
Alien: Covenant movie review: game over, man
A rote disappointment. There is nothing shocking or even mildly unexpected here. But there is an ironic weakening of the power of the xenomorphs to terrify.

A rote disappointment. There is nothing shocking or even mildly unexpected here. But there is an ironic weakening of the power of the xenomorphs to terrify.

After a truly spectacular and fresh opening sequence, everyone might as well be enacting a Bond puppet show, which is sometimes unpleasantly retro-icky.

What we witness here is the destruction of the old Bond mystique, and the creation of a new one. This is the sneaky cleverness of the film: it is, at last, going to tell us why Bond still matters.
Here’s an at-a-glance look at my picks for tomorrow night’s Academy Awards…
Martin Scorsese made a 3D kids’ movie that’s about movies. That’s about the love of movies. And it’s steampunky and rollicking and features a cool girl character, too. How is it possible that I won’t love this movie?
How can it be that a kiddie movie is wiser and funnier and more relevant than the Coens Brothers’ True Grit? This is, in fact, what a Coens’ animated flick might look like and sound like, if they got an assist from Terry Giliam: this is a deeply weird and deeply demented movie, and thrillingly so.

Just hearing a description of it, you have to think, my god, my god, *yes.* The twisted, separated-at-birth twins Tim Burton and Johnny Depp taking on Stephen Sondheim’s gory opera about a murderous barber? Who else would you give it to?