Prey

Essential, and the best film in this franchise since 1987. It is also the one that proved the series had somewhere to go: instead of another squad with bigger guns, it goes backwards to the Northern Great Plains in 1719 and strips the technology out of both sides.

That is the whole design. The Predator here carries early, cruder equipment, and Naru has a bow, a hatchet on a rope and her own observation. She spends the film being told she is not a hunter by men who are about to be killed, and she wins the way Dutch did, by watching what the thing does and working out its rules. The sequence where she establishes what it will and will not attack is the best piece of writing in the series.

Amber Midthunder carries it almost alone and the film is unusually patient, shooting the landscape and the animals with real attention before anything starts. The violence, when it comes, is sudden and short. One hundred minutes, no slack.

Two things to seek out. There is a full Comanche-language dub, made with the production rather than added afterwards, and it is the better version of the film. And it was released directly to streaming rather than to cinemas, a decision made before anyone saw it, which remains the strangest commercial call in the franchise's history.