Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Look at online photos from the real incident at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972, and photos of the real robber John Wojtowicz - in the movie, Sonny Wortzik, played by Al Pacino - and you'll be impressed by the likenesses, but exactly why these events led to such a painstakingly recreated film treatment by Sidney Lumet is lost in time: hailed for its portrayal of desperate 1970s New York, the film in fact revels in two other things - the comic chaos of the bungled robbery turned fourteen-hour hostage situation, and the fact Wojtowicz apparently wanted the stolen money to fund a lover's gender-affirming surgery - and, though well acted, is ultimately as chaotic and unrewarding as the robbery - a dull little mess - itself.

★★★☆☆

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Alien 3 (1992)

The gunmetal-blue quiet of space that marked the first two Alien movies is switched for the brown bluster of a prisoner-run refinery in this third movie directed by David Fincher and that change is the movie's fundamental flaw - rather than an unseen, unfathomable, latent horror suddenly, noisily bursting out of space's deep dark and quiet, here the alien burns around Thunderdome at breakneck speed, noisy, more lit up and visible and more understood than ever before, and it is killing not mercenaries or astronaut scientists but a noisy, repellent bunch of grubby convicts that it is hard to care about.

★★☆☆☆

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Aliens (1986)

For poor Rip-(van Wink)-ley, 57 years of sleep in an escape pod must have seemed like a mere heartbeat when in fact it was plenty of time for the eggs on the LV-426 colony (sighted in the original Alien) to hatch into an alien plague; Ripley skips breakfast and gets straight into alien-busting consultant mode for some macho commandos, but before long, Director James Cameron wipes everyone else out so that the mother-progeny theme that is to become the series' signature can come to the fore as Ripley defends herself and Newt, the colony's lone survivor and first daughter figure of the series, from the aliens and their queen.

★★★★★

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