China or the U.S.? Two Meetings Offer Competing Showcases of Global Power.

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© Vyacheslav Oseledko/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Sam Wolfe/Reuters

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Old favourites Shaun the Sheep, Dune, Jane Austen and Godzilla join Charles de Gaulle, the Peasants’ Revolt and queer identity in Spain
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here
• Big tech goes to Hollywood: is Silicon Valley ready for a silver-screen reckoning?
All release dates are UK and subject to change
Willem Dafoe is typically grizzled and poetic for this study of a near-retirement postal worker who, it turns out, was a beatnik rhymester of cachet – but no lasting renown – back in the day, and who has now been rediscovered by a new generation of literary hipsters. Director Kent Jones, adapting a novella by Arthur “La Ronde” Schnitzler, was the longtime head of the New York film festival; he might be in for a spot of late fame himself. AP
• 4 September

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© Composite: Guardian Design/Alamy

© Composite: Guardian Design/Alamy

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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

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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

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