TheRetroCritic

Like 'em or not, Siskel & Ebert once defended Star Wars pretty gosh darn well.

Another year, another Hunger Games movie. Well, part of one, anyway. The popular pseudo- Battle Royale franchise is back as the actual "games" finally take a backseat to an actual plot and Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a hidden world outside the big city and her own district. To put it in retro movie terms: this is basically the Beneath The Planet Of The Apes of the series, except not awesome. After breaking out of the arena, Katniss finally wakes up in some kind of underground bunker/shelter occupied by a rebel army led by yet another silly-named character: President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore). She is kept up to date by Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his *sob* final roles) and Jeffrey Wright's character as they try to convince Coin that Katniss is a worthy "Mockingjay", the face and spirit of the resistance. But Katniss' beloved Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) is still held captive by Donald Sutherland's intim

You'd think that by the fourth film in a horror franchise, things would have crash-landed long ago leaving but traces of a once decent concept. Yet after two, frankly not bad, sequels The Dream Master comes along and still does a decent enough job. Freddy's one lucky-ass movie monster... Annoyingly, it still seems like the franchise isn't quite sure about whose story it should follow. The first sequel seemed to be headed in a different way, then the third film brought back Heather Langenkamp from the first movie (opening up dozens of plot-holes in the process, by the way) and now, with The Dream Master, we follow a couple of characters introduced in Dream Warriors except they're played by different people (bye bye Patricia Arquette). Oh and Langenkamp isn't in it anymore. Yeah, that's not confusing at all! I hear that 3, 4 and 5 are essentially sequels to each other so I guess some consistency is on the horizon but it seems like a needlessly convoluted

Before Sylvester Stallone breathed new life into the Rambo franchise with a particularly violent new outing, he gave Rocky one more shot with Rocky Balboa and miraculously did not mess it up. This sixth Rocky instalment should have been a disaster or at least an unforgivably bland retread. Instead, Sly takes what made the old Rocky movies great, updates all the characters to what they would be like in present day and makes it work. He doesn't go down the dumb, "let's make Rocky into James Bond" route Die Hard 4.0 style focusing more on the emotional baggage those much older characters are carrying. Adrian has died, so has Mickey, Rocky's on his own running a restaurant, his son (played by Heroes ' Milo Ventimiglia) wants nothing to do with him and although he's got the respect of those people who recognise him as the legendary boxer he is, there's just something missing. Meanwhile, some new boxing champion is dissatisfied with the criticis