Ratings Central - Movies

I walked into the theater bracing for a specific kind of disappointment, the sort that usually follows high-concept sci-fi where the "alien" is a glorified sock puppet or a distracting pile of pixels. My expectations were a coin toss between a gripping space drama and a hokey B-movie mess that would require a massive amount of internal forgiveness to sit through. I sat in the dark, prepared to squint past the strings, only to find my skepticism evaporating before the first thruster ignited. Image by Wikipedia The Gosling Standard Ryan Gosling doesn’t just lead this film; he grounds the entire improbable universe. It is one thing to carry a scene, but it is quite another to make me entirely forget I was watching a man interact with a puppet. His performance is so seamless and sincere that the silliness of the idea simply vanishes. Whether he was portraying the wholesome budding of a cross-species friendship or the sheer, jagged distress of trying to communicate with a literal ...