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Based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 short story, Story of Your Life, Arrival originally premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2016 before getting a theatrical release in the United States on November 11, 2016. The movie has been available on a number of streaming platforms in the years since its release, and it has now found a new home on Tubi as of July 22, 2025. Arrival is considered to be not only one of the best movies of 2016, but one of the most memorable and poignant movies in history, and a gem in Villeneuve’s filmography.
Arrival sees linguist world-renowned Louise Banks (Amy Adams) hired by the United States Army to learn how to communicate with mysterious extraterrestrials who arrive on Earth without warning. It’s up to Louise and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) to work out the aliens’ language before rising tensions turn to a global war, but they soon realize that the aliens – dubbed Heptapods because of their seven limbs – experience time non-linearly. As Louise gets a hold of the Heptapods’ language, she begins to experience time as they do, so we, too, see past, present, and future in non-chronological order.
