinematographer James Laxton shoots much of the movie with a very shallow depth of field, at times with only a character's face being in focus, creating a feeling of intense intimacy. Editors Joi McMillon and Nat Sanders string together Chiron's story in a way that lets the film move breezily and quietly, and the result is nothing short of mesmerizing. The way the images and scenes effortlessly ebb and flow together make the experience of watching Moonlight a captivating and engaging one to say the least. On top of that, every performance - and I mean every performance - in the film is absolutely terrific, including a number of child and teen performances, which is itself a major accomplishment. Ali, Harris, Rhodes, Holland, Monae, and Sanders are the standout performances, though it really is impossible to single any one actor out, as they all breathe incredible life into complex, impeccably wrought characters.

And the characters and their interactions with each other, and specifically their interactions with Chiron, is the thread that binds the film's story together. One of the essential aspects of great screenwriting is avoiding cliche. Moonlight not only avoids the cliches and stereotypes you might expect to see in an Oscar-campaigning indie film about a gay black man living among gangsters and drug slingers; it ventures inside each of them and actively dismantles them. It not only asks you to leave behind your assumptions and preconceptions of the experiences of black people, LGBT people, drug dealers, drug addicts, men, boys, single mothers, etc.; it confronts those preconceptions and shatters them, revealing the complex humanity in each of these archetypes too rarely offered honest portrayal in American cinema.

Through its unconventional all-violin score to its striking and intimate camerawork to its breathlessly personal and compassionate screenplay, Moonlight tells a story that strips away its characters' superficial identity signifiers and instead presents us human beings whose experiences have shaped them over generations. Chiron encounters many of the same people at the three different points in his life shown in the film, and with each there is growth, conflict, and forgiveness. Culminating in his final words of confession to a longtime childhood friend, we learn through Chiron's experiences that no matter the societal labels, our most important commonality as human beings is that we strive for connection and understanding amid feelings of isolation and pressure to live up to the expectations of either society or those around us, whether relating to preconceived notions of masculinity, sexuality, or more simply what makes someone a good person, or what it means to love someone, to forgive someone.

In a way, Moonlight is everything we go to the movies for - to understand each other, to feel each other's experiences, to ache with one another, to try to find solace in the fact that we are not alone in feeling pain, loneliness, or the pressure of creating a life for ourselves. Moonlight strips down its characters' stereotypical archetypes to reveal their humanity, urgently challenging us to see through color, sexuality, social status, physical appearance, or walk of life, accept those differences, and really, truly feel for one another and connect with one another for the good of all of us. And it does so in a way that is unique, original, captivating, uplifting, poignant, and almost spiritual.

Moonlight is a soulful, brilliant, and I would say essential film. In a time where empathy and recognition of common humanity is often blockaded by matters of identity, Moonlight is a refreshing take on that theme from an uncommon voice. But don't think that simple politics explain why this film is so great - Moonlight's tale of the astonishing power and necessity of human connection and the eternal struggle to be accepted and understood is a timeless one. Roger Ebert once said that movies are "a machine that generates empathy". Moonlight is the purest incarnation of that machine I've seen in a long, long time.

Grade: A+

"The Edge of Seventeen" Review

The Edge of Seventeen is a coming of age comedy-drama film directed and written by Kelly Fremon Craig and starring Hailee Steinfeld, Woody Harrelson, Kyra Sedgwick, Haley Lu Richardson, Blake Jenner, and Hayden Szeto. Steinfeld plays 17-year-old Nadine, who's always been difficult and a bit of a loner, taking solace only in her friend Krista (Richardson), especially after a family tragedy at the end of middle school. Nadine's life begins to fall further apart, however, when Krista hooks up with and later begins dating her confident, attractive older brother (Jenner). Nadine attempts to navigate this situation alongside her sardonic history teacher (Harrelson) and an awkward boy who has a crush on her (Szeto), all while dealing with the regular trappings of being an angsty teenager.

This film was originally titled Besties, and if you're like me, you'd probably read that title and my synopsis and roll your eyes a bit, thinking that there are a million movies telling the story of The Edge of Seventeen. And you'd be right. Where you'd be wrong, however, is assuming that this film is generic, unsurprising, or not worthy of your time. I had hints of that feeling when I saw the first trailers for this film. To my surprise, The Edge of Seventeen ended up being one of the most enjoyable movies I've seen this year, and perhaps one of the best coming of age movies of this generation. I mean it.

