Life in One Chord (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Life in One Chord (2025) – M. Gordon

Shayne P. Carter is probably best known for leading the Flying Nun band Straitjacket Fits in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, as singer/guitarist/songwriter.  They were part of a New Zealand music scene (along with the Chills, the Clean, the Bats, the Verlaines, etc.) that became popular in the college radio scene in the US while I was a d.j.  I don’t think I ever saw them live back then but I admit that they weren’t my favourites from the scene, tending toward something more dramatic, possibly like arena rock (if Flying Nun could ever reach that scale), which wasn’t exactly my cup of tea. That said, songs like “She Speeds” and “Hail” were on heavy rotation in my world.  I didn’t know them at the time but Carter’s earlier band, the DoubleHappys, fit my indie-rock mold better (I discovered them later). Perhaps the difference was in Carter’s collaborators, trading bassist and songwriting partner Wayne Elsey for David Wood (bass) and Andrew Brough (guitar/vocals), retaining drummer John Collie. Tragically, Elsey had been killed while on tour, falling from a train in Carter’s presence (they were both only 21), which had a traumatic impact and affected Carter’s life as well as his musical direction.  A moving single, “Randolph’s Going Home” (in collaboration with Peter Jefferies), was Carter’s way of paying tribute to his friend and documenting the tragedy.  Later, Straitjacket Fits got signed to Arista Records before imploding and subsequently Carter founded Dimmer who have had continued success in New Zealand.  In 2019, Carter published his autobiography which inspired filmmaker Margaret Gordon to track him down to make a film out of it.  Like many Kiwis, Gordon has spent time in Melbourne and has contacts with some of my friends who were drawn to collaborate on the film (Reece Sanders worked on motion graphics and Simon Wright helped with some editing, I think).  When the producers struggled to afford to pay for the music rights for some of the clips, I contributed $50 to their kickstarter campaign (and have my name in the credits – is this a conflict of interest for this review?). Although I didn’t get to see the film on the big screen when local shows happened here last year, I did see Carter’s solo show at the Northcote Social Club (which was great). I also bought his solo album from 2016 (Offsider) on bandcamp, which is a stark piano-based affair, an instrument Carter apparently taught himself for this release (recommended!); he’s also recorded with an orchestra, provided accompaniment to stage performances, and generally taken artistic challenges and risks rather than played it safe.  I finally had the chance to watch the film on Amazon Prime last night and, having spent the last year refamiliarizing myself with Carter and his music, I found this a deep and moving experience.  He’s an amiable character, funny and self-deprecating despite his success. Beyond the music (which is well-documented here from the early Dunedin scene to beyond), Gordon’s film takes us into Carter’s personal experiences growing up half-Maori/half Pakeha (European), feeling that he didn’t belong in either culture.  Since he didn’t feel comfortable reading passages from his memoir aloud for the film, he recommended NZ newsreader Carol Hirschfeld to do this instead, an odd conceit but well explained (and which also informs us a bit more about Carter’s character and the walls of defence he has erected, which may also include his humour). At any rate, I am pleased to say that the doco is never less than engaging, finding a way through editing, music, graphics, found and shot footage (visiting old haunts), and carefully chosen talking heads (archival and new) to flesh out Carter’s story and the adjacent stories of his bandmates and other scenesters (he volunteered as a carer for Chris Knox after the latter’s stroke!). This is a film and an artist that you should definitely check out!  I’ve been re-evaluating Straitjacket Fits and Dimmer now in this new enriched light.

