Double Take: ‘Arrival’ and ‘Little Women’

Two of my all-time favorite movies are Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. Though singular achievements on their own, they also share a breathtaking symmetry: each is a time-looping tale with a woman at the center driven to make sense of her world through language, love, and the little epiphanies that reverberate far beyond her circumstances.

This symmetry stretches onto the screen as well, with a surprising number of shots in both movies that serve as echoes of each other—like messages sent across space-time through the miracle of cinema:


Chad Comello is the managing editor of Cinema Sugar.