For its second season, HBO’s reboot of Perry Mason offers up deeper characters, darker morality, and an even better mystery than its first time out.
Katherine Waterston
A work of pure spectacle and scandal, writer-director Damien Chazelle’s overblown, risky, and compulsively watchable Babylon is a film with love for the past made with the most post-modern of sensibilities.
Mid90s, the gritty, purposefully un-PC directorial debut of actor Jonah Hill, is the rare sort of nostalgia trip that’s tinged with more mortification and subtle regret than an open embrace of one’s younger years.
After Ridley Scott’s return to the Alien franchise with Prometheus garnered a divisive critical and popular response, the aging director’s follow-up, Alien: Covenant, feels like a retreat to more familiar territory. Still owing to the film that came before it, but not always beholden to it, Alien: Covenant contains more nods to the first film in the franchise and a handful of thrilling action sequences that wouldn’t feel out of place in James Cameron’s Aliens. It doesn’t abandon Prometheus’ religious and philosophical leanings, but Scott has consciously made the decision here to deliver something a bit more rousing and primal. For the most part, that decision turns out to be the correct choice.