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      All the ‘Alien’ Movies, Ranked

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      With “Alien: Romulus” hitting theaters, the 45-year-old series is getting a new jolt of life. How does the latest film stack up against its predecessors?Just like the space creature it’s named after, the 45-year-old “Alien” franchise has proved hard to kill: Every time you think the series has been dealt a death blow by a disappointing installment, a new movie rolls around, rekindling fans’ hopes. Following that pattern, here comes “Alien: Romulus” in theaters, seven years after “Alien: Covenant.”The series (all the older titles are streaming on Hulu) has endured for many reasons. Thematically, it has touched, often in a pioneering way, on many subjects we now confront daily: corporate malfeasance, science gone rogue, artificial intelligence, cloning and the very meaning of life. And it has done so by pitting regular working stiffs against the cryptic title life form, whose motivations boil down to reproducing their own kind, and exterminating everybody and everything else in a viciously gory manner.Whether you are new to the “Alien”-verse, need a refresher or are looking for a spirited argument, here is a ranking of the seven core movies, on a scale of one 👽 (not too spooky) to 👽👽👽👽👽 (terrifying).1979‘Alien’ 👽👽👽👽👽Few films are so perfect that you can’t imagine changing anything; Ridley Scott’s brilliant second feature, written by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, is one of them. Lured to an isolated moon by a mysterious signal, the crew members of the towing ship Nostromo run into a terrifying life form that decimates them one by one. In just under two hours, the grittily realistic yet eerily poetic “Alien” modernizes cinematic space creatures, reinvents bio-horror and anticipates the contemporary discourse about capitalist greed and artificial intelligence. It also introduces to the science fiction canon the xenomorph (the creature’s biomechanical-looking life stage, a biped with a double set of fangs) and an action heroine for the ages in Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). Even the trailer was amazing. No notes.1986‘Aliens’ 👽👽We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni and the ‘It Ends With Us’ Drama, Explained

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      What’s happening onscreen has become secondary to the conversation about differences between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, her co-star and director.The Blake Lively romantic drama “It Ends With Us” revolves around a florist, and the film’s marketing campaign, including the red carpet and the posters, has been entirely floral-themed. But the press tour has hardly come up roses.The movie itself is a box office hit, earning $50 million after its release last weekend. The plot centers on Lily Bloom (Lively), who escapes a rough childhood, opens her dream flower store and soon meets her seemingly dream guy, Ryle Kincaid, played by the film’s director, Justin Baldoni.Based on a best-selling Colleen Hoover novel, “It Ends With Us” is ultimately about breaking the cycle of domestic violence that entraps one generation after another. But the film has been at the center of a surprisingly varied number of controversies that have raised a number of questions:Has there been a rift between Baldoni and the cast?Hints that things were off first surfaced at the New York and European premieres. Though Baldoni was in attendance, he wasn’t posing for the cameras with anyone else involved in the movie and wasn’t participating in joint interviews. Fans speculated that this was a marketing tactic, given that he plays an abusive husband. The theory seemed to be that the distance was a statement about not romanticizing the relationship between the Lively and Baldoni characters.But that conjecture was quickly discarded when it emerged that Lively, her husband, Ryan Reynolds, other cast members and even Hoover had unfollowed Baldoni on social media. The interpersonal drama was fueled by reports of conflict during the making of the film — all of it related by anonymous sources, of course.Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, at the New York premiere. Cindy Ord/Getty ImagesDoes the rift involve Ryan Reynolds?Baldoni and his production company, Wayfarer Studios, secured the rights to the book in 2019, and in 2023 it was announced that Lively had signed on to star. Crucially, both had executive producer roles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Beyond ‘Shaft’: 5 Blaxploitation Movies You Should Know

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      A Film Forum series pays tribute to the 1970s genre that birthed “Superfly” and “Foxy Brown,” but also features lesser-known films that show the genre’s range.John Shaft emerges from a New York City subway to the rat-tat-tatting of the film’s empowering theme song. A drug dealer named Super Fly leaps over a fence in his brown leisure suit. A cool Foxy Brown pulls a gun from her luminous Afro.The heroes of blaxploitation, a genre that dominated the 1970s, radically altered the representation of Black Americans in cinema away from the roles of domestics, comic relief, and buttoned-down freedom fighters. In this genre, Black people wore fashion that was as colorful as their personalities, had Afros as large as their ambitions, and grasped sexual, political and economic freedom. These heroes were not chanting “we shall overcome.” The system would have to overcome them.The genre’s treasures can be witnessed at Film Forum in Manhattan, where, over the course of a week, 16 movies will screen as part of a series called Blaxploitation, Baby! While the program features plenty of well-known titles, it also includes under-the-radar gems that add greater context, depth and variety to the genre. Below is a selection of some of the rarer highlights in the series, and, for those unable to attend, information on where to stream them.‘Sheba, Baby’ (1975)Stream it on Tubi.Of Pam Grier’s butt-kicking heroines (Foxy Brown, Coffy, Friday Foster), Sheba Shayne, a private investigator returning to her hometown to defend her father against a gentrifying syndicate, might be her most commanding. Her fashion is fly: blue denim ensembles and trim white suits topped by a white fedora. She is also respected. While Sheba is certainly the center of every man’s attention, Grier is not just playing a dangerous sexpot, as in previous roles. This is a professional, diligent woman adept both in the boardroom and against an enforcer like Pilot (D’Urville Martin) or his conniving boss, a white man named Shark (Dick Merrifield). “Sheba, Baby” demonstrates that Grier could vary her persona, tinkering with it to fit the political requirements of the film.‘Slaughter’ (1972)Stream it on Pluto TV.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Netflix Documentary ‘Daughters’ Shows Reality of Girls Separated From Imprisoned Fathers

