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The TV ads for the upcoming sci-fi film Arrival — which opens in theaters this Friday — aren’t touting the septapod aliens that arrive on Earth at the film’s outset, nor stars Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner who are at the film’s center. Instead, the ads are touting the film’s 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating (still holding strong as of today, though surely some spoil-sport will arrive to tarnish that) and status as one of the best-reviewed movies of the year. Braggy marketing aside, it’s remarkable that a sci-fi alien-invasion movie is doing so well, but you should believe the hype. Arrival is a tense, smart, and sneakily emotional movie that moves with precision and hits you where it hurts at exactly the right time. In many ways, it’s the movie we all wanted Interstellar to be, with a final third that run circles around the weakest parts of Christopher Nolan’s space film.
This is all a great credit to French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, who is now poised to break through to the top echelons of working auteurs today. His is a career that’s been steadily building for a few years now, and if you don’t already know his name, you definitely know his movies. Villeneuve works at a fast pace, rattling off four films in the past four years, all building off the breakthrough French-language success of his Oscar-nominated Incendies. If things break the right way for Arrival, he may end up Oscar-nominated again.
These are the films that helped him get to where he stands today, as one of Hollywood’s most upwardly-mobile directors.
'Incendies' (2010)
Two French-Canadian siblings travel to Lebanon in order to piece together the mysteries of their mother’s life, after her death. After Villeneuve’s first films, August 32nd on Earth and Maelstrom, were small critical hits in Canada, Incendies managed to crack the Academy Awards, nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in a category that included films by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu (who later made Birdman and The Revenant), Yorgos Lanthimos (who later made The Lobster), and Susanne Bier (who later directed The Night Manager).
Incendies was a huge critical hit and announced Villeneuve as an exciting new director. He showed particular affinity for getting performances of great inner mystery out of his cast. If you saw the BBC miniseries The Honorable Woman, you saw Lubna Azabal playing Maggie Gyllenhaal’s confidante; she gives a killer lead performance in Incendies, bolstered by the way Villeneuve prods at her character from a distance. Villeneuve lost the Oscar, but it wouldn’t be the last time their paths crossed.
'Prisoners' (2013)
For Villeneuve’s English-language debut, he dove right in for a potboiler about two neighbor families whose daughters go missing, and the maniac lengths that one of the fathers (Hugh Jackman) goes to in order to find them. Villenuve was working with an all-star cast here, with Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Viola Davis, Terrence Howard, and Melissa Leo. The film is something of a trashy blunt instrument, but there were unquestionable artistic touches that set it apart from the usual grubby vigilante fare. In particular, Villeneuve placed great attention on Gyllenhaal as the twitchy detective investigating the disappearance. The end result was a divisive but also compulsively watchable film. The National Board of Review named it one of their top 10 films of 2013, and gave it an additional prize for Best Ensemble Cast. The Academy Awards gave it a single nod, for Roger Deakins’ cinematography.
'Enemy' (2013)
At the 2013 Toronto Film Festival, Villeneuve brought not one but two movies. Prisoners was the glitzier one with more stars, but Enemy was much more fascinating. Based on the Jose Saramago novel The Double, Enemy is a psychological thriller where Jake Gyllenhaal discovers a man who appears to be his doppelgänger, and as you can imagine, it starts to drive him crazy.
Villeneuve’s film is atmospheric, mysterious, and possessed of the kind of straight-faced surreality that will really mess with you as an audience member. Toronto his never looked more eerie, and Jake Gyllenhaal has seldom been better. It was never going to be a major awards contender (at least in America; it won a bunch of Canadian film awards), but at least Enemy can boast the freakiest ending of any movie in the last decade or two.
'Sicario' (2015)
U.S. drug enforcement’s push into the cartels of Mexico is a far fry from foggy Torontinian psychodrama, but once again Villeneuve proved himself to be a versatile director. Sicario unfolds like a Swiss watch, with tense, taut editing stringing together the story of a federal agent (Emily Blunt) tasked to join a wildly zealous task force, run by Josh Brolin and employing shadowy insider Benicio Del Toro. There is a shootout that happens early-ish in Sicario that is probably the best shootout scene on film since Heat.
Sciario took three Oscar nominations — for Editing, Cinematography, and Sound Effects — but nothing in the major categories. This despite Emily Blunt laying down one of the best performances of her career in the lead role. Clearly, though, forward momentum had been achieved. Now, Arrival is poised to become Villeneuve’s next level-up moment. He’s had it coming for a few years now.
