Arrival: Is this one of the best films of 2016?

Arrival, a new sci-fi film about an alien landing on earth, has been called genre defining and the best film of the year - but will it satisfy the fanboys?

Directed by Denis Villeneuve (Sicario), it starts with a host of alien spacecraft touching down around the world and sparking fears of a hostile invasion. An elite team is assembled to investigate, including language expert Louise Banks (Amy Adams). With humanity on the edge of global warfare, Banks must put her life at risk to communicate with the extraterrestrials.

Based on Ted Chiang's 1998 novella Story of Your Life, Arrival features a script by Eric Heisserer and performances from Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker.

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Peter Travers in Rolling Stone says it is this generation's answer to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It's "a mesmerising mindbender" of a film, he says, directed with a searching mind and heart by the Quebec-born Villeneuve.

Adams is "simply stellar" in this Oscar-buzzed performance of "amazing grit and grace", adds Travers. Action fanboys might get antsy about the film's contemplative pace, but this is a film that gets inside your head – "intimate and epic, a linguistics odyssey through space and time".

If the gatekeepers of classic screen sci-fi are at all anxious about Villeneuve's upcoming Blade Runner project - a sequel 35 years after the iconic original – they can rest assured after seeing Arrival, says David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter.

He adds it is refreshing to watch an alien contact movie in which no cities are destroyed or monuments toppled. Arrival is a "grown-up sci-fi drama that sustains fear and tension while striking affecting chords on love and loss", he says, all anchored by the rich emotional depth of Adam's performance.

This parable is distinctly more idealistic and hopeful than most movies in the genre, says Manohla Dargis of the New York Times: it's one of those "unassumingly smart science-fiction puzzles that blend absorbing storytelling with meditations on the universe, being, time and space".

Arrival adds action scenes and political notes to Chiang's original novella, she says, but these seem slight compared with its "larger, grander adventure" about a woman who, "in staring into the void, leaps into life and finds herself".

Bryan Bishop on The Verge agrees, calling Arrival "a mature, thoughtful piece of science fiction" and an "incredibly powerful and nuanced look at love, relationships, and the human condition itself".

The critic says that if sci-fi has been going through a maturation process, a truly genre-defining moment "has finally arrived". Christopher Nolan's Interstellar tried something similar, he adds, but that convoluted film failed to emotionally connect with viewers.

Bishop continues that the extraordinary success of Arrival is that it combines bravura style, grand sci-fi questions, tremendous emotional intelligence and a heart so full it's ready to burst.

It's "one of the best films of the year" he says, and at "a time when so many seem intent on walling themselves or their countries off from one another, it's exactly what we need".