Although by no means a conventional narrative, and certainly a film inspired by the avant-garde’s simultaneous engagement with formal abstraction and material energy, L’Arrivée also engages with the history and form of narrative cinema. Certainly its role in that relation is a critical one, revealing both the mechanism and the material that commercial cinema strives to conceal. But while engaged in a process of deconstruction, L’Arrivée also recognizes the power of cinema, utilizing its control over space, and in this film especially, time, in order to uncover the energies of motion and story, of the violence inherent in both revolt and containment. (Tom Gunning)