Maybe this would have been more fun with a crowd--or maybe the "go in cold!" hype set expectations unfairly--or maybe it's that I recently watched THE BLOCK ISLAND SOUND, which did something very similar to this with less flash but (I thought) way more resonance. The alien home invasion stuff is decently fun but wears off, while the main emotional throughline ultimately falls into the trap of "litigating a personal drama that feels trivial in view of the world-shaking events…

Like the rest of the world, I vividly recalled the intense military-SF action of the back half, but had totally forgotten, or maybe never realized, that the really bracing thing about this movie is Ripley's dawning astonishment and terror in the *front* half--not at what she learns about xenomorphs and the fate of the colony they're out to find, but at the incompetence of the military stuffed-shirts and corporate stooges she's stuck with. *That's* what made me really clench up…

Michael Cera plays a legendary self-absorbed asshole, but the biggest accomplishment of his performance – and of the movie – is the way that his character transforms, without moving a muscle, from almost unwatchably insufferable to uncomfortably recognizable. The key is the dawning realization of how genuinely important the hunt for the hallucinogenic cactus is to this guy – not as some sort of brass ring or poseurish hipster status symbol, but as an experience that he truly wants to…

Not a doomed love story so much as a fragile one, forever susceptible to circumstance and others' cruelty and caprice -- and it's always so, isn't it, then as now, with anything we might long for that doesn't fit into prescribed, regimented boxes. Haynes captures the rhythms of new friendship and courtship, wise to the ways they can blend into one another, the ways small gestures become charged with meaning and desire. The lush, grainy cinematography and Carter Burwell's amazing…