Clockwise from top: Another Battle After Another, The Lowdown, Alien: Earth, and House of Guinness.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Warner Bros. Pictures, Ben Blackall/Netflix, Shane Brown/FX, Patrick Brown/FX
It’s time to start reaping the rewards of our Movie Fantasy League! If you picked One Battle After Another, expect to get some early points — though, hey, maybe The Strangers: Chapter 2 will surprise the handful of you who drafted it. Paul Thomas Anderson’s splashy action-thriller feels like the talk of the film world. It helps that it’s actually quite good, but for those of you trying to stay in, there’s the finale of Alien: Earth, House of Guinness (think Irish Succession), a new Sterlin Harjo series(!), and the release of one S-word Apple TV+ show this week. (Hint: It’s not Savant.)
With a $140 million price tag, One Battle After Another is one of Paul Thomas Anderson’s more ambitious swings. Based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, this thriller stars Leonardo DiCaprio as the paranoid Bob Ferguson, a former member of the revolutionary group French 75, who lives off the grid with his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). After Willa goes missing, Bob is drawn back into the fray. Teyana Taylor, Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, and Regina Hall also star.
➽ See where it lands on our rankings of every PTA movie and every Leo performance by reading one list after another.
Steven Knight is back playing in the field he likes best: portraits of U.K. history that allow for violence, scheming, and general ne’er-do-well-ness. This show follows the Succession-style family infighting that occurs after Sir Benjamin Guinness’s death. Which of his four adult children will pick up his yeasty mantle? —Roxana Hadadi
An Apple TV+ show that didn’t get pulled from release this week is the streamer’s ol’ reliable spy series, Slow Horses. Gary Oldman stars as the curmudgeonly Jackson Lamb, who leads MI5, a unit full of low-level spies that includes Jack Lowden’s River Cartwright.
The Strangers is utterly terrifying, but it’s funny to see them attempt a rebooted trilogy when the premise is just “people in masks invade houses.” Madelaine Petsch’s Maya survived the titular strangers once, and of course, they’re hunting her again in Chapter 2. If she survives this, her character, Maya, really needs to leave the country and live in a bunker, because they’ll just hunt her again for the upcoming Chapter 3.
“In the latest, fifth season of Fargo, [Noah] Hawley’s obsession with debt reflected an increasingly anti-capitalist worldview, and it’s in line with his preferences for Alien: Earth to depict the five corporations that rule the world as evil money-grubbers fighting over the scraps of a dying society locked in indentured servitude. But this isn’t a unique idea within the context of the Alien franchise, which means that Hawley’s only real addition of note is the suggestion that xenomorphs can be relative heroes against the greater evil of tech bros.”
That’s Critic Roxana Hadadi on the ending of Hawley’s Alien prequel series, now streaming on Hulu. (I’ll admit, I wasn’t a fan of the finale, for points Hadadi mentions and mostly because Wendy communicating with the xenomorph for the nth time for unknown reasons drove me up a wall, but I do need to see what happens to these characters, so Hawley, you win this round.)
➽ Now that Alien: Earth is over, how about traversing the other worlds of Alien?
Audiences didn’t come out to theaters for Terminator 2: Judgment Day–style M3GAN the way they did for Terminator 1–style M3GAN in 2023. But maybe audiences will at least reach for their remotes and go to streaming for the killer doll that slays in more ways than one. She may be on Gemma’s and Cady’s (Allison Williams and Violet McGraw) side now, but she still dances menacingly, so there’s that.
➽ There’s also Danny and Michael Philippou’s horror film Bring Her Back, out on HBO Max, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Splitsville on VOD.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s first take on a Thomas Pynchon novel before One Battle After Another was 2014’s Inherent Vice. It saw PTA teaming up with Joaquin Phoenix again after the lauded The Master. Here, Phoenix plays a bumbling and always-stoned PI in Los Angeles who investigates the disappearance of his ex, Shasta (Katherine Waterston), and her rich real-estate boyfriend (Eric Roberts), which has him encountering a number of colorful characters played by Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Benicio del Toro, Reese Witherspoon. The list goes on.
Want more? Read our recommendations from the weekend of September 19.
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