Predator: Badlands (Dan Trachtenberg, 2025)

Still the Predator franchise grinds on, its sixth instalment spurred on by the critical plaudits the last non-animated one, i.e. the fifth, received just for changing the setting to 18th-century North America and the protagonists to Comanches, not because the antagonist was any more interesting than the super-efficient killer aliens of the previous rounds. Here, the novelty value is just in having the story from the killer alien's perspective instead, out to gain glory by killing an unkillable beast on a planet full of other lethal natural obstacles. Of course, the whole film can't just be the hunter roaring and chopping, so he finds a human-facsimile android, or 'synth', with her legs missing who becomes his 'tool' to find the prey and engages him in gabby conversation to provide us with some counterbalance to the grim hunting. The said prey is eventually found, and then so are the protagonists, by another party of synths sent to bring back the prey, who are then shown as the real antagonists. 

So, a sci-fi action film with no actual humans in it, and I'll bet the makers were ever so pleased with themselves for having come up with that idea. After that and naturally lots of megaviolence, there isn't too much else here to chew on, though, apart from the explicit establishment of the Predatorverse as being the same as the Alienverse (which the two feeble Alien vs. Predator films tried to set up around 20 years ago), with the nefarious Weyland-Yutani corporation of the latter scheming away in the background.

5/10

Du bist nicht allein (Bernd Böhlich, 2007)

Made 17 years after the fall of the Wall, You Are Not Alone shows East Berlin still in a parlous state through a bunch of unemployed or drifting characters. They spend money they don't have, get enraged at the authorities about their lack of opportunities, or take on utterly pointless jobs. Their situations are treated with some humour, but really no more than in any Mike Leigh production, so it stands more as a snapshot of what happened when people used to an authoritarian system were left to their own devices without orders or support, and not a fully-rounded piece of drama as such.

5/10

Wake Up Dead Man Rian Johnson, 2025)

Daniel Craig left one franchise with Bond, and has now become entrenched in another in the role of Poirotesque detective Benoit Blanc, this time taking on the case of the murder of a fire-and-brimstone preacher at a New England smalltown church. Naturally the puzzle doesn't prove as straightforward to solve as it first appears, and the initial suspect, Judd, an dealistic young priest who just arrived at the church and found hmself immediately at loggerheads with his hate-filled predecessor, can be dismissed from the list of suspects without too much analysis. Less so when it comes to the congregation, all of whom, in typical Agatha Christie style (director Johnson always explicitly acknowledges the debt to her stories) have clouded motives.

It's a lot do do with the conflict between the importance of religious faith and logic, embodied by Judd and Blanc, and the exchanges between them are really the most interesting element of an overlong film. There are some inconsistencies in the plot which really should have been avoided, especially given the genre, but at least Craig in particular is clearly having fun, and so you can expect a fourth instalment to get the green light posthaste.

6/10