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024) – D. Hinton

Martin Scorsese is omnipresent talking about film, particularly classic films and film preservation. He has 493 “self” credits on iMDb which is probably an underestimate.  Occasionally, he has made his own documentaries or essay films about his relationship with cinema and the influence of movies he’s seen on his own oeuvre, such as A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) or My Voyage to Italy (1999).  This time, as directed by David Hinton, he talks us through his feelings about the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (and their production company The Archers).  I’m also a big fan of this duo – there are 16 reviews on my two blogs for films directed by Powell and often also written by Pressburger. I gave 5 stars to The Thief of Bagdad (1940), I Know Where I am Going (1945) and Black Narcissus (1947) and 4.5 stars to The Edge of the World (1937), A Canterbury Tale (1944), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), and Peeping Tom (1960). Scoresese has a particular affinity for the ballet films, The Red Shoes (1948; 4 stars) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951; which I still haven’t watched all the way through) as well as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943; which I need to watch again and review). He narrates his way through all the films with a healthy dose of clips and also links them to choices he made in his own films (primarily Raging Bull, 1980). He highlights the risks they took -- their experiments with plot, Technicolour, composition – and their fierce independence (leading to many ruptures with producers and companies). Scorsese also discusses his real interpersonal relationship with Powell who became a friend and mentor and who eventually married Scorsese’s longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker. He talks a lot about Powell’s love for England and his embodiment of the stereotypical English reserve.  Pressburger, a Hungarian Jew who moved to Berlin and then escaped to England, also gets his fair share of behind-the-scenes stories and clips. In all, it’s a touching and insightful tour through the Archers’ body of work, although inevitably it contains an arc that moves from success to decline and disregard. Fortunately, Scorsese isn’t the only voice heralding the cinematic output of this great duo (and they were finally re-appreciated in their lifetimes). If you haven’t checked out any of their great films, what’s stopping you?

We Jam Econo (2005)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

We Jam Econo (2005) – T. Irwin

I’m pretty sure I didn’t really appreciate the Minutemen when I saw them open for R.E.M. at the Mosque Theatre in Richmond, VA, in the Fall of 1985 (except perhaps their Creedence cover “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”). This turned out to be their final tour before singer/guitarist/lyricist d. boon died in a van accident in December of that year.  Knowing that outcome adds a lot of extra emotional weight to this otherwise straightforward doco about the band – even the predictable ex-punk talking heads seem to have an extra level of tenderness toward the band.  Of course, a lot of that devotion is due to the striking contribution of this band to music history.  They were punk, yes, but not in the stereotypical sense. Instead, they were flying flannel as self-professed corn-dogs out of San Pedro, CA, ready to absorb classic rock, country, jazz, and everything else they heard into their short sometimes abrasive songs; they grew into musicians with superb creative technique (drummer George Hurley gets many kudos here). Our guide through the band’s history is bass player/singer/lyricist Mike Watt, now an elder statesman of the music scene (as well as in 2005). I guess I did not realise how many of the band’s songs he wrote himself (nor the fierce rivalry between him and d. boon) – thinking about it now, you can see the difference between boon’s political lyrics and Watt’s more narrative take (esp. on “History Lesson Part 2” of course). He’s down to earth, switched on, and authentic in his spiel. I’ve got 3 or 4 of the band’s albums, including their opus Double Nickels on the Dime, which was designed not only to compete with Husker Du’s Zen Arcade, another double LP, but was a reference to Sammy Hagar’s “I can’t drive 55” because his driving might have been crazy/exciting but his music was boring – the Minutemen opted for the converse, boring driving (at 55 or below) but crazy/exciting music.

Bad Timing (1980)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Bad Timing (1980) – N. Roeg

Let’s face it, after the high-water marks of Walkabout (1971) and Don’t Look Now (1973), director Nicolas Roeg never really made it as an auteur (he also co-directed Perfomance, 1969, with Donald Cammell and served as cinematographer for Lester, Schlesinger, Truffaut, others).  This might be his last hurrah (though there were other attempts to follow this theme to come). Perhaps following on from the cut-up technique he used to edit the Julie Christie-Donald Sutherland sex scene in Don’t Look Now, he used that technique for Bad Timing, although for the entire film.  Some reports suggest the film was shot as a straightforward erotic thriller and only later sliced and diced (à la William Burroughs) but I prefer to see it as a puzzle film, intended as such. After Tom Waits’ “Invitation to the Blues” plays, we are in an ambulance with Art Garfunkel tending to a comatose Theresa Russell (subsequent versions of this scene include “Who Are You”). From there, we jump back and forth in time across their (intense) relationship. It’s an “opposites attract” scenario with free spirited Russell living in the moment and Freudian psychotherapy professor Garfunkel trying to control her. In keeping with Garfunkel’s occupation, sex and death are the main themes here, but it isn’t clear who is unravelling more as the film “progresses” (or just as more details are added to beginning, middle, and end).  At some point, we realise that Harvey Keitel is actually a police detective investigating whether any malfeasance has taken place on the night that Russell was sent to the hospital and suspicion rests on Garfunkel. Things do conclude with a revelation and I guess that cements the feeling that both characters are equally damaged by this oil-and-water affair. But the reason to watch this film (if you are fully prepared) is for the madness and intensity and brave acting by both Russell (who subsequently married Roeg) and Garfunkel (previously in Carnal Knowledge, 1971, another risky choice) who don’t shy away from nakedness (physical or emotional).  Reviews suggest this is polarizing (no surprise).

