“Arrival” and “Moana,” two top box office movies, have earned rave reviews and have started an exciting holiday movie season.

In the new hit movie, “Arrival,” Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, and a team of elite scientific experts in various fields explore an alien capsule that landed in a rural Montana area. Eleven other capsules landed in various places around the world, and different countries made an alliance to assist with research efforts regarding the aliens. Every eighteen hours, the capsule opens and the group goes inside in an attempt to teach the aliens how to communicate and learn more about their reason for coming to Earth.

The new mystery/science fiction film was released on Nov. 11 and has earned a very good score of 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie made a whopping $24 million in its highly anticipated opening weekend.

Throughout the movie, the director has the audience thinking about what has happened in the past to make the characters the way they are. The end of the movie leaves you thinking about your life and your morals.

Freshman Aditya Krishna said, “To be honest, it was a great film. There were lots of parts that were really unexpected. I like the part where they figure out when the twelve ships landed on earth. The plot intrigued me, and overall, it was an average-to-good movie.”

Krishna rates the movie a nine out of ten.

Adams has starred in multiple roles that earned Oscar nominations, such as her role in “American Hustle” in 2014 and her role in “The Fighter” in 2011. Jeremy Renner has appeared in multiple roles, such as Aaron Cross in the “Jason Bourne” series and as Hawkeye in the “Avengers.”

This movie can be compared to “Interstellar,” which starred Matthew McConaughey as Cooper, who goes into space to try to save mankind from hunger and starvation. Both of the movies reveal that speculative “aliens” see time in much different ways than people do.

Another movie to watch is the Disney’s “Moana.”  In this new Disney animated film, the protagonist is a young girl who is the daughter of the island chief. She has been a brave, adventurous girl ever since she was just a child. This inspirational movie gives young children the hope that they can be whatever they wish to be when they get older. The movie opened to great reviews — earning a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes — and was the second largest grossing movie over the Thanksgiving holiday, making $81,108,000.00.  Only “Frozen,” Disney’s other hit princess movie, made more during the Thanksgiving holiday.

The voices of the main characters are Auli’i Cravalho as Moana, Dwayne Johnson as Maui, Rachel House as Gramma Tala, and Temuera Morrison as Chief Tui. Most of the characters had singing parts in the movie, and the songs themselves were very passionate and impressive.

Freshman Tucker Mihalik said, “I thought it was a pretty dandy movie. Seven out of ten. I really liked it, and I thought the songs were good and catchy. And I like that they put the Rock in there. I’ve never seen a wrestler in an animated Disney movie, and that was pretty great.”

But Mihalik had other thoughts as well. “I really like a good Disney movie, like ‘The Lion King’ or ‘Finding Nemo,’ but this just did not seem like a good Disney movie. It didn’t have enough Disney stuff. ”

It is not too late to catch these movies playing in theaters, so plan a movie night with family and friends.