Let's enumerate the negatives first, because there are very few. The Edge of Seventeen is a teen dramedy about growing up and being an angsty bitch and experiencing your adolescent sexual awakening, and it hits all of the requisite notes of the genre and doesn't offer many surprises on a narrative level, insofar as that I was able to guess where the story was going at basically any turn. While the film largely avoids cliches and gaps in reality, two observations I made that took me out of it at times were the fact that Woody Harrelson's teacher character would definitely be fired for saying the things he says to Nadine, and that a girl as beautiful as Hailee Steinfeld would never have trouble convincing boys to have sex with her in any American high school I can think of. These are the only primary points at which the film enters a world of fiction.

Beyond that, though, The Edge of Seventeen works so well because of its believability and authenticity, which is owed to the well-rounded characters that Kelly Fremon Craig creates and the performances of the actors portraying them, especially Harrelson and Steinfeld. This is a rare R-rated coming of age film, and the movie revels in it. Sexuality is confronted frankly and unabashedly, and our main characters are vulgar, politically incorrect, and often legitimately shitty people to each other. And it all feels authentic and honest, a quality every coming of age film strives for. The film doesn't cheekily and obviously poke fun at genre tropes while embracing them in execution like many entries in the genre of late. The Edge of Seventeen doesn't care if you've heard this kind of story before; it prefers instead to tell it with honesty, personality, and a population of three-dimensional characters.

Nadine is not an angsty teenager for the sake of it. Her experiences shape her, though she prefers to see those experiences through an immature, sarcastic lens. What's refreshing about the film is how it doesn't settle for simplicity in exploring the relationships between its characters. This isn't a story of a girl who is outcast for no reason and thrown into bad situation after bad situation as she pleads for mercy, being the only teenager who understands the world - in fact, that's what Nadine would want it to be. Instead, Nadine is simply thrust into an existence rife with unfortunate experiences, the effects of which are exacerbated by her own personal flaws and the flaws of those around her. That's what makes the story and characters in The Edge of Seventeen feel so fresh. No one's a good guy or bad guy; they're people who make mistakes and struggle to come back from them. You either know or are someone in this movie. It sounds simple enough, but you'd be surprised how hard many similar movies find it to get it just right. This is truly the Goldilocks zone of coming of age movies.

And, again, not to minimize the great work from Craig (in her directorial debut, by the way), but this can really be owed to the charm and talent of the cast, especially Hailee Steinfeld. She absolutely carries the film, pulling the audience gracefully and tactfully through the film's many tonal shifts, making Nadine sympathetic, bitchy, or just plain goofy whenever needed. Steinfeld's impressive command of her part in Craig's script gives Nadine even further emotional complexity, culminating most notably in a tearful confession scene during the film's climax that had me legitimately teary-eyed.

The Edge of Seventeen is smart, funny, sweet, and uplifting. It's a story about the very real tendency of adolescents to assume they are alone in their pain in life, and that nobody else gets it. This film is a reminder of the universality of the awkwardness, sadness, isolation, and self-consciousness of the adolescent experience, and that each individual is ultimately responsible for their method of tackling life's numerous obstacles. It's an incredibly refreshing addition to a very crowded genre, and an exciting leap forward for a newcomer filmmaker. It's fairly by-the-numbers as far as this type of stories go, but if anything, The Edge of Seventeen is testament to how far any story can be taken with a talented cast, well-written characters, and an abundance of charm and authenticity.

Grade: A-

"Doctor Strange" Review

Doctor Strange is a superhero fantasy action film directed by Scott Derrickson, written by Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill, and Jon Spaihts, and starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Mads Mikkelsen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, and Benedict Wong. It's based on the Marvel comics character and is the 468th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Now that the Earth-based (Avengers, Captain America, Iron Man) and space-based (Guardians of the Galaxy) aspects of the MCU have been established, Doctor Strange continues Thor's delving into the mystical realm, this time revolving around Eastern mysticism instead of Norse mythology. The movie itself follows Steven Strange (Cumberbatch), a successful, arrogant neurosurgeon who suffers a debilitating car crash that leaves him in only marginal control of his hands, effectively ending his entire career. After Western medicine fails him, he travels to Nepal to attempt a sort of healing possible only through the spiritual realm, and is introduced to the Ancient One (Swinton), who leads a spiritual resistance against a rogue ex-student of hers (Mikkelsen), who is bent on enveloping the natural world in the dark realm, an existence outside of time where life is eternal, but miserable.

