NOW IN THEATERS
ARRIVAL
Rising director Denis Villeneuve, adapting Ted Chiang’s story about large spacecrafts that have landed all over Earth, offers a quiet thriller that plays like an arthouse version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Amy Adams stars as a brilliant linguist who, along with a physicist (Jeremy Renner), is charged by an Army colonel (Forest Whitaker) to communicate with the aliens. This thematically rich story unfolds slowly, often without music, but never feels slow. It offers philosophical questions about how we experience life and emphasizes the importance of language and togetherness — the story’s biggest barriers are not between people and aliens but between Earth’s nations. Expect a few big plot twists, which not only dazzle you with their cleverness but also add renewed emotional heft to everything that has come before. Rated PG-13. 116 minutes. Violet Crown. (Robert Ker)
THE BEST WORST THING THAT EVER COULD HAVE HAPPENED
Though revered by aficionados, Stephen Sondheim’s musical Merrily We Roll Along was a flop at its 1981 Broadway premiere, limping through just 16 performances. Its concept — tracing the lives of middle-aged adults backward to when they were idealistic youngsters — proved unwieldy on stage. Being in the show was a dream come true for the original cast members, who were all aged sixteen to twenty-five, and its failure impacted them profoundly. Among them was Lonny Price, director of this deeply moving documentary, which provides glimpses of cast members from archival films from 1981 and visits some of them 35 years later, when they ponder the experience with wisdom born of age and experience. Not rated. 95 minutes. Center for Contemporary Arts. (James M. Keller)
THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT
God is not dead. Although sometimes He must wish He were. In Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael’s hilariously impious vision, God runs the world from a computer in Brussels. God (Benoît Poelvoorde) is an ill-tempered, sadistic slob who spends the day in His bathrobe, emerging from His office for meals at which He terrorizes His wife (Yolande Moreau) and daughter Ea (Pili Groyne). God’s big hold over humanity is knowing the dates of our deaths. So when Ea finally rebels against her father’s tyranny, she breaks into His office and triggers a program that sends a text message to everyone on Earth, telling them how long they have left to live. Van Dormael’s humor is cheeky and irreverent, and he piles on the gags with the abandon of a Creator with a new universe to play with. Sketch humor is hard to sustain over feature length, but Van Dormael always manages to pick it up again after a lull. Underneath it all is a darkly comic philosophical point of view. Not rated. 112 minutes. In French with subtitles. The Screen. (Jonathan Richards)
THE EAGLE HUNTRESS
Training golden eagles to aid the Kazakh hunters of Mongolia has been a traditional skill, handed down from father to son, for generations. The Eagle
Huntress tells the dramatic story of one girl, thirteen-year-old Aisholpan Nurgaiv, who trains with her father to be the first female eagle hunter in her family. This moving documentary by director Otto Bell, narrated by Daisy Ridley, balances a portrait of Kazakh family life and culture with breathtaking aerial footage of the Altai Mountains by cinematographer Simon Niblett. Aisholpan inhabits a harsh, unforgiving terrain, where the Kazakhs live in symbiotic relationship with their environment and hunt out of necessity. An intimate look at the