TheRetroCritic

Time travel movies are a gamble: they either work or they don't.  Or they work well enough that you feel too dumb to figure out if they actually make sense. Remember Twelve Monkeys ? Man that film made me feel f***in' stupid back in the day... So along comes Looper , a film which once again takes the "let's send Bruce Willis back in time" scenario and puts a brand new spin on it. This time, we follow Joseph Gordon-Levitt who plays a younger Willis whose job it is to kill whoever the mob (who have somehow gained control of time travel technology) sends back. One day, his older self is sent back by order of a mysterious mob boss known only as The Rainmaker who is closing all the "loops" for whatever reason (getting every "looper" to kill their older selves, basically). The lines between hero and villain get blurred as young Joe's mission turns out to be more righteous than older Joe's, which involves killing random childr

You'd think with a film called Cowboys & Aliens there'd be very little room to mess things up. I mean, how much more straight-forward can you get? Just get some cowboys, a bunch of aliens...voila! And yet Cowboys & Aliens doesn't quite get there... Now don't get me wrong: it's a decent film and I really enjoyed it. But alas it falls just short, like all the other summer blockbusters we were treated to this year, of being actually awesome. Which is pretty frustrating as, much like Super 8 and Horrible Bosses , they had the material and everything served up to them on a plate. All they had to do was not spill anything! Here's the thing, it's really quite simple: if you're going for something purely retro like an 80's Spielberg flick or a cowboy sci-fi in the style of Westworld it's your DUTY as a filmmaker to leave the CGI out of it as much as you can. Yes stop-motion monsters can look animated but so does CGI and at the very least

From Richard Pepin, director of the Cyber Tracker movies, comes this ambitious disaster...thriller in which LA is pretty much destroyed by some big-ass earthquake. Is it any good? Lets find out. The film actually starts off as some kind of spy thriller with Gary Daniels stealing some files and microchip off some big company in order to sell it to some bald Russian mobster. But this undercover FBI agent (played by consistently rubbish Traci Lords) manages to arrest him. So far so thriller but then Jeff Fahey shows up and there's an earthquake that NEVER ends! Could this film be getting awesome? No, not quite. The whole thing is pretty clumsy throughout: the acting ranges from awful (Lords) to good (Fahey), the effects range from lame (a sex scene in which obviously the actress refused to be naked so they only show her face and some unknown stunt-boob lady's body) to surprisingly decent (buildings falling apart etc.) making for a pretty uneven affair. The ending is also laug