Your ultimate guide to Bangkok

Shane Black, co-writer and director of the rebooted The Predator, appeared in the 1987 original as dead meat: the kind of wise-cracking character that gets killed off early. (He was just a hot-shit script seller at that point, thrilled to be included in some primo Arnold Schwarzenegger dumb.) As satisfying as it’s been to see Black evolve into a distinctive, banter-friendly voice—The Nice Guys is a recent example—his Predator is exactly the sort of flick he would have made 30 years ago when he played that gangly supporting clown. It’s aggressively pacey, overloaded with smug one-liners, gore-laden and unlikely to have much of a future. Today’s run through the jungle doesn’t include Ah-nold or, indeed, anyone to gaze with bewilderment at a dreadlocked alien with a cloaking device. But it does feature the intriguingly hard-edged Olivia Munn as a biologist who’s called into a secret lab to do some explaining. (Munn has a variation on the first movie’s sole memorable line, but she swaps out “ugly” for “beautiful.”) Also on hand for combat with the green-blooded invaders (there’s more than one this time) are a wry ex-Army Ranger (Boyd Holbrook), a Con Air–chatty busload of military nuts (including Keegan-Michael Key and Moonlight's Trevante Rhodes) and an autistic child (Room’s Jacob Tremblay). Were it not for the hard-R violence and a generous amount of computerized splatter, The Predator would play like a slightly naughtier Independence Day or Armageddon, sci-fi movies that ha

It may surprise you to learn that the denizens of “Europe, 20,000 years ago”—as the prehistoric adventure Alpha situates us—rocked some beautifully tailored fur-lined parkas and cozy boots that look a lot like Uggs. Evidently, facts aren’t terribly important here (even the movie’s title comes from a civilization that’s still millennia away), but if you can get past that, there’s a moderately gripping tale of survival and natural kinship to be had, one in the long-forgotten vein of 1983’s Never Cry Wolf. Teenage Keda (The Road’s Kodi Smit-McPhee, maturing into a forceful silent presence) has a stern but loving father to impress: Hunting the Great Beast is a rite of passage that’s arrived for him. But after Keda is flung off a high ledge by a charging buffalo, his tribe assumes the worst. The kid survives the ordeal, though, and, left alone in the wild, comes to befriend a relatively sweet-natured wolf that he muzzles and nurses back to health—a first for interspecies relations, it’s implied. The film works best during its (too-brief) getting-to-know-you section, which balances humor against snarly danger. Visualized by director Albert Hughes in an impressive large-frame format, Alpha makes the most of gorgeous British Columbia locations when it’s not undercutting them with its slight overuse of CGI. Perhaps the target audience—thoughtful children (and parents who remember being same)—won’t mind the occasional slickness, especially when it comes in the service of a story with