Sputnik

Add in an engaging female lead in Akenshina (The Bourne Supremacy), some solid period production design and a real chilling sense of menace, and Sputnik offers terrific Halloween-weekend viewing.

Abramenko, for the most part, relies on character development rather than action and effects to drive the story, proving as adept at helming quieter moments as he is at handling louder sequences.

Abramenko maintains the film's finite appeal throughout, mostly thanks to a familiar aura and a charismatic lead performance by Oksana Akinshina, a fine surrogate for the tough-as-nails heroine Ellen Ripley.

Duller than it sounds.

This is altogether well-made, straightforward entertainment, gross but contained, intriguingly structured: a movie as slickly designed as the slime trailing the alien's mermaid butt.

Sputnik's genre pleasures are modest, but like the best sci-fi, it gets you thinking.

In a concrete Russian military facility, no-one can hear you scream. Sputnik offers obvious time-honoured sci-fi/horror shenanigans with a few fun tweaks to the formula.

"Sputnik" is a reminder of the mixed-bag experience that so many of them offer: It's an efficient, effects-driven ride with snippets of real ideas, but never quite willing to take them out of this world.

Sputnik’s third act is a rush of formulaic action meant, perhaps, to compensate for the interminably repetitive and impersonal second act, which is mostly concerned with reinforcing a set of foregone conclusions.

You’ve seen this before. Think of it as a potent dose of sci-fi/horror Methadone to keep the withdrawals at bay.

The creature design, by the director in collaboration with Main Road Post, is a masterstroke: staring at this thing, which looks horrifying from some angles and almost cute from others, you keep thinking you can see intelligence or motivation in that wet, many-eyed face, but then you decide it’s just your imagination—that you’re just projecting onto it.