By new, you must mean the reboot and not a sequel, I didn't even know that was out yet. I mean the Unrated Cut of the original on blu-ray. I didn't bother with Theatrical, but if I had to guess what the less-than-a-minute difference was, probably the 2-second flashback of the boy in the bathroom.

Alien: Covenant

Ridley Scott clearly is a master of his craft when it comes to really cool and impressive shots, but the movie failed to make me care about any of the characters, and so watching them die in horrible ways didn't do anything to me.

I don't watch many movies any more, I've really become more of a fan of the serial format that - if well done - leaves way more room to explore characters, circumstances, consequences of actions further down the line, and development of relationships.

One of my favourite films, but I can appreciate it isn't everyone's cup of tea. Have you watched Tarkovsky before? He can be quite challenging as his films delve into the philosophical and existential.

I watched this one not too long ago too! I wasn't initially fond on it on my first watch, the but second time around I really enjoyed it. There's a lot of commentary there about poverty, race, injustice and institutional discrimination. I'm really excited to see this new remake actually, certainly after that great trailer with the shadow puppets!

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I recently watched Wake In Fright which is an Australian exploitation film, verging on horror but more in regards to the horrors that man commits rather than a serial killer or monster on the loose. It's pretty dizzying at times, and whenever I watch this film it never fails to make me feel so anxious. A British schoolteacher bets all his money in an attempt to leave town with enough money to quit teaching, but he loses every penny and falls into a pit filled with excessive drinking, slaughter and despair.

It's a genuinely nasty film, but it's a very well-crafted one.

The Normandy sequence is great, but for me the movie pretty much goes off a cliff after that. Definitely one of my least favorite Spielberg films overall.

I could not make myself watch it after Prometheus. Now, I admit I had a ton of fun with Prometheus, but only in a "so bad it's good" kind of way, as it's a total trainwreck. Like you said, a beautiful wreck in terms of cinematography, but still.

I don't think either format is inherently superior. Depends entirely on the story, style etc. I've seen a lot of tv series recently that I felt would be much better as movies.

Of course. I only wanted to express that my personal preferences shifted.

I find it interesting how the TV show format has developed. If you compare movies to, say, everyday novels, older serials where like short story collections with recurring characters and setting, but most stories being "complete" on their own.

Nowadays many serials work more like multi-volume novel series with story arcs spanning thousands of pages. I do like book series like that, no wonder I also often like TV shows working in a similar fashion.
I think there is very little difference between a 3-and-a-half movie monster like The Irishman and a "continuous" TV show - the latter is just even longer. Netflix even often cuts away the "previously" and the intro if you watch several episodes in a row, making those shows look even more like superlong movies.

Does Rifftrax/MST3K/Cinematic Titanic count? Because otherwise...Blazing Saddles if we're also not counting documentaries.

Feature-length documentaries definitely count, sorry I probably should've been clearer in the OP. I dunno if I'd say MST3K-type shows count as films, but I suppose you could say you watched the film that they watched in those shows if you wanted to. Blazing Saddles is so good! I had a bit of a Mel Brooks marathon last year where I watched Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and The Producers in a single sitting and it was a blast!

Well, I wouldn't be able to mark which of the criteria I listed first I watched most recently, so I went by my Netflix viewing history. I was already a fan of Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks, but had never seen Blazing Saddles. Save for one scene, it was quite dynamite.

The Shinjuku Incident

While i have a particular soft spot for Jackie Chan in dramatic roles (Heart of Dragon, New Police Story, The Foreigner, Police Story 2013, etc.), this may be my favorite of his drama films, even though it utterly lacks action.

Which is one of my big problems with them - a lot of those shows feel very slow, padded and poorly paced because they don't really need to be a series at all, they don't need 10 or 12 hours to be told and it shows. It's easier to tell a story in 10 hours than 2, but that often means it's done more lazy. It feels like nothing gets cut or re-written and every point can be hammered home again and again instead of subtle visual storytelling doing the same work in a fraction of the time.

