Arrival - It's amazing what you can dig out of the cheapo DVD bin at Walmart. For example, I was very moved and impressed by this film, which I had previously only seen in small fragments while watching my folks channel-surf on their cable TV. It had a lovely cast, headlined by Amy Adams, Forest Whitaker and Jeremy "The Hurt Locker" Renner. (I know I'm showing my disconnectedness from pop culture by not leading with his Marvel Films character, whose name I can't think of at the moment. But "The Hurt Locker" was a great movie.) Also, it had a mind-bending plot, freighted with powerful emotions, rewarding multiple viewings. It's the kind of movie that makes you re-interpret what you've already seen as it goes along. To make a long movie adapted from a short story really, really short, it's about a linguist who discovers how to communicate with an alien race by embracing their non-linear perception of time. On a deeper level, it's basically about accepting an offer of love even with the knowledge that it will end in grief.
Three scenes that made it for me (at least, as far as memory serves): (1) Saboteurs have planted a bomb right where Amy Adams is interviewing aliens "Abbott" and "Costello." They keep trying, unsuccessfully, to warn her about it - then they take thrilling (and self-sacrificing) steps to save her. (2) The sequence in which Adams sends herself a message from the future (sorry, I don't want to spoil it by being more specific). (3) The gag about what the Sanskrit word for "war" literally means.
Fury - The main conceit of this World War II picture is revealed in an opening title that says, more or less, that because Germans had better tanks, American tank crews dropped like flies during the Allied invasion of Germany. The whole film illustrates that thesis in all its brutal, heartbreaking and morally challenging tragedy. The hero tank crew includes a leathery Brad Pitt, a zealously religious (but still irritating) Shia LaBeouf, a wide-eyed and innocent Logan Lerman (late of the "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" movies), and two or three more who are well cast and memorable. It's a movie that, for example, makes good use of Jason "Lucius Malfoy" Isaacs. There is a lot of blowing up of things and people in this movie. It really does put the viewer through a wringer, along with the cast of characters.
Three scenes that made it for me: (1) The sequence in which Lerman falls in love with a young German girl, and it takes all of Pitt's strength of command to keep the other tank guys from raping her during a very tense meal scene. (2) The battle in which one German tank and four or so American ones are pretty much evenly matched - edge of your seat, gripping and horrific stuff. (3) The final battle against a relentless and numerically superior enemy, with the hero tank crew knowing that retreat is not an option and survival pretty much isn't either.
Interstellar - Here is another sci-fi epic that I only saw in tiny snippets until I found it in the bargain bin. What a bargain it was, with Matthew McConaughey performing the almost unprecedented acting feat of not making me want to smack him in the face, supported by Jessica Chastain ("Zero Dark Thirty," "The Help," "Jurassic World"), Michael Caine, Timothée Chalamet, Casey Affleck, Anne Hathaway, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Topher Grace, David Oyelowo, Wes Bentley, William Devane, Josh Stewart (JJ's husband on "Criminal Minds"), Elyes Gabel (TV's "Scorpion") and Bill Irwin (Lou Lou Who in 2000's "How the Grinch Stole Christmas"), not to mention a secret surprise casting stunt that I don't want to spoil. If you already know about it, shut up.
The plot is dense and ranges over a long period of time, thanks in part to Einsteinian time dilation effects and whatnot. The survival of the human race depends, so the story goes, on finding a way to transport a significant part of the population to another planet that can support life. Failing figuring out how to do that, there is a Plan B - but you really don't want it to get to that. For McConaughey, a hotshot pilot in a near future when school books are being rewritten to paper over the era of space exploration, the opportunity to play a role in that chance of saving mankind becomes devastatingly personal. Whether he pulls it off, and how, is a thing of amazement.
Three scenes that made it for me: (1) McConaughey does four-dimensional space, tying everything in the movie together. (2) The entire segment surrounding that casting surprise I told you about, full of awe-inspiring tragedy, madness and violence. (3) Dad reunites with daughter at the end of an epic journey - and that's using the word "epic" in as proper a sense as anyone has ever applied it to a science fiction movie.
The Foreigner - Jackie Chan does some serious damage to some Irish terrorists in this movie, which is only to be expected. But how he does it, and the amount of legitimate acting he successfully pulls off, is unprecedented as far as I can recall. Mind you, I haven't seen every movie he ever made. But putting him opposite Pierce Brosnan is a really interesting choice, and the dark paths this film leads both of them down are gripping in a very different way from the typical Jackie Chan action comedy. It starts when a restaurant owner's daughter, the last surviving member of his family following their disastrous escape from China, is blown up by a bomb in the streets of London. Finding that the government ministers responsible for catching his daughter's killers aren't getting the job done, he goes rogue and gets it done himself, with both bad guys and good guys gunning for him. What he pulls off is really amazing. It's the odd movie in which you're not entirely sure whom to root for, because both of the main characters, who are not entirely on the same side, are both sympathetic and scary.
Three scenes that made it for me: (1) Brosnan sends his thug nephew into the woods to collect Chan dead or alive, and Chan not only turns the tables but actually brings said young thug onto his side. (2) The time Brosnan's goons track Chan to his flat and how he escapes. (3) The bombers' comeuppance, an exploit of fiendish cleverness, superbly choreographed and satisfying on a very simple, moral level.
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