Thomas Matich

In Ridley Scott's universe there are no safe spaces, only harsh habitats and mysterious planets that rotate on an evil axis where time slips into a haunted abyss. In his new film Alien: Covenant, Scott's delayed follow-up to the original Alien prequel Prometheus from 2012, he serves a stiff cocktail of those two aforementioned films. Prometheus was a decisive film not free from flaws, but it was driven by man's curiosity to meet his maker and the intriguing premise of exploring who the "Space Jockey" was in 1979's Alien.

With Scott back at the helm of the franchise, Prometheus was epic cinema and a visual glory to behold in theaters viewed in dazzling 3D. The original idea for the Prometheus sequel was titled Paradise Lost and it followed Dr. Shaw and conniving android David to the planet of the "Engineers," the creators of mankind. A few years, a name change and a James Franco casting later, Covenant is not that film at all and has a Resident Evil…

Anarchy in the Amazon -- Charlie Hunnam stars in The Lost City of Z. 

One of the enlightened theories from economist Robert J. Gordon's behemoth 2016 book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Livingsince the Civil War, is that aside from technological advances such as flat-screen televisions, the Internet and smartphones, modern everyday life does not differ much from the way it was in the 1940's. The idea the Northwestern professor conveys is that if one today were to be teleported into a single-family home in the post WWII era, they would be equipped with basic plumbing, television, air-conditioning, refrigeration and numerous other appliances and comforts that were not bestowed upon those that lived 75 years earlier.

In James Gray's new ambitious epic The Lost City of Z, 20th century explorers are confronted by the harshness of surviving the jungle searching for the remains of an ancient civilization. The film was adapted from David Crann's 2009…