Anora (2024)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Anora (2024) – S. Baker

This is the fourth Sean Baker film I’ve watched and I came to it a bit late, after all the hype surrounding its Best Picture Oscar win (and the Best Director, Screenplay, and Editing wins for Baker) has died down.  I wasn’t sure if I was prepared to like it, given the Cinderella story marketing frame, to which I only barely paid attention, seemed a bit cliché. And, as the film unfolded, the blue-collar erotic dancer meets spoiled Russian heir plot seemed just an opportunity to show decadence on the screen rather than to explore any meaningful ideas about class differences.  But then the fairytale plot evaporated and the intensity and stress racheted up, scene by scene, so that this felt more like a Safdie Brothers outing (although I haven’t yet seen their solo efforts) than the keenly/wryly observed naturalistic films of Baker’s oeuvre (e.g., Red Rocket, 2021; The Florida Project, 2017; Tangerine, 2015). The chaos and breakdown of relations between the characters is both comic and harsh and although Anora (Best Actress Mikey Madison) remains the heart of every scene, there are some excellent character turns by Karren Karagulian and Vache Tovmasyan. Still, it was hard to tell if this was just a thrill ride for viewers or something deeper – and then the final scene between gangster/minder Igor (Yura Borisov) and Ani/Anora made the film for me. Not only did this provide the necessary emotional release for the character but it revealed just how many defenses had been up, perhaps for a very long time, as a protective shield necessary in a hard hard world (even if the temptation to dream about that fairytale might be omnipresent, if not fully conscious).

No Other Choice (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

No Other Choice (2025) – C.-W. Park

I was very enamoured with Park Chan-wook’s previous film, Decision to Leave (2022), a hazy film noir romance that felt like an ode to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).  Now his new film takes a Donald Westlake novel (The Ax, previously adapted by Costa-Gavras, to whom this film is dedicated) and turns it into a dark comedy about our era of industrial transformation and the mass layoffs it is creating.  Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) works for a large Korean paper company that is taken over by an American corporation that promptly sacks a chunk of its workforce including Man-su.  An expensive present from the company (an eel dinner) foreshadows the pink slip.  The film then follows Man-su and his family, including his wife Miri (Son Ye-Jin) and two children, Si-one and Ri-one, a possibly autistic cello prodigy and a typical teen getting himself into trouble, as they cope with the disaster. The family struggles to make ends meet (Miri goes to work as a dental assistant) and with the bank about to foreclose on the family home, Man-su hatches a desperate plan to ensure that he is the prime candidate for any job opening at other paper companies (there seem to be quite a few).  The film takes its time as Man-su identifies his competition and builds up the courage to take them out. Of course, it’s messy, and Man-su creates too many clues and loose ends for the police to follow -- but director Park revels in the opportunity to create eccentric characters, stage some magnificent shots in beautiful colour (kudos to cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung), and basically let things get weird and goofy.  Lee Byung-hun holds it all together with a charismatic performance (rightfully nominated for a Golden Globe). Another highlight in Park’s already excellent oeuvre.

Fallen Leaves (2023)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Fallen Leaves (2023) – A. Kaurismäki

