Alien Reviews
Top CriticIt is depressing to watch an expensive, crafty movie that never soars beyond its cold desire to score the big bucks.
These things no longer surprise or tantalize us as they once did. In a very short time, science-fiction films have developed their own jargon that's now become a part of the grammar.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
An empty-headed horror movie with nothing to recommend it beyond the disco-inspired art direction and some handsome, if gimmicky, cinematography.
2UE That Movie Show
Alien has power, elicits terror, and the acid blood scars your consciousness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
The way [Ridley] Scott meticulously raises the sense of menace and tension is worthy of Hitchcock.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
FEARnet
My favorite film of all time is one of the finest blu-rays in my collection.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
EricDSnider.com
Remains one of the best examples of sustained tension. There is a sense of ominousness, a sense that something bad is going to happen, from the moment the film begins.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Flipside Movie Emporium
Superior science fiction and the best haunted house movie ever made.
| Original Score: 5/5
Sacramento News & Review
It certainly doesn't look like a 24-year-old movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Antagony & Ecstasy
In a century of sci-fi/horror hybrids, few if any movies do such a good job at reaching the absolute highest peaks of both halves of that equation as this one.
Full Review
| Original Score: 10/10
ColeSmithey.com
Science fiction horror doesn't get any better than this.
Full Review
| Original Score: A+
Common Sense Media
Dated but still extremely scary. Not for younger kids.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Combustible Celluloid
The monster itself is still one of the flat-out scariest ever designed for the movies.
An old-fashioned scary movie set in a highly realistic sci-fi future, made all the more believable by expert technical craftmanship.
The limited strengths of its staple sci-fi horrors always derived from either the offhand organic/ Freudian resonances of its design or the purely (brilliantly) manipulative editing and pacing of its above-average shock quota.
AboutFilm.com
...a seminal movie in the history of horror...
Full Review
| Original Score: A+
