TheRetroCritic

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&

For a film that's sat on the shelves for so long, The Cabin In The Woods has done rather well for itself. It's been called a "game-changer" within the horror genre and it's been compared to Scream for its self-awareness and satiric take on a familiar horror template. The result? One hell of a fun movie! And pretty darn clever. ... and spoilers so if you haven't seen it: beware. As the trailers spoilered (new word), The Cabin In The Woods mixes sci-fi with Evil Dead -style slasher conventions to create something resembling a cross between Cabin Fever and The Truman Show but altogether infinitely better than the former, don't worry. Actually, the sci-fi twist isn't much of a "twist" at all: the film begins with both genres firmly meshed together. You've got the ever reliable Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford casually chatting in a futuristic Bond villain-style lab setting before the title bangs on the screen loudly in bloo

The trailer for Thor promised epic camp the likes of which hasn't been seen since Flash Gordon  and a lot of it looked like they probably would not work for a second. Frost giants? Yeah that won't be silly at all... And yet there I was, witnessing Norse Gods in shiny gold armour riding horses along a glass rainbow bridge, taking it all in and not even batting an eye. The entertainment value of the whole thing was such that I could easily go "nothing wrong here" and suspend my disbelief like I've never done before to accommodate this ridiculous, yet somewhat irresistible mythological superhero epic. For one thing, Asgard looks amazing: this is Marvel on a grand scale and, upon its release, it was probably the most ambitious superhero film ever made. Yes, when you take a step back it's like: "what is all this?" but if you allow yourself to go with it, you'll just love this visual feast. It's almost a shame Thor has to go to Earth, esp