Doctor Strange is, appropriately, probably the strangest Marvel film thus far in terms of subject matter. Yes, Guardians had a talking tree and raccoon and was fairly innovative in terms of tone when it comes to superhero films, but Strange decidedly goes for a more fantastical setting and tone than any previous Marvel film to date. And it gets extra points for embracing that and running with it to entertaining degrees. What remains is an exceptionally entertaining, if still a bit formulaic, Marvel movie. But don't write it off from that sentiment alone.

Unsurprisingly, Benedict Cumberbatch does a wonderful job as the character Strange, who is almost grossly arrogant and callous to his girlfriend (McAdams) in the film's opening scenes, and yet somehow manages to come off as likable and a genuine hero to root for. McAdams, Ejiofor, and Swinton all deliver superlative performances as well, elevating their characters into the realm of the third dimension beyond the typical cookie-cutter action flick characters they could've been. Mads Mikkelsen does a great job as the villain whose name escapes me, but as the first clause of this sentence might have tipped you off to, the villain is unfortunately under-written, under-developed, and Mikkelsen's acting chops mostly remain untapped. His scenes are effective, but they are few and far between.

In regards to the action and spectacle, I actually preferred the treatment of these elements to this year's other Marvel outing, Captain America: Civil War, mostly for choosing to be more visually creative than most Marvel films (as well as having the first Marvel musical score, written by Michael Giacchino, that I actually actively wanted to listen to later). While Derrickson's direction of the hand-to-hand combat leaves a lot to be desired (if someone with more of a hold on effective martial arts fight choreography had helmed this film, it could have had some of the most enthralling action scenes in the MCU), the setpieces for the action are stupendous. Even if not as innovatively shot or involving as they could've been, each action sequence makes use of new developments of the world in the film, and are creative and entertaining, especially a fight taking place between two spirits in a doctor's office and one involving time moving backwards around our characters.

And the visual effects are bonkers - if it weren't for The Jungle Book this year, I'd give Doctor Strange the Best Visual Effects Oscar. Some of Doctor Strange's most entertaining sequences involve kaleidoscopes of bizarre imagery straight out of an acid trip, tesseracts, and shapes folding in on themselves as the characters' spirits and minds hop across dimensions. From folding New York City streets into cubes to trapping characters inside of walls as buildings reconstruct themselves in backwards-moving time, computer-generated imagery is used as it should be in Doctor Strange - to create dazzling, mind-bending images that are truly transporting and impossible in the natural world.

What mostly bogs down Doctor Strange is the fact that this is yet another superhero origin story, and it hits all those notes as it should. The screenplay is competently written, with plenty of set-ups and payoffs, some effective humor sprinkled throughout, and my second-favorite ending of any Marvel movie thus far (the first being Civil War, so it's nice to see Marvel is beginning to branch out beyond "villain creates giant glowing thing in the sky to destroy a city"). I actually think the movie should've gone on about 20 minutes longer. Strange's training in the mystical arts is largely skipped over, and we don't get to see much of an evolution of him as a sorcerer. He goes from being unable to doing basic tasks to being one of the most gifted students in what is told to us to be several months, but in reality is only about 5 minutes of screen time. Beyond that, the film mostly plays by the numbers of any other superhero origin story, so if you're completely sick of those, you may not have a lot of fun with this film. Luckily, the mystic aspect keeps the film mostly fresh, even if its screenplay isn't as tight, subtextual, or carefully crafted as Civil War's.

I feel like I'm being overly harsh when I really enjoyed this movie. Trust me, being a well-done superhero origin story is not nothing, and this film has plenty of wonderful things going for it. In the end, Doctor Strange is visually resplendent, well-acted, and satisfying middle-ground addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It doesn't reinvent the wheel as far as superhero film formula, but it has just enough surface-level shake-ups to keep me invested in Marvel's crazy decade-long crossover mania. I look forward to seeing Strange and Tony Stark trading snarky quips in the upcoming Avengers movie.

Grade: B+