"Alien is a great example of the importance of seeing movies on big screen.  For any director reliant on frequent long-takes, compositions naturally become less didactic: greater scope in field-of-vision grants greater freedom to the explorative viewer’s eye.  For a filmmaker like Scott, compositions are so enlarged that it is as if the audience is looking at the film through a microscope." Cracking article on Alien over at MUBI.

"Corridors make science-fiction believable, because they're so utilitarian by nature - really they're just a conduit to get from one (often overblown) set to another. So if any thought or love is put into one, if the production designer is smart enough to realise that corridors are the foundation on which larger sets are 'sold' to viewers, movie magic is close at hand."

Jones annotates his screengrabs from the James Coburn classic; lovely to see it all captured so well, even if I'd disagree that the plot is a thing of "gossamer" - it's a _tiny_ bit thicker, surely?

Jones has now seen "The President's Analyst" which is, by anyone's standards, a remarkable movie. Especially the bit in the cornfield. And the ending. Anyhow, he's screengrabbed loads of it on Flickr because it's just beautiful.