Pete Travis’ film tells us just how much the mass media manipulate news and current affairs to suit their own political and ideological agendas. The film then does the exact same thing it appears to critique. Read my review to find out why I didn’t like Vantage Point.

Dan Stephens tales a look at David Auburn’s directorial debut The Girl in the Park starring Sigourney Weaver. Weaver plays Julia, a once successful and happy mother, who loses her daughter when at the local park. 16 years later the mental scars are still evident until she meets wayward blonde Louise (Kate Bosworth). The two strike up an unlikely friendship and as their relationship grows Julia begins to believe that Louise could indeed be her missing daughter…

Aliens is one of my favourite films. It arrived at a time – during the middle 1980s – when science-fiction was a huge box office attraction. Lucas had kicked it all off with “Star Wars”, with Ridley Scott’s “Alien” and Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.” continuing the trend. “Aliens” was the perfect follow-up to “Alien” – bigger, more expansive, and equally as scary, it also benefitted from a fast-moving action-movie aesthetic that wryly mocked the war credentials of America’s military in Vietnam. Here was a crowd-pleaser and blockbusting spectacle that had depth, character, and intelligence.

The film is a nightmare envisioned on the screen – call it Ripley’s nightmare, indeed she’s asleep when we first meet her at the beginning and she’s asleep when we leave her at the end. It’s one of those dreams where you’re being chased and you just can’t seem to wake yourself up, as the thing that wants your blood gets ever closer. What James Cameron was able to do was recreate the adrenaline, the anxiety, the impending terror of those dreams, and sit you on a roller coaster as your head spins with images of something unimaginably awful, getting ever closer.

Directed by: David Fincher
Written by: David Giler, Walter Hill, Larry Ferguson
Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, Paul McGann, Brian Glover, Ralph Brown, Danny Webb, Christopher John Fields, Holt McCallany, Lance Henriksen, Christopher Fairbank, Pete Postlethwaite
Released: 1992 / Genre: Science-fiction Horror / Country: USA / IMDB
Buy on DVD from Amazon.co.uk:
Buy Alien Quadrilogy (9 Disc Complete Box Set) on DVD from Amazon.co.uk
See also our Top 10 Science-Fiction Horror Films
When I first saw Alien 3, shortly after its release in the United Kingdom, I wasn’t impressed. I didn’t like …

Directed by: Ridley Scott
Written by: Dan O’Bannon / Ronald Shusett
Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto
Released: 1979 / Genre: Science-fiction Horror / Country: USA / IMDB
Buy on DVD from Amazon.co.uk:
Buy Alien Quadrilogy (9 Disc Complete Box Set) on DVD from Amazon.co.uk
See also our Top 10 Science-Fiction Horror Films
My introduction to Ridley Scott’s space opus came sometime after being bowled over by James Cameron’s sequel. I guess it must have been around 1990, before David Fincher released the third instalment of the …