TheRetroCritic

Before Tom Cruise battled it out with Universal's latest Mummy, James McAvoy was Victor Frankenstein in this 2015 Frankenstein reboot. The film was a flop and another failed attempt at building some kind of new monster movie franchise or universe. Daniel Radcliffe plays a hunchbacked circus clown (need I say more?) who suddenly develops a passion for medicine (don't ask) and becomes mad genius Victor Frankenstein's colleague under the name Igor. They first attempt to make a living being out of various dead animal parts then move on to bigger, and more familiar endeavours. There's something consistently unclear about this movie: is it a prequel to the original classic or is it a prequel to a reboot Frankenstein movie that doesn't and will never exist? Of course it's the latter but the film's early claims that we all know Frankenstein's story along with various references to the iconic original constantly clash with the new interpretation of thes

Another year, another extended Chanel advert. Unfortunately, unlike Coco Before Chanel , this doesn't have much to work with. What we get is not so much a Chanel biopic as a vague Stravinski biopic awkwardly stuck inside a sexy Chanel bubble. The main problem is that, really, the film has nothing interesting to say: Chanel and Stravinski had an affair...they had sex...buy our perfume! This is literally it. Having said that, Jan Kounen does a remarkable job making such an empty narrative interesting. The cinematography is stylish and well crafted and the score is beautiful. A terrific scene involving a Stravinski concert going awry is definitely a highlight. There's good performances here. Anna Mouglalis' over-cool but genuinely manipulative and really pretty dislikable Chanel is a lot of fun and Mads Mikkelsen conveys a lot with the shameful 5 lines he was given to work with (!). His performance, although practically silent, is nevertheless the most compelling in the e