Past Life is an Israeli drama/mystery that's apparently based on true life events. As that seems to be the case, those peeps in Haifa are living lives even more melodramatic than your average Bollywood film, only not quite as much fun.
Crappy dialog, perfunctory acting, and only good enough direction can't quite damper the killer premise of 47 Meters Down, wherein Mandy Moore and some other young actress that I'm way too old to recognize spend essentially the whole dang movie underwater, dealing with decompression sickness, dwindling oxygen supplies, and of course the many killer sharks they find themselves adjacent to. Once the setup is out of the way the perspective never goes above the sea level again (nice touch, that), and the murky depths they inhabit provide no shortage of dangers and makes for a great setting for a compelling survival thriller. Its not nearly as good as it could have been, but it ain't exactly bad either.
I don't think Ridley Scott is actually a creative person, but he's got more than one stone cold classic under his belt and I always appreciate his visual sensibilities and his adult tastes. He's just tricky to nail down as an artist. A highly skilled journeyman who's really into diffused lighting? Sure, I guess. I'm just being longwinded here, but I really enjoyed Alien: Covenant, which lacks the overreaching ambition of Prometheus, but is otherwise more competent in pretty much every way. Its actually quite refreshing to see a huge budget, skillfully made, no winking and all-business horror film. Even one that gives the short shrift to almost every character that's not played by Michael Fassbender. It is very much indebted to its predecessors in the series, but it does find some nice ways to tweak the by now familiar tropes of an Alien film, and it frequently looks spectacular. Its back to basics approach yields rewards. You don't really have to re-invent the wheel every time.