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      The Netflix documentary doesn’t gloss over hard truths as it follows participants in the Date With Dad program.It’s not unusual for a documentary to be a tear-jerker. Stories of unusual connection or unusual bravery tend to make for good cinema, so when the film features real people, it’s even more affecting. But even by those standards, “Daughters” (on Netflix), directed by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton, is extraordinarily moving.The film focuses on the Date With Dad program, which Patton has led for more than 12 years as part of her community work with Black girls. The children are brought to the prisons where their fathers are incarcerated for a party with dancing, refreshments and opportunities to take photos and talk. Socials like these might be run of the mill for many Americans, but for these families they’re extraordinary: Prisons have increasingly stopped in-person visits (known as “touch visits”) between family members, resorting instead to video and phone calls. Furthermore, incarcerated people can be moved from institution to institution, sometimes far from their families. For some fathers, these events may be the only time during their sentences that they can interact with their daughters in person.The film focuses on several girls, ages 5 to 13, as well as on their imprisoned fathers. The men who are eligible to participate in Date With Dad are required to first attend a 10-week coaching program led by a mentor. These sessions are captured in the documentary, and feel a lot like group therapy. Rae and Patton spend equal time with the girls and the men, letting us listen as they talk about their hopes, their fears, their relationships with their own parents, their regrets and a lot more. Women, too, are part of the story: For many who have been pushed into operating as both mother and father, it’s a fraught decision to even allow their daughters this contact. Their strength is remarkable.There are a lot of tears in this documentary, for the subjects and the audience, too. But “Daughters” is a remarkable study in how to tell this kind of story without twisting into sentimentality. I had assumed “Daughters” would conclude with the dance, with the glad reunions, tears, joy and the promise of closer relationships, but Rae and Patton are more invested in candor than in a happy ending. They’ve constructed the film to show the range of emotions that the girls have toward their fathers, even at the dance, where some are overjoyed and weeping and others are clearly struggling with their feelings.After the dance, the film continues to check in with some of the subjects for several years, exploring how the program affected their futures but also how their fathers’ continued imprisonment profoundly shaped the girls’ lives. Plenty of it is good. But rebuilding a family torn apart by the often unpredictable prison system is hard work, and it doesn’t always go the way we want. When hope does exist, it’s hard-won. And “Daughters” lets us feel all of that, too. More

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      ‘The Union’ Review: Old Flames and Spy Games

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      When a mission goes pear-shaped, a covert operative (Halle Berry) turns to a secret weapon: her high school boyfriend (Mark Wahlberg).The “Mission: Impossible” series went missing in action this summer, but that’s no reason to settle for Netflix’s “The Union,” a depressing illustration of the wisdom that sometimes you shouldn’t buy — or stream — generic. The movie combines a catalog of elements from the Tom Cruise franchise (supersecret agents, exotic locales, stunts) with a high-concept twist so silly it might as well have been selected by A.I.: What if — hear this out — the lead operatives happened to be former high school sweethearts?“The Union,” directed by Julian Farino, kicks off in Trieste, Italy, with a blatant retread of the first “M:I” installment: The agents are on a mission to retrieve a traitor with a stolen hard drive. Suddenly, violence breaks out, and almost the whole team is killed. A survivor from the group, Roxanne (Halle Berry), pitches her boss, Tom (J.K. Simmons), on who to turn to for help: “If he’s anything like that guy I remember,” she says, “he’s exactly who we need.”“He” is her onetime boyfriend, Mike (Mark Wahlberg), now a construction worker in New Jersey who is hooking up with their seventh-grade English teacher (Dana Delany). Roxanne hasn’t seen him in 25 years when she approaches him in a bar. His credentials are that he is, in Roxanne’s words, “a nobody”: Because of the nature of the pilfered intelligence on the drive, she and Tom need someone who has left virtually no civic footprint.Besides, their spy outfit, the Union — so covert that half the intelligence community doesn’t know it exists and the other half regrets finding out, Roxanne says, as if reciting a tagline — prefers blue-collar guys to Ivy League suits. They are, in theory, way more fun than the C.I.A. (Stephen Campbell Moore appears as a stiff from Langley.) Mike used to be a star athlete and is accustomed to spending all day on a sky-high beam. With that background, shouldn’t a three-and-half-minute training montage suffice?The other Union members are defined largely by their specialties — physical force (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), psychology (Alice Lee), computing (Jackie Earle Haley) — and the movie makes a few feeble feints at fish-out-of-water humor. (Mike may never have left the tristate area before, but does he really not know what side of the road the British drive on?)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gena Rowlands Shows Her True Power in ‘A Woman Under the Influence’