It’s probably easy to underestimate Aki Kaurismäki, the 68-year-old Finnish director. His films are short, understated, and droll. In Fallen Leaves, the characters interact in a version of Helsinki filled with movie posters – including for films by Bresson, Godard, David Lean, and Jim Jarmusch (whose film, The Dead Don’t Die, 2019, the central couple go to see). This provides some hints about Kaurismäki’s intent – his film may feel slight, but it is actually linked carefully to film history, though unique in its own style. Bresson is a clear inspiration because we often see the characters doing things, small things like looking at the expiry date on food or sweeping a factory floor, which puts viewers in an existential mindset (thinking about doing and being). This is part of the so-called “Proletariat Trilogy” (the fourth film, following 1990’s The Match Factory Girl) which speaks to the class differences which were pivotal to Godard’s politicised cinema; including ongoing reports of the war in Ukraine every time a radio is switched on also reminds us of Godard’s intertextual approach (his bold colour palette also shows kinship). As far as the plot goes, David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) seems to be a touchstone, although in Fallen Leaves, Alma Pöysti’s Ana and Jussi Vatanen’s Holappa aren’t married to others and approaching an affair – they are just lonely strangers who struggle to make their connection happen.  Kaurismäki observes them nonjudgmentally (even when Holappa’s behaviour is clearly self-destructive, but with a wry eye that suggests that finding humour in life is one way to survive its repeated letdowns. Bemusing sequences, such as in the karaoke bar, are played as deadpan as you can get (a tendency also shared with his friend Jarmusch). Things go wrong, yes, but it’s never as bad as it seems – or at least the characters pull themselves together and get on with it (as existential proletariats must do). Music ties the whole thing together, bringing the melancholy, especially with a Finnish version of the French song “Les Feuilles Mortes” (known in English as “Autumn Leaves”, and translating to the film’s title here) and a Finnish version of Gordon Lightfoot’s Early Mornin’ Rain. Holappa’s friend Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen) sings a traditional Finnish ballad at karaoke and indie-rock duo Maustetytöt get showcased in a bar. Definitely worth 80 minutes of your time.

Nights of Cabiria (1957)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Nights of Cabiria (1957) – F. Fellini

My Fellini period was decades ago, in the 1990s; so revisiting Nights of Cabiria felt almost like seeing a new film.  Yet, Fellini’s early style, mixing (Italian) neo-realism with something more personal, poetic, episodic, remained familiar. This film belongs to Giulietta Masina (Fellini’s wife and muse) who plays Cabiria, a downtrodden prostitute with an indomitable spirit (she won the Best Actress award at Cannes for this performance). The arc of the film follows Cabiria (full circle?) from our first glimpse of her being pushed into a river (nearly drowning) by a seedy paramour only after her purse, through a series of encounters where we see other sides of her, sometimes disparaged but often her (not clichéd but perfectly acted) heart of gold shows through and invites warmer treatment, eventually from a gentle accountant (François Périer) who promises to take her away from the life. Emotions follow this same arc: bitter, melancholy, playful, amazed, despondent, resilient. Fellini started as a screenwriter and his talent shines here. The sets and locations, from squalor (older prostitutes living in caves) to astounding luxury (the film star’s mansion), allow Masina to act as the viewer’s emissary to unknown worlds, adding empathy and identification.  Is she looking for true love? Well, so are we.  After this, Fellini moved onto the decadence of La Dolce Vita.

La Chimera (2023)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

La Chimera (2023) – A. Rohrwacher

Director Alice Rohrwacher’s most recent feature and her first since her breakthrough with Happy as Lazzaro (2018).  (She seems to make a lot of shorts).  La Chimera feels very European (Rohrwacher is Italian), even if it stars British Josh O’Connor (he barely speaks and usually in broken Italian). Isabella Rossellini plays a matriarch (the mother of O’Connor’s lost girlfriend). As in Lazzaro, there’s a communal feel to the casting, with a lot of amateurs, possibly non-actors, in bit parts or just part of the gang. Is this Fellini-esque? Rohrwacher also seems to enjoy gazing at faces. The blurb at iMDb seems to position this as some sort of arthouse Indiana Jones but I have to tell you that even though O’Connor plays a sort of archeologist (or perhaps just a graverobber), this is not that (although there are some beautiful arthouse shots!). Instead of action, we get an elusive meditation on our connections to the past, both cultural (as in the hunt for artefacts or lost treasures) and personal (as in returning to one’s old haunts or dwelling in one’s thoughts about people who have passed). Not so much bringing the past to light in the present but perhaps escaping to the past, not necessarily but especially one’s own past, not an updated version? But that’s just one of the themes and ideas free-floating through the film. Rohrwacher again toys with magical realism with O’Connor also a sort of dowser for graves, overcome when near treasure-filled hollows in the ground. But how do these lost souls feel about giving up their riches?

