News that Scott is working on a follow-up to his maligned 2017 film leaves me worried the franchise has run out of shocks

If any science-fiction saga looked beyond recovery, it was the Alien franchise. For the 38 years that followed James Cameron’s Aliens, film-makers contrived to find every imaginable way of not making a good Alien film. They tried killing everyone the audience cared about before the opening credits, marooning Sigourney Weaver on a planet populated entirely by bald British character actors, cloning Ripley, pitting xenomorphs against Predators, and sending scientists across the universe to ask an enormous, hairless space bodybuilder why he made them. They even ponied up the thick end of $100m for a film in which Michael Fassbender teaches himself to play the flute.

And then in 2024, we got Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, in which actual xenomorphs chase actual human beings down actual corridors for the clearly defined purposes of either killing them or putting smaller xenomorphs inside them. Better still, a year later we got Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth, which reminded us that giant, murderous space insects are in fact less awful than tech trillionaires.

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© Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

© Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

© Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

Investors want Kevin Warsh, the Fed chairman, to address inflation, interest rates and the bond market in a major speech. Some worry he won’t say enough.

© Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Robin Wigglesworth of Financial Times explains everything you need to know about the Trump administration’s meddling with the bond market.

© The Ezra Klein Show

A father and son must team up to find a serial killer in a cheaply made and increasingly uninteresting thriller

It’s not as if Robert De Niro’s choices have improved all that much since the nadir of the mid-2000s (last year did see him crop up in a Scott Eastwood-led actioner and The Alto Knights) but there’s something specifically rubbishy about his latest that transports us back to that particularly cursed time. The Whisper Man, a film as openly stupid as its title would suggest, could have been released in between the evil clone horror Godsend and imaginary friend thriller Hide and Seek, the kind of bottom-tier project that offers the actor a nice big cheque and the audience a nice little nap.

It’s a familiar pile of B-movie schlock – serial killers, missing children, bumps in the night, more imaginary friends – and there is some initial junky fun to be had as we wonder just where it all might be headed. I was hoping for a destination a little more deranged or vaguely surprising, the film making a silent promise that we’re hurtling toward somewhere wildly unexpected before dumping us in a ditch instead.

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© Photograph: DAVID LEE/NETFLIX ©2026

© Photograph: DAVID LEE/NETFLIX ©2026

© Photograph: DAVID LEE/NETFLIX ©2026

We are approaching a credibility crisis with Scott Bessent and Kevin Warsh leading our economy.

© Nathan Howard/Reuters

The relative indifference to the news that the U.S. government now owes $40 trillion demonstrates how drastically the politics of deficit spending has changed.

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Residents of Georgia's 13th Congressional District outside of Atlanta will get a new representative to Congress after a special election runoff Tuesday to replace the late Democratic Rep. David Scott, who died April 22.