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      In “A Woman Under the Influence,” her gloriously, terrifyingly imperfect Mabel was emblematic of the actress’s work, especially with John Cassavetes.Midway through “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974) — one of a number of astonishing films starring Gena Rowlands, who died Wednesday, and directed by her husband John Cassavetes — the distance between you and what’s onscreen abruptly vanishes. It’s the kind of moment that true movie believers know and yearn for, that transporting instance when your world seems to melt away and you’re one with the film. It can be revelatory; at times, as with Rowlands’s performance here, it can also be excruciatingly, viscerally painful.Rowlands is playing Mabel, an exuberantly alive woman of great sensitivities whose husband, Nicky (Peter Falk), loves her deeply but doesn’t understand her. They’re home and he has just yelled at her in front of some colleagues, who’ve fled. Now, as this husband and wife look at each other across their dining-room table, they struggle to push past the rancor and hurt. But Mabel is struggling harder because her purchase on everyday life has begun to badly slip, bewildering them both. Her love for Nicky and their children feels boundless, and it radiates off her like a fever, but Mabel is headed for a breakdown.Working with Cassavetes, Rowlands was helping find a new way to make American cinema.Faces InternationalAs the two begin working it out, Cassavetes cuts between them, framing each in isolating close-up. At first, Nicky looks at her with a faint, inscrutable smile that Mabel doesn’t return. Instead, she stares at him and holds up a thumb, as if she were getting ready to hitch a ride out, then she begins a strange pantomime. She screws her face into a scowl, waves her arms, mimes some words. Rowland had an incredibly expressive, near-elastic face and equally extraordinary control of it, and the quicksilver shifts she uses here are unexpected and destabilizing; you want to keep watching Mabel but aren’t sure you can.Within seconds, Nicky and Mabel are talking again and revisiting or, really, relitigating what just happened. “Wacko!” he yells. “I like your friends,” she answers, her voice rising. As Mabel keeps talking, Rowlands widens her eyes but she also shifts the character’s focus inward. Suddenly, Mabel isn’t looking at Nicky and she isn’t exactly talking to him, either. Instead, as Mabel animatedly continues, her gestures and expressions growing more exaggerated, she no longer seems present. She’s somewhere else and then just as abruptly she returns to the here and now, and everything shifts again. Mabel looks at Nicky, her face open and soft. “Tell me what you want me to — how you want me to be,” she says. “I can be that. I can be anything.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Red Island’ Review: Madagascar Is Shifting Beneath Their Feet

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      Robin Campillo relies on the power of suggestion to sketch life in this former French colony, filtering it obliquely through a young white boy’s eyes.The striking rusty color that gives Madagascar the nickname the “great red island” comes from the rich iron content in its soil. The drama “Red Island” — about a white French boy from a military family living there in the early 1970s — suggests that a fair amount of blood has seeped into the earth, too. The boy is just 10 but he grasps more than other kids might because his experiences are filtered through the life of the French filmmaker Robin Campillo.The boy, Thomas (Charlie Vauselle, sweet and saucer-eyed), lives in a pleasant, airy house with plenty of room and a red-dirt backyard. There, tucked in a corner, he shuts himself up in a large wooden crate reading comics featuring Fantômette, a plucky female superhero whose adventures routinely come to life in his imagination. When he isn’t immersed in his comics, Thomas bikes around, gets into harmless trouble and observes his modest world, especially its people. He’s particularly attentive to his loving homemaker mother, Colette (a very good Nadia Tereszkiewicz), and his father, Robert (Quim Gutiérrez), an army officer.A drama about a child, his family, a social set, their adopted home and the larger world, “Red Island” is by turns seductively sultry and frustratingly elliptical, with a structure that brings to mind matryoshka dolls, those colorful nesting figurines of differing sizes. For the most part, Campillo introduces these nesting elements just fine; it’s integrating them that proves difficult. As befits his autobiographical subject, he fills in the details of Thomas’s worldview, a limited vantage that’s manifested by the crate he hides in. Those limits are also evident in the awkwardness with which Campillo tries to do justice to history and to Madagascar, which solidified its independence from France a decade before the story opens. There’s a dreamy innocence about Thomas that never meshes with the movie’s very adult, historical backdrop.“Red Island” is a coming-of-age story in which not all that much happens to the protagonist even as everything around him changes. You can sense that Thomas’s home life will soon take a turn by the naturalistic conversations that he overhears as well as some of the fraught scenes he witnesses. Campillo, who directed the very fine drama “BPM (Beats Per Minute),” about young AIDS activists in the early 1990s, has a talent for catching the charged energy and the friction that a room of people can produce when they’re thrown together in close quarters. Here, when some drunken officers and their wives dance in the family’s home, bodies pressing in toward one another, the circuitry of desiring and resentful looks is electric.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More