It's a lot like CG and practical effects - limits of budget and technology often were the catalyst the led to some great visual effects, because the people behind them had to get very creative to work around the limitations. With CG you can just hsow anything, there's no obstacles to force a greater effort. Limited running time vs "just make it however long you want and chop it randomly into roughly hour long bits" is much the same.

That's not to say there are no modern tv show I enjoy (The Expanse for example is great), but they are few and on the whole I like series of the 80s and 90s much more.

Well that certainly depends on the show, and on what you consider "padding". Comparing it to books: some people find long and flowery detailed descriptions of landscapes, characters, clothes or whatever extremely boring, some don't like long dialogues digressing into stuff like philosophy or science. "Just get on with it!" :-) And others love the stuff.

Also good shows often tell more than one story at once, there's the big "main" arc, and then the stories of individual characters, how they cope and develop. Some people don't like that and call it fluff or padding, for me it's the most interesting part of many shows - because, honestly, the "big stories" have been told over and over - but there's a myriad of way people react to circumstances, how they adapt, how they deal with each other - or how they break. To show these developments, you simply need the "space".

I do agree though, that often creators run out of juice, especially noticeable in long-running shows. I guess one problem is how, if a show is successful, the publisher "orders another season".
But that problem was already there in the 80's and 90's, maybe less visible, because the number of good episodes simply decreased over time while in modern "long story" shows it often becomes obvious quickly from the start of the new season that they ran out of ideas. This is actually not a thing. The problem is more "congrats, your show is a success, you will make another 22 episodes, now chop chop!" - whether there is enough material for those episodes or not.

I would disagree with the notion that modern TV series are comparable to long movies. I have to admit that I actually find it easier and more entertaining these days to watch TV shows over movies as well, and I would chalk that up to significant differences in the story-telling. To me modern series often feel better paced than movies due to the way they tell the stories, and they feel more like novels to me than movies would, because like toxicTom said, they are able to follow different stories at the same time, do excursions, introduce characters in more interesting ways, while in movies you don't have a lot of time and need to condense everything, but paradoxically that also often leads to them feeling longer, because more exhausting and even tedious if they don't manage to make you interested right away, maybe also because the plots have to be kept simpler. You'd expect long series to be slow and boring in the pacing and movies fast and exciting, but it often feels the other way around for me, because I think there's so much more happening in them, in terms of plot or character evolvement. They are just written differently, involve you at different levels, you can't just compare the time. Movies these days tend to be too long, IMO, but with series I often don't realize how time flies. Of course, that's just generally speaking; there still are great entertaining movies and very bland and tiresome TV shows.

Oh, and I actually think the old TV series are more like movies than the new ones. They feel more exhausting to me as well, because the stories are similarly condensed but also less involving.

I recently watched Angel's Egg, an underrated cult anime film about a young girl's attempt to protect an enigmatic egg in a desolate landscape. It's a beautiful film and is filled with gorgeous images, theological symbolism and this strange, haunting atmosphere. If you're wanting to watch a minimalist anime film with no explanations, I would definitely recommend this one.

Yeah, that's something I also noticed. I do think movies often are on the one hand more condensed - having to pack exposition of characters and setting, story, character development and conclusion all into their limited timeframe - on the other hand they are more focused to achieve that. Meaning, TV series often venture off, allowing you to catch some breath ("breather episodes" are a thing), while most movies stay focused on their main subject all the time.

I agree, watching two episodes of classic Star Trek with a complete story each feels definitely longer than watching two episodes of, say, Dirk Gently, where you barely scratch the surface of the plot.

Recently re-watched Ted Kotcheff's Wake In Fright. Deeply disturbing film about a British school teacher in Australia who delves further into chaos. Infamous real kangaroo hunting scene is definitely unpleasant to see, but the film as a whole is a real anxiety-trip. Couldn't really recommend it to anybody, but it's clearly a well-made film. It really becomes something dizzying and nightmarish. Probably the most human horror film I've seen. You can really feel the arid heat from this film.