Happy Monday! I hope you had a wonderful weekend. Last week’s recommendations were a bit… intense, so I promise today will be lighter.

Today’s movie is Columbus (2017), a romance streaming on Hulu. This wildly overlooked and underseen gem by video essayist Kogonada, who has often cut supplemental material for the Criterion Collection, has quickly become one of my favorite movies of this century.

Here’s what it’s about: After his father falls ill while on a speaking tour in Columbus, Indiana — a small midwestern town renowned for its modern architecture — Jin (John Cho) finds himself stuck waiting for his condition to improve. While wandering around the town he strikes up a conversation with local Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a young architecture enthusiast. [Trailer // 104 mins]

Why you should watch it: Every time I watch Columbus I fall deeper in love with it. This time what struck me is how it perfectly captures the feeling of two people at a crossroads in life — between relationships, between decisions, between life before and life after — and how they find each other.

Columbus is one of those gems that doesn’t seem like anything extraordinary until you’re sitting through the credits trying to absorb what you just watched. Like the Before series, it is one long conversation. And Kogonada — with help from Oscar-worthy performances by Richardson and Cho — allows the conversation to flow naturally, but with purpose and empathy. And that purpose is for two completely different people, a juxtaposition just like the town they’re in, to understand each other and eventually understand which road each of them should take. [Full review]

🍷 Pair it with:

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir. Celine Sciamma)
La La Land (dir. Damien Chazelle)
Support the Girls (dir. Andrew Bujalski)

📺 Buy or Rent: Prime Video | iTunes | YouTube

Rank all the movies

🥚 Every Alien movie ranked

Since the moon that Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and the crew of the Nostromo landed on in Ridley Scott’s Alien was called LV-426, April 26th was deemed Alien Day. And since the original 1979 sci-fi horror is my favorite science fiction movie of all time I thought I’d celebrate by ranking every entry in the franchise. Reply to the newsletter with your ranking — and tell me why I’m wrong!

Alien (1979): Ridley Scott’s watershed film is one of the most influential movies ever made and remains a masterclass in building tension in horror.
Aliens (1986): Legend has it that when James Cameron pitched a sequel to Alien, he wrote the word “Alien” on a chalkboard, then added an “s,” and then drew two lines through the “s” spelling ALIEN$. The rest was history.
Prometheus (2012): After the first two films the franchise has had its ups and downs. However, Ridley Scott took the biggest swing with this reboot by expanding the lore and visual iconography of the original in a remarkable way.
Alien: Covenant (2017): Though it’s one of the few movies I’ve ever walked out of (long story), I’ve come to appreciate Covenant for its pure audacity. The plot is unwieldy and at times it’s ridiculous, but it’s at the very least entertaining.
Alien³ (1992): David Fincher’s directorial debut was a mishmash of ideas following a hellish development period. And while the finished product is rough around the edges, Fincher’s talents, even at this early stage, were undeniable.
Alien Resurrection (1997): One word: basketball.

Take care of yourself and check in on each other.

See you Thursday —
Karl (@karl_delo)

🥚 Every Alien movie ranked

📽 Looking for something to watch? You can see every movie I’ve ever recommended right here.

🍅 I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic on Rotten Tomatoes! You can find all my reviews here.

Columbus 🗼