First Contact: ARRIVAL

Like all the best science fiction, Arrival uses heady ideas to illuminate humanity. In the movie, large black pods descend upon the Earth, hovering ominously above twelve, seemingly random, spots on the globe. We don’t know what they want. Armies mobilize. News media chatters endlessly about our anxiety. And with a grim, secret determination, small bands of researchers try to figure out a way to communicate with the extraterrestrial visitors. Their silence is scary. But science just might find a way. We follow one of those teams, a linguist (Amy Adams) and a physicist (Jeremy Renner) recruited by a colonel (Forest Whitaker) to helicopter into the base around the UFO in the wilds of Montana. The object opens every 18 hours, a passageway into which they can climb and attempt to learn the aliens’ language. The mysterious beings hide behind a clear wall, spindly, spidery grey giants in milky off-white fog, uttering their inscrutable otherworldly tones. How we react to them, how we attempt to understand them, will determine the fate of the world. Is that kind of emotional intelligence, that drive to cooperate and understand, within the powers of the human race? After all, it’s so much easier to give into the fear of the unknown, to scapegoat, to shoot first and ask questions never.

Alien visitation narratives can take many forms: the campy, the exciting, the funny, the metaphorical, the ponderous. Director Denis Villeneuve, whose films like Prisoners and Sicario are pulp procedurals told with heavy deliberateness, treats Arrival with great seriousness. Austere, carefully composed images captured by cinematographer Bradford Young tell the story with patience, watching competent people doing their jobs in extraordinary circumstances. Maybe one of the most poignant effects of watching the military and scientists quickly get over their bewilderment and get down to the business of figuring out what to do next step-by-step is its fantasy of competency when faced with unprecedented events. Remember thinking our political and intellectual leaders could withstand such a test? But the movie isn’t safe fantasy. It interrogates the impulses with which mankind would greet such a moment. Some countries send researchers of their own into the UFOs nearest them, eager to share research with colleagues at other sites. Some countries lock down, militarize, and greet news of others’ discoveries with suspicion. One wrong move could bring unknowable consequences. Will one bad faith act wreck the planet for us all?

Villeneuve, working in the shadow of 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Contact, in which scientific process is diligently portrayed until leaping into pure poetry at the point of its most beautiful conjectures, imagines the events with cautiousness and precision. If this were to happen, this might be how it’d go down. There’s a tick-tock element of professionalism to the researcher’s routines. We see them pouring over data and fitfully sleeping before it’s time to go into the UFO again, hands shaking as they attempt new techniques of communication. The progress is slow. The stakes are high. Everyone moves as if in a daze, determined to get it right, too overwhelmed to register how mind-bending and world changing their position is. Villeneuve, so good at conjuring dread and awe, uses every ounce of his ability to give these events their full weight. We stare up at the massive edifice of the object, stare in wonder at its enormity, its unusual construction. It dwarfs the actors who move up into it. Clouds roll by. Below, the humans wait for its next move, if it will ever come. It’s a beautiful and terrifying unknown.

The impeccable craftsmanship of the film gives it its unshakeable mood, and its dizzying intensity. With a story like this one, equal parts mystery and reverence for what other filmmakers could’ve easily turned silly, tone is crucial. By maintaining tight control over the soft light and somber soundtrack, the eerie alien creaking and clunking and crisp man-made tools clicking and clacking, Villeneuve keeps the proceedings compelling in their stillness, their intellectual puzzling, and slowly accumulating power. The film begins with the story of Amy Adams’ linguist losing a loved one (earning weeping faster than any film since Up), associating the earthshaking discovery with death, grief and fear mingling as one melancholy unknown. This backstory is shuffled into the background as the film gets down to business, informing the emotional terrain subtextually. But as it bubbles back up, the film reveals its full intentions, melding a massive coldness with subtle warmth, tenderness invading the foreboding.

Screenwriter Eric Heisserer’s reverent expansion of the short story by Ted Chiang – one of our greatest sci-fi authors – faithfully recreates the full, breathtaking, head-spinning melding of real emotion and speculative fact. How fulfilling it is to be confronted with big budget sci-fi spectacle that actually grows more complicated and confounding as it goes along. So often these things start with provocative questions then funnel into a routine battle or cliché confrontation. Here, it’s a what-if scenario played out with respect for its characters’ weary commitment to facts and faith in the power of process. They aren’t gilded with subplots about interpersonal conflict. Instead, they have a job to do, and the plot is studded with smart suppositions and clever obstacles: an uncooperative foreign military, a soldier quietly radicalized by right-wing conspiracy websites, the adverse effects of little sleep and lots of stress. It asks a familiar question – what is one fleeting human life in the fullness of time and space? – in a gripping intellectual thought experiment procedural, and finds in the end not a puzzle-solving solution, but beautifully poetic answers in a way only this genre could find.

