Welcome to Quickies! Nick Issac's series highlighting the short films of notable directors.

Denis Villeneuve should be in the conversation for the best directors working today, a festival darling in the early 00’s with his French-Canadian features, Villeneuve has found great success in the English market. His aesthetic finds beauty in the mundane, ugly environments of everyday North American life. Personally selected by Ridley Scott to continue the Blade Runner franchise, his films have a way of speaking to the hubris of power, and often feature skeptics working against the restrictions of giant systems.



Villeneuve’s latest film, Arrival, is a perfect bridge between his earlier English works and his soon-to-be-released endeavors with hard sci-fi. Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist expert, who is brought on board by the US Military to determine the intentions of an intergalactic race of aliens with a spaceship fleet parked around the world. Faced with obstruction from uncooperative world governments and the impatience of her country’s own officials, Louise embodies the fight against the system previously embodied by past lead actors in Villeneuve films such as Jake Gyllenhaal and Emily Blunt.

Abstaining from the nastiness of the real world for a heartbreaking, but hopeful possibility for the future, Arrival is less overt than Villeneuve’s past works, through its voice of reason against power that is practically muted. If one were to get an idea of where Villeneuve became compelled to tell this type of story, there is no better place to start than his early short films from the 2000s.