Movies

Aliens earns its 8 by doing the one thing sequel filmmaking almost never manages: it doesn’t compete with the original. Ridley Scott’s Alien is a horror film about isolation and violation — one…

The Fifth Element is a perfect film. Not a perfect science fiction film, not a perfect action film — a perfect film, period. Every element serves the same vision with complete commitment, and that…

Alien was terrifying when it came out. I saw it in theaters in 1979, before the culture had absorbed it, before the xenomorph was a franchise product, before the chest-burster scene had been parodied…

Blade Runner 2049 is visually extraordinary and narratively inert. Denis Villeneuve and Roger Deakins built some of the most stunning images in recent science fiction cinema — the orange desolation…

Prometheus wastes one of the most visually gifted directors in contemporary cinema on a script that requires its characters to be catastrophically stupid for the plot to function. These are…

The Butterfly Effect has a disturbing premise — childhood trauma so embedded in a group of people that any attempt to fix one person’s damage creates worse damage elsewhere — and squanders it…

Waterworld had one genuine asset going in: a production design concept that was visually striking and physically coherent. A world covered in water would look exactly like this. The floating atolls,…