
Arrival movie review: how to talk to aliens and expand your consciousness
Intelligent, intense, grownup science fiction that will thrill genre lovers and satisfy fans of moving human drama. A beautiful, thought-provoking film.

Intelligent, intense, grownup science fiction that will thrill genre lovers and satisfy fans of moving human drama. A beautiful, thought-provoking film.

Cute and sweet and will put you to sleep, like a diabetic coma, and then it will smack you awake with its relentlessly cheery vivid-pastel optimism.

Stakes out its own fresh place in an SF subgenre that is well played out, and rehumanizes it ways that are both extraordinarily moving and deeply unnerving.

An atypical disaster movie, less about the failure of technology than the failure — and perhaps the resurgence — of the human spirit in the face of that.

As entertaining on an escapist level as it is irrefutably engaging on a level that is essential for citizens who are players in our political environment.

There is genuine if exasperated warmth here, but it is far less satisfyingly bound up into a cohesive story in this halfhearted retread of the original film.

A marvelous little movie: compact, efficient, almost unbearably intense, smartly (perhaps accidentally) feminist. A glorious treat of pulp genre fun.

Smart, perceptive, keenly observant, heartbreaking: how the world crushes girls and turns lively people into automatons merely because they are female.

Powerful, intimate, and fresh. We desperately need to hear more women talking about being driven in an inexorable way toward a passion.

Flawless in every way: sumptuous visually and emotionally. One of the more mature and sophisticated romances the big screen has ever seen.