A spaceship visits a planet where it should never have stopped. Alone with the terrors of deep space, facing a murderous xenomorph that patiently lies in wait for its prey, five astronauts soon find themselves in a battle for survival. A classic among classics, this proto-feminist film paved the way for a genre cinema renaissance, and remains a major source of inspiration. Alien is a unique work of art (see Memory: The Origins of Alien, also being screened this year), and it is...
Feature film , Fiction
UNITED KINGDOM, United States | 116 minutes | 1979
Ellen Ripley is back on the planet from the first movie. But this time, she’s accompanied by a squad of marines with a simple mission: kill all the aliens on the planet. By shifting the franchise to war-movie territory, James Cameron (who had just released The Terminator) made one of the most iconic films of the 80s. He put his own spin on the American action movie, packing in great ideas that audiences loved. A particularly cool cast, immortal lines for Sigourney Weaver facing the...
UNITED STATES, United Kingdom | 134 minutes | 1986
Ellen Ripley crash-lands on Fiorina 161, a forgotten prison planet populated with civilization’s most dangerous and unstable criminals. She soon finds herself caught between implacable aliens and hardened criminals, and the anxiety just keeps ratcheting up. The first feature film by David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club, The Social Network, etc.), Alien 3 takes the franchise into a very dark, corrosive place, to everyone’s surprise at the time – it’s a pessimistic...
UNITED STATES | 114 minutes | 1992
200 years after Alien 3, Ellen Ripley re-emerges (understandably changed) alongside a group of space pirates trying to save the Earth from an imminent alien invasion. When Winona Ryder appeared in the Alien universe, audiences were pleasantly surprised (almost as much as they were when she showed up in Stranger Things). Directed by French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie Poulain, La Cité des enfants perdus), the fourth instalment in the original series has some...
UNITED STATES | 116 minutes | 1997
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