Even if the twists and turns in the plot aren't too hard to see coming, there's a distinct joy that [Ridley] Scott takes in setting up and setting off each of those traps.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 8, 2017

Covenant works best when it's honoring Alien and massively fails when it hearkens back to Prometheus.

| Nov 20, 2017

There's an air of mystery to Alien: Covenant that the movie can't live up to, because for all its interest in what it all means, it has relatively little to show for all that idle questioning.

| Aug 10, 2017

While it may sometimes exceed its own reach, Covenant extends a grasp so impressively audacious, it might as well come from a director with nothing to lose.

| Jun 1, 2017

In space, no one can hear you laugh.

| May 29, 2017

Yet again a crew sniffs after a mysterious ping and sticks their nose in a deadly larva pod. Are our astronauts learning? God no. And if the audience expected a different plot, we're not learning, either.

| Original Score: C | May 26, 2017

As redesigns go, Alien: Covenant is not ambitious, but it's roaringly, repulsively effective.

| May 26, 2017

This may not be a movie that reinvents the wheel. But it's one that knows how to make it roll.

| May 25, 2017

It's an Alien movie for our times, one in which mankind isn't just under the thumb of an oppressive corporation but sowing the seeds of its own destruction on a more sweeping scale.

| May 24, 2017

There are plenty of reasons to shut your eyes and cross your legs while watching this film, but is that the same as being scared?

| May 22, 2017

Director Ridley Scott clearly wants to give us more than *just* an 'Alien' movie. But his film is best when it aims for that simple goal.

| May 19, 2017

This desire for procreation and preservation of the self - human, alien or artificial - is what motivates every being in the Alien universe, and in Covenant, Scott sets up a thrilling thunderdome in which we can watch this bloody battle unfold.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 19, 2017

If this is your idea of a good time, you can tick away the film's two-plus hours guessing which crew members will get offed, and in what order.

| Original Score: C+ | May 19, 2017

Peel away the big budget genre film's veneer of Western Civ for Dummies (Michelangelo, Wagner, Byron and Shelley) and what you have is rather conventional Lego blocks of sci-fi horror.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 19, 2017

Sure, there's more blood, and guts, to appease fans, but at what cost?

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 19, 2017

The new film is intended to act as several things, none of them particularly admirable.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 19, 2017

The first "Alien" had better special effects. Watch it instead.

| Original Score: C- | May 19, 2017

Unfortunately, Alien: Covenant is not really up to bearing the weight of the yarn it wants to spin.

| May 18, 2017

Yet director Ridley Scott -- who birthed the original nearly 40 years ago as well as that last film -- plunges back into the latter's mythology, with equally uninspired and perhaps more blatantly derivative results.

| May 18, 2017

Despite a few remnants of the earlier film's obscure genesis story, most of the action in Covenant plays like an elaboration on the original Alien (1979).

| May 18, 2017