What makes Alien such an effective horror film is how quiet it is. After all, most horror films make the mistake of equating fear with noise. But that's often a mistake, as silence is usually infinitely more effective. And so it is with Alien. The scariest moments are all devoid of intrusive scoring, jagged editing and overblown sound effects. One of the best...

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I can remember as a kid being somewhat frightened by Live and Let Die. I'm not sure what it was – whether it be the freaky Baron Samedi, the crocodiles or seeing more black people than you'd see on an average episode of Sesame Street (poor whitey had probably only encountered one black person at that time) – but like the supposedly kid-friendly...

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I’m not quite sure what’s up with Robert Zemeckis’ animation fetish. First The Polar Express and now Beowulf (and in the future, A Christmas Carol). He seems to have got tired with any notion of reality, of the limitations that traditional filmmaking techniques put on him. After all, Beowulf could have been a live-action picture. With technology today, it wouldn’t have been that...

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Track 29 begins with the image of Gary Oldman appearing out of thin air - he appears by the side of the road with his thumb stretched out. Then after a while he screams, like a banshee, 'Mummmmmmeeeeeeeee!' Er, okay. We've got a weird one here.One of the first hints that the film gives you about the nature of Oldman's character, aside from...

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Let’s face it. Most monster movies are complete shit. Even the original King Kong leaves me cold, featuring as it does bland characters and atrocious dialogue. But wait, it features a massive ape tearing shit apart. Isn’t that, like, totally awesome, dude? No, not really. So does Cloverfield buck the trend of the shit monster movie? Well, it does and it doesn’t. I...

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There’s a scene in Glengarry Glen Ross where Shelly ‘the Machine’ Levine (Jack Lemmon) says that a man is his job. And as far as some people go, he’s right. Many men define themselves by the work they do, the money they earn and the car they drive. I mean, who gives a fuck about friends and family or higher aspirations? Or even...

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