Imagine a breakfast wrap.

You know the one, because there really is only one.

Sausage, egg, cheese, bacon and a potato rusty all wrapped together.

Yep, there it is.

I think my work here is done.

Serve them until 11am.

It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the breakfast. served until 11 a.m.

It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome to The Next Picture Show, a movie The Week podcast devoted to a classic film and how it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Keith Phipps here with... Genevieve Kosky.

Scott Tobias.

Natasha Robinson.

Here in the next picture show, we believe that no film exists in a vacuum and that all culture is more interesting in context.

So, every other week, we get together to talk over a classic film and consider how it relates to a current movie. This week, we look to the sky and consider if anyone else is out there and, if so, whether they might want to talk to us. Tasha, using verbal communication constrained by human perceptions of time and space, can you tell us what's in store for us tonight? Well, there are a lot of movies and theaters right now, but only one involves Amy Adams trying to talk to tentacled aliens from parts unknown. Adapted from Ted Chang's novella, The Story of Your Life, Denny Villeneuve's arrival imagines what would happen if visitors from another world arrived in the form of shell-shaped monoliths and just kind of, you know, hung out and hovered over 12 spots around the globe. Adams plays a linguist enlisted by the U.S. government to try and figure out what the visitors want, with some assistance from a scientist played by Jeremy Renner and a sympathetic army colonel played by Forrest Whitaker. We didn't have to think too long to find a pairing for this film, which has a lot in common with contact, Robert Zemeckis' 1997 adaptation of Carl Sagan's novel of the same name. Both

focus on the difficulty of communication between different worlds. Both feature determined female

protagonists who have to surpass the expectations of their mostly male co-workers while taking

tremendous risks, and both are about the inward journeys involved in looking to the stars. There are other similarities, too, including extremists who use violence and attempt to sabotage scientific efforts. Yet after a certain point, the resemblance does break down. Zemeckis and Villeneuve tell similar stories, but they tell them quite differently. Zemeckis is working in the form of a large-scale blockbuster, complete with

satisfying twists and turns. Villeneuve takes a moodyer approach from the beginning, emphasizing

the often fragile emotional state of its protagonist. Yet despite these different approaches,

they end up overlapping quite a bit. Contact becomes an emotionally gripping movie, and a rival

...