It Happened One Night (1934)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

It Happened One Night (1934) – F. Capra

It seems to me that Frank Capra is one of those filmmakers that you first encounter as a child or youth (from It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946, to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939, and maybe to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 1936), when his “Capra-Corn”, full of sentimentality and simple populist politics, can have its biggest impact.  But there’s no denying the pleasures available to adult viewers in a film like It Happened One Night (1934), winner of 5 Oscars for Capra, screenwriter Robert Riskin, and stars Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, not to mention Best Picture.  Gable is at his charismatic best as the no-nonsense straight-talking but principled reporter who gets drunk, gets fired, and then stumbles onto the story of a lifetime: heiress Colbert has run away from her over-protective banker father (Walter Connolly) to elope with an older aviator, acknowledged by all to be a fraud. When her bag is stolen, bystander Gable helps her to navigate the journey from Miami to New York to meet her fiancé (by night bus and other modes of transport), teaches her about hitch-hiking (the thumb!), piggy-back rides, and donut-dunking – and also falls in love with her. There are some highly-charged erotic moments when the couple are separated by the Walls of Jericho (a blanket suspended between two twin beds). When they aren’t fighting (which is most of the time), you can see the care developing between them.  Anyway, it’s a comedy with the kind of plot that puts all sorts of obstacles in the way of young love until we reach the requisite happy ending. They don’t make them like this anymore.

 

Bugonia (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Bugonia (2025) – Y. Lanthimos

For some reason, I haven’t checked in with director Yorgos Lanthimos for quite a while (last time was The Favourite, 2018), so I missed his two previous collaborations with Emma Stone. After watching Bugonia, also starring Stone, I think I’m going to need to go back and catch up.  To be honest, I wasn’t certain that I would like this one.  I mean, “conspiracy theorists who kidnap a CEO because they think she is an alien” sounded either too facile or trying too hard to be weird. So, the film had to work hard to convince me – and by the time it was done (with those amazing freeze-frame shots), I was convinced.  Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis play the conspiracy theorists, none too bright, but Plemons (playing “Teddy”) is clearly obsessed while Delbis (playing “Don”) appears to have some sort of disability and is more ambivalent (and not lacking in empathy). The film plays out sort of exactly how you think it would – CEO denies being an alien but tin-foil-hat guys persist.  Yet Lanthimos keeps adding extra details and the cast fully inhabit their roles, going for broke. To say that this production pushed things as far as they possibly could is probably an understatement. Weird, but not only for weirdness’s sake – there are some deeper themes here about corporate greed (of course), the destruction of the environment (particularly bees – which relates to the ancient Greek origin of the film title) but also about power’s need for victims (even the cop-babysitter evokes this) and the merry path to hell that we humans are currently traversing… Perhaps this could be read as one big cosmic joke but the final moments arrested that thought. Highly recommended.

The Mastermind (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Mastermind (2025) – K. Reichardt

I guess I lost track of director Kelly Reichardt since the pandemic but I have enjoyed all of her films that I’ve seen (particularly Old Joy, 2006, and First Cow, 2019). With The Mastermind, Reichardt has brought her technique and themes to the heist drama. (It is always hard to know whether these arthouse directors choose to make genre films to attract a wider audience, for commercial prospects, or because, like many of us, they are truly fond of the genres). The setting is Framingham, Massachusetts, circa 1970. Reichardt and her team (including longtime cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt) use film stock and camera techniques to evoke films shot in this period (gauzy, washed-out colour) alongside pitch-perfect art design and set-decoration and costumes (furniture, cars, buildings, shirts, dresses, etc.).  The plaintive jazz soundtrack by Rob Mazurek lends an emotional note to the proceedings even when some scenes are scored only by extended drum solos. The plot centres on Josh O’Connor’s failing carpenter/architect/art-school graduate, married (to Alana Haim) with two young sons, who concocts a plan to steal some abstract paintings from the local art gallery with a couple of local guys/friends. Reichardt takes us step-by-step through the caper and its aftermath in true slow-cinema style, allowing viewers’ awareness of the genre to fill in some of the gaps in the plot as she hones in on a character study of O’Connor’s “mastermind”. Rather than using other characters to psychoanalyse him, Reichardt allows O’Connor’s actions (and the little bit of context we glean about him and his past) to help viewers to draw their own conclusions. The film concludes, with Vietnam War protests on TV and on the streets, with a sort of sudden ironic joke and no denouement (possibly one could see 2/3 of the film as a long long denouement, I guess!).  Slow but always absorbing.

