TheRetroCritic

I talk about Disney's latest remake Pete's Dragon .

Another month, another Disney remake... An update on the 1977 musical, Pete's Dragon sees a young child named Pete wander into the woods after his parents perish in a car crash and a friendly green dragon he calls Elliot takes him under its wing: years later, the inhabitants of a nearby town finally find Pete. Not that they were looking... The original Pete's Dragon may not have enjoyed quite as much praise as, say, Mary Poppins over the years but it remains one of Disney's most charming live-action films to date so a remake would certainly need to get Pete and his dragon right. Fortunately, the film achieves just that as young Oakes Fegley gives an appropriately wild performance as Pete and Elliot, while looking hairier and more dog-like, is still pretty adorable. Their friendship is once again the heart of the story and it still works. The big difference with this remake, however, is that Elliot isn't so much Pete's dragon as he is just a random

Here's the video version of my Pete's Dragon review.

As Disney puts the final touches on its upcoming remake of Pete's Dragon , it's about time I look back at a film I really enjoyed as a kid but did not get the chance to revisit... until now. This is certainly one of Disney's more dated live-action films: it's a pretty stagy Mary Poppins -style musical with an extremely earnest main character and most of the others hamming it up big time. It's also one of the Mouse House's most adorable movies ever and Elliott the dragon (animated by Don Bluth) is quite simply a joy from start to finish and even if the rest of the film is not your cup of tea it's likely you'll still fall in love with this endearing animated creation. I should point out it was ambitious of Disney to mix live-action and animation back in 1977 and, while it doesn't always merge that well, Elliott is so likeable that it doesn't matter how smooth that mix is plus younger viewers won't care, I sure didn't. By essentially

Here's the first trailer for Peter Jackson's new The Hobbit movie. Loads of barrels in this one.

Having missed most of the Donnie Yen craze ( Ip Man and all that), I went into Dragon expecting something conventional, a typical martial-arts flick with a straight-forward plot and loads of floating and kicking. Dragon is most definitely not something conventional. It's also not about dragons. Instead, here we have Donnie Yen playing a rather dodgy character who is being investigated by Takeshi Kaneshiro, who's basically Sherlock Holmes in this. The story kicks off with Donnie Yen defending an old man from two machete-wielding robbers, he kicks their ass but without really doing anything and in the end, one of them is killed. Self-defence or not, Kaneshiro's sleuth doesn't buy Yen as a simple fisherman and starts to dig deeper and deeper into what actually happened, focusing on details, Yen's past etc. It's gripping stuff and it works as a Holmes mystery because you're really not sure where the movie is going for most of it, what's truth, wha

(Slight SPOILERS ahead)

The original The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was a film I expected a lot from. Overhyped upon its release, it was really being pushed as THE next must-see thriller series. Bourne was done, Bond and Ethan Hunt were on their gap years: this was the sexy European fix we needed. What we got was a cross between a TV movie-style investigation, a classic whodunit and a sexy, modern, kickass thriller. It hardly blew me away but it worked and although I was no fan I acknowledged it was well made and was a good example of the genre. Now David Fincher is in as director for the remake and the likes of Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer and Stellan Skarsgard make up the cool US cast. The result? It's the same. Well, more or less the same. You've got a swanky Placebo-style music video to get you started as a kind of dark, modern, gooey Bond opening title sequence complete with fire, Led Zepellin AND hornets. Not sure how useful that really was but I enjoyed it: it was