TheRetroCritic

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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

Ever since The Happening , every new M. Night Shyamalan movie has been met with cynicism. His last film The Visit was surprisingly well received, however, and so was  Split , a horror thriller starring James McAvoy as a man with 23 split personalities who kidnaps three teenagers. The serial killer premise sets the tone for the rest of the film, which is easily one of Shyamalan's creepiest efforts. We follow Kevin (McAvoy) as he incarcerates three innocent girls while still attending his psychiatrist's sessions. Meanwhile, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) and the other two teens try to figure out what's going on and look for a way to escape. Some of Kevin's personalities include a 9 year-old kid called Hedwig, the super intimidating Dennis and female mastermind Patricia. Your enjoyment of this film will depend completely on how you rate James McAvoy's performance which is both excellent but also wacky as hell. A lesser actor could have easily rendered Split either unwatc

I never thought I'd ever say this but... Zack Snyder would have made this movie work. Now, nothing against director Timur Bekmambetov, I liked Night Watch and enjoyed Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter , but Wanted is a perfect example of how to make a movie adaptation of a comic-book and completely miss the point. Not that Wanted is as bad as something like Catwoman , far from it, but had someone like Snyder taken on the project Watchmen -style, he would have at least represented the visual style of the whole thing accordingly rather than settle for this watered-down, safe Hollywood template. Bekmambetov is a talented director who knows where to point the camera and make fun, dark, amusingly trashy comic-book style movies for relatively not that much money, so this should have been a shoe-in but clearly, for his first big-budget Hollywood outing, studios probably pushed for a safer, more obviously Matrix -ey version of a pretty out-there comic-book. The film made big bucks