Weapons (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Weapons (2025) – Z. Creggar

Ostensibly narrated by a primary school girl from whatever small town in America the film takes place, lending a fable-like quality to the proceedings, we begin the tale with the key mystery to be solved: on one particular school day, all of the students in one classroom (save one) fail to turn up to school (in fact, they each left their houses at 2:17 AM and disappeared). Distressed parents focus their anger on the class teacher, played by Julia Garner. The film is divided into three parts: Justine’s story (the classroom teacher), Archer’s story (one of the parents, played by Josh Brolin), and Alex’s story (the one boy who did show up for school, played by Cary Christopher). Everyone is desperate to understand what happened to the missing children – and, of course, to find them. Amy Madigan, playing Alex’s Aunt Gladys, was nominated for a Golden Globe for best supporting actress for this film but did not win. To say any more would be criminal but I left the film thinking about the Brothers Grimm (and although I was hoping for a strictly supernatural film, I did wince on a few occasions that involved some violence and gore). Worth a look (if you dare)!

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Phoenician Scheme (2025) – W. Anderson

I will have to watch this one again, having only seen it on my trans-Pacific flight to the USA on the tiny back-of-the-seat screen (possibly with an airline crash edited out).  However, even with these conditions, I’m confident that this is director Wes Anderson’s best feature since The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Although I enjoyed them well enough at the time, Asteroid City (2023) and The French Dispatch (2021) felt like a letdown. Here, Benicio del Toro stars as businessman Zsa-Zsa Korda, who may have a shady past and also the target of various attempts at his life (possibly leading to multiple airplane crashes, all survived). He is trying to put together the financing for one last engineering feat, which involves visiting a series of former business partners around the globe. Along with him are Mia Threapleton playing his daughter Liesl, now a nun, to whom he plans to bequeath his estate, and Michael Cera playing Bjorn, a tutor hired to teach him about insects. The characterisations (including from the many, often familiar bit players) are sublimely eccentric. Although not scaling the droll comedic peak that Grand Budapest conquered, Phoenician Scheme offers many amusing moments as Korda seeks to eliminate “the gap” in his financing. As could be expected, the art design, set decoration, and music (Alexandre Desplat, plus curated classical and jazz selections), are highly stylized and exquisite.  Recommended, particularly if you’ve more or less given up on Wes recently.

 

Aliens (1986)

 

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Aliens (1986) – J. Cameron

In preparation for a family visit to the Deep Space escape room at Ukiyo.com.au (courtesy of Nanna & Vaari) – and because I recently played Alien: Isolation (the survival horror videogame) – I rewatched this sequel to the original Ridley Scott 1979 horror sci-fi classic.  This time with James Cameron at the helm (fresh off his success with The Terminator, 1984), the franchise takes a distinct turn to the action film, as a group of marines (including Bill Paxon, Michael Biehn, Jenette Goldstein, and synthetic Lance Henriksen) are sent to THAT planet, where a human colony has now disappeared, approximately 57 years after the first film. Ellen Ripley (played again by Sigourney Weaver) has been on ice in hibernation all this time on the Nostromo’s escape pod but, ultimately, is encouraged to join the rescue mission (by slimy corporate shill Paul Reiser) after a traumatic recovery period on Earth. When they arrive on LV-426, they find only 9-year-old Newt whose parents and brother have been killed, along with all of the colonists (except those used for incubating offspring), by the swarm of aliens that has infested their base.  And with that premise in place, the rest of the film is one long fight between the space marines, Ripley, and the aliens (including their queen), with a few subplots for character development along the way.  Cameron ups the tension and plays up the “maternal instinct” angle by mirroring Ripley (with Newt standing in for her now dead real daughter) and the alien queen.  It’s a relentless ride, although not quite up to the spooky-scary benchmark set by its predecessor.  If I recall correctly, none of the subsequent films in the franchise are as good as the first two.