A Change is Gonna Come: SELMA

Whatever their individual merits, or lack thereof, Hollywood reflections on the Civil Rights Movement from the likes of Driving Miss Daisy or The Help tend to conclude by putting on a happy face. They’re viewing the tribulations of the time through a historical distancing complex that takes great pride finding history in the past. How terrible racism and its effects, they say. And yet situating a story as vital as a fight for human rights through the view of sympathetic white help, told firmly from a supposedly more enlightened present, provides only uplift. One whose knowledge of history comes only from Hollywood could be excused for thinking the story of Civil Rights is the mission-accomplished post-racism lie sold by the willfully ignorant.

The power of a film like Ava DuVernay’s Selma comes in its restoring to history its devastating immediacy, while refusing to obscure the direct line from then to now. It takes as its subject the 1965 marches for voting rights in Selma, Alabama. That was a mere 50 years ago, when brave peaceful protesters were beaten by eager police in riot gear, in front of news cameras for the entire world to see. In this film, each blow feels fresh, the bruises still painful. It keeps the focus of a heroic, historic moment rooted in the humane details, presenting key figures as complicated human beings confronting the worst of humanity with hard-fought grace and determination. It’s a film that plays on your historical knowledge – you can’t watch an opening scene of little girls in their Sunday best walking through a church without a sick feeling of dread suspecting their fate – without taking it for granted or softening historical horror with the benefits of hindsight.

Every choice made by the filmmakers is rooted in immediacy and intimacy. They take our usual view of history – of Great Men, Important Speeches, and Big Moments – and restore a sense of the masses to a movement. The Civil Rights Movement was, after all, made up of people, hundreds and thousands of individuals whose collective voice was heard. The marches at Selma may have been organized and inspired by, among others, Martin Luther King Jr, but he needed the passion and commitment of the people who made up the crowds. DuVernay’s film’s most powerful moments are in its crowd scenes, when King (played brilliantly and convincingly by David Oyelowo) is simply one of many marching towards crowds of cops and hecklers, determined to draw attention to their cause.

Placing the crowds and King on similar levels of focus, the film draws a lively and humane reenactment. We come to recognize faces (Oprah Winfrey, Common, Lorraine Toussaint, Tessa Thompson, Stephan James, and more). We can pick them out in the crowds. We know a little of their stories. We see their eagerness, their idealism, their pragmatic planning. Then we see them shoved, hit, shot at, and bludgeoned. Their faces are bloodied as they limp to safety, ready to head out and march again the next day. At its best, Selma is history written with lightening, sharply revealing and an electric burn. It burns for the ferocity of the facts, and the sad recognition in them of so many concerns that linger still. When an unarmed black man is gunned down by white cops who will never be punished, it’s hard not to read echoes of current events in the pain and sorrow on the screen.

Writer-director DuVernay’s previous films were small-scale intimate dramas, tenderly studying the emotional currents between her characters. You can see that skill in Selma’s portrait of King’s relationship with his wife (Carmen Ejogo) and closest advisors (Wendell Pierce chief among them). Not just the easily appropriated, endlessly quotable symbol to which he can so often be reduced, we see King at a recognizably human level. He heads to the streets, ready to face death threats and worse as he delivers sermons with fire and conviction, no matter his private troubles and doubts. But we also see in the small, quiet moments of his life as husband, father, and friend, soft intimate spaces over which hangs the import and danger of his righteous calling.

The film is more diffuse than a biopic, and the time with the supporting cast doesn’t allow for any one standout amongst them. King still dominates the proceedings, drawing focus even when not on screen. He’s a figure of inspiration and conflict amongst everyone, but it’s always clear he’s only human. It’s a picture of a person, and of a movement, that manages to be honest without tearing anyone down. Following backroom negotiations, strategy sessions, and heartfelt speeches between moments of extreme racial tension and sympathetically drawn character moments, Selma is best when it’s witnessing the crisis points of the conflict, and when sitting back with the activists in casual moments of camaraderie, eating, praying, or singing while planning the next move. In those cases, DuVernay makes a film most clearly interested in the human experience first, not just the Big Important moments.

The film falls into some conventional docudrama patterns, like unnecessary time-stamped text and a few clumsy integrations of full names and position statements, orienting the audience at the (brief) expense of immediacy. So, too, the scenes in the White House with LBJ (Tom Wilkinson) or the State Capital where George Wallace (Tim Roth) growls and spits slurs, sequences which sit at a remove from the street-level interest. But when the story and the filmmaking sits powerfully close to the planning and the protests, it is too vitally alive to be held back entirely by such predictable based-on-a-true-story message movie moments.

Bradford Young’s cinematography finds glowing skin tones in cozy interiors that crackle with dimly-lit beauty reminiscent of Gordon Willis. But then we head outside with the protestors, where under the bright light of the sun, angry, violent racism must inevitably meet non-violence. The emotions of real people who somehow muster the courage to put themselves in harms way for what they believe are beautifully realized in a present tense, shorn from the usual feel-good conclusions. This is a hard-hitting view of these events, sympathetic and inspiring, but also pragmatic and clear-eyed about how hard-fought the battle, how real the accomplishments, and yet how ongoing the conflict.