One of the greatest entertainments of last year was Denis Villeneuve's Sicario, a piercingly moody jump down the rabbit hole of the vendettas, compromises, and fractured laws that have fueled the war on drugs, especially in Mexico. The film never quite moved beyond the thrill of the chase and the indiscriminate codes of the hunt, but for a film steeped in the 0s and 1s of the crime genre, Sicario was seductive, exciting, and texturally alive in ways that very few films are these days.
This has been a regular thing for Villeneuve, who provided similar triumphs with Incendies and Enemy, and also elevated familiar material with keen visual ideas and composition with Prisoners. He's already set to direct the Blade Runner sequel, which will star Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford, but first he will release a film that, up until today, was called Story of Your Life. The fascinating conceit of the science fiction tale involves a linguistics expert, played by Amy Adams, who is called in when alien contact is first made by the military, and matched with the visuals we've come to expect from the filmmaker, this has the potential to be a new sci-fi classic. But as BMD reports, the film has been retitled Arrival when its released later this year, which is a far more simplistic, clean title for the feature.
On top of the title change, we now have a release date for the film: November 11th. The date was originally listed by eOne, but now its confirmed that Paramount will release the film on the same date in America. That would mean that if the film has a strong first two weeks, the film could even get a second wind for the Thanksgiving weekend, considering that the film will open pretty wide. Time will tell, of course, but either way, Arrival is now officially one of the most anticipated films of the Fall/Winter season.
