Alien

Alien will scare the peanuts right out of your M&M's. It was about time someone made a science-fiction thriller that thrills... and just boils everything down to the pure, ravishingly vulgar essence of fright.

You can have Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 2001. I'll take Alien.

Miss Weaver, a New York actress making her film debut, makes the most of the opportunity without overdoing it. She suggests toughness and fear in equal measure.

The most intriguing aspect of the film is actress Sigourney Weaver, who cuts quite an imposing figure as the one intelligent member of the ship's crew besides the monster.

Alien, like the Exorcist, works on your nerves and emotions with the practiced hand of a torturer extracting a confession. The movie is terrifying, but not in a way that is remotely enjoyable.

You are in for jolts, shocks and some fairly gruesome and shuddering sights. With only his second feature, Ridley Scott has emerged as a major film maker. What he has to say is still not clear, but he certainly knows how to say it effectively.

Half the joy of Ridley Scott’s miraculous sophomore film is watching Weaver ascend from the film’s pack of charismatic character actors to become a movie icon in under two hours.

Combined with the brilliant visual aesthetic, impeccable production design, and great performances from top-to-bottom, Alien has few equals in cinematic history.

Like so many great sci-fi films of the era, it leaves those to the imagination in favor of character and story.

Human beings mostly die in the order of how much they acquiesced to the company without complaint, and even the robot and alien are not immune. Only the rebel, Ripley, and Jonesy, a cat who is the embodiment of a being who is never subservient, survive.