"shockingly fresh even after repeated viewing"

"H.R. Giger's bio-mechanical creatures have amazingly nightmarish qualities"

By transplanting the classic haunted house scenario into space, Ridley Scott, together with screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, produced a work of genuinely original cinematic sci-fi with Alien that, despite the passage of years and countless inferior imitations, remains shockingly fresh even after repeated viewing. Scott's legendary obsession with detail ensures that the setting is thoroughly conceived, while the Gothic production design and Jerry Goldsmith's wonderfully unsettling score produce a sense of disquiet from the outset: everything about the spaceship Nostromo - from Tupperware to toolboxes-seems oddly familiar yet disconcertingly ... well, alien.
Nothing much to speak of happens for at least the first 30 minutes, and that in a way is the secret of the film's success: the audience has been nervously peering round every corner for so long that by the time the eponymous beast claims its first victim, the release of pent-up anxiety is all the more effective. The nightmarish quality of H.R. Giger's bio-mechanical creature and set design is enhanced by camerawork that tantalises by what it doesn't reveal.

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• Alien

"Sigourney Weaver plays a very strong female lead"

"More action-packed than the original"

Ripley, the sole survivor of the Nostromo, is asked to go back to the planet where the aliens were first found, when communications with the colonists are lost... Includes the scenes edited from the 1986 film release.
James Cameron's Aliens digests all the virtues of Alien and regurgitates them bigger, louder and brasher than before. By the simple expedient of turning the singular beast of the original into a plural, Cameron transforms the franchise's focus from horror to all-out action. Sigourney Weaver's Ripley - one of the strongest roles for a female lead in mainstream cinema - is centre-stage throughout, more than able to hold her own either among the butch Marines and insectoid aliens. Although the director later revealed that there were only ever six alien costumes in any one shot, rapid-fire editing makes it seem like hundreds. Aliens is one of the most dynamic, viscerally exciting movies of the decade.

•   Aliens 1986

Ripley finds herself the sole survivor of another alien attack. This time she finds herself on Fiorina 161, a penal colony... It is not long before Ripley realises that her doomed escape pod was contaminated with the alien. Now she is imprisoned on a planet where weapons are unavailable....

•   Alien 3

Two hundred years after the death of Ellen Ripley and many experiments later, a group of scientists clone her and the parasitic alien... Anxious to test their new weapon, the scientists abduct a crew... Once the alien escapes and takes control of the spacecraft only 'Ripley' and a team of smugglers stand between it and Earth.

•   Alien Resurrection

5-disc DVD set

Featuring all four Alien movies, gathered together in one set. The complete story of the flesh-eating aliens in various encounters with the space crews. In this box set, all four movies are presented in widescreen aspect ratios derived from pristine prints allowing you to discern more in the shadows than you get in even the best VHS editions. The imaginatively designed interactive menus flash the logos and computer codes of Weyland-Yutani (the evil corporation in the movies) helping you to "access transmission".

•   Alien Box Set of all the movies