Back stories are the stuff of rich literature, but all too often in these overexplained times they’re the bane of strong drama. In “Arctic” a pilot has crashed his single-engine plane in the middle of a snowy nowhere. If the film weren’t as clean and uncluttered as it is, we might be told that his crash had complex antecedents. Maybe his mind was clouded by opioids after the loss of his newborn quintuplets to an incurable disease, he misread the coordinates on his charts and, in a mounting delirium of anxiety and grief, ran out of fuel. Instead, Joe Penna’s fine debut feature, with Mads Mikkelsen in the only speaking...

Source: Wall Street Journal January 31, 2019 21:00 UTC