Alien: Romulus

 Since the first two films in the 1980s, the sci-fi horror series has been a very mixed bag. But this latest gets back to basics, and makes for a superbly scary monster movie.

There have already been eight Alien films, including the two Alien vs Predator spin-offs, but if you add up the Alien films which are genuinely good, that number gets much, much smaller. The series is notorious for sequels and prequels that were compromised by personality clashes and studio interference, and even the last two, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, ended up being derivative and pretentious muddles, despite being made by the director of the peerless 1979 original, Ridley Scott.

Now, though, the total of genuinely good Alien films has gone up by one. Fede Álvarez, the Uruguayan director of Don't Breathe and 2013's remake of The Evil Dead, has triumphed with a clever, gripping and sometimes awe-inspiring sci-fi chiller, which takes the series back to its nerve-racking monster-movie roots while injecting it with some new blood – some new acid blood, you might say.

He has set Alien: Romulus between the events of Scott's Alien and James Cameron's Aliens, and he takes care to recreate the retro-futuristic atmosphere of those films.

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