TheRetroCritic

Two years after the failure of Howard The Duck , Executive Producer George Lucas redeemed himself with Willow , a fantasy film from 1988 directed by Ron Howard. It starred Warwick Davis in the title role with a young Val Kilmer supporting. After sorceress Queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsh) orders the death of children in the kingdom due to a prophecy stating that a female child will, one day, orchestrate her downfall, a chain of events is set into motion when a midwife decides to save one baby. The latter ends up in the hands of kindhearted Nelwyn farmer Willow but, when it becomes apparent that keeping the baby poses a threat to his village, he is sent to bring the child back to where she came from, but in safe hands. He first encounters disgraced warrior Madmartigan (Val Kilmer) and soon entrusts the child to him but that backfires almost instantly. What follows is an epic yet relatively intimate adventure involving fairies, "brownies" (tiny people), magic, trolls and monster

Alright, let's get the annoying technical stuff out of the way first. Unknowingly, I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey  in "high frame rate", which means that my eyes not only had to take in 3 hours of crazy fantasy visuals but in 3D and at 48 frames per second. Forgive me if I sound a bit bitter about that, I'll make sure not to let that taint my review of the movie itself. I will say, however, that if you want to see The Hobbit: check it out in 2D or 3D, don't high frame rate that shit. The CGI stuff just doesn't gel with the real stuff and you just end up watching what feels like dudes with big fake noses and big-ass plastic feet wearing silly costumes. Which, in essence it is, but you're taken out of the movie SO quickly and so much that you're just left squinting your way through what looks like a low-budget 90's BBC fantasy TV series. Anything slightly fake-looking make-up/costume/background-wise is emphasized to the max and that rea

After Tarsem Singh's "attempt" at a Snow White movie, the odious-looking Mirror Mirror , this instalment looked amazing. The trailers promised a stylish, exciting, dark, moody epic sort of like Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland but grittier and actually probably better. For the most part, Snow White & The Huntsman delivers. I was afraid the film would go down the Alice In Wonderland route and trick its audience into thinking they were about to watch the classic Snow White story when in fact giving them some weird, stand-out sequel but this one does stay surprisingly close to what you'd expect from a Snow White movie. You get the evil queen, the creepy brother, the mirror, the dwarves, gloomy forests... it's pretty much all there. It's almost like the film tries to hide its Snow White-ness wanting to be something altogether darker and more twisted but restraining itself for the sake of the fairy-tale. The cast is hit-and-miss with Charlize Theron&