TheRetroCritic

Back in the day, Michael Keaton managed to fit this little flick in between Batman movies. One Good Cop isn't quite the big blockbuster you'd expect the man, The Bat-man, to take on but cop movies were in vogue so why not? The film sees Keaton and Anthony LaPaglia as NYPD cops, the former is married (to Rene Russo, typecast as a cop's wife in EVERYTHING back in the day), the latter is father to three kids, they follow various cases which always end up getting pretty messy. One day, Keaton's partner gets killed recklessly and he is left trying to deal with the best way to give his kids a new home. One Good Cop isn't so much a cop movie as it is a rough-edged melodrama with cops in it. A lot of emphasis is put on literally every character around Keaton so it's hard to pin his down, which means that when he finally does something completely out of character it's pretty jarring. The film's trying to tell this emotional story of a cop, a good guy with

"The Bat, The Cat, The Penguin." Best. Tagline. Ever. For a long time, Batman Returns was not only hands down my favourite Batman film but one of my all-time favourites. To a certain extent, this is still true but time has made me a harsher critic so here's me trying to objectively review a film which has been firmly embedded in my DNA for decades. Hell, I could even hum the entire score from start to finish if I was drunk enough! Where Batman took the film noir route and was firmly inspired by detective flicks of the 40's, Batman Returns is pure Tim Burton. The snow, the quirky fairytale feel, the gothic look, the twisted sense of humour... it's a very different Gotham City to the one we were first introduced to. The film almost feels like an opera with the town hall, where most of the action takes place, acting as a kind of grand stage where all the drama and madness can take place. The film's opening is one of my personal favourite sequences of

After the catoonish lunacy of the Adam West 60's TV series which had the Dark Knight dancing, surfing, running to crime scenes ON FOOT and stroking his chin repeatedly speaking bat-nonsense and adding the word "bat" before any device, it was definitely time for something a little more, shall we say, edgy? Not that the old series weren't fun: they were great! But as far as comic book heroes go, this one had more potential than the West series could ever produce. So who better to bring out the gothic weirdness and quirky theatrics of The Bat than Beetlejuice maestro Tim Burton? Michael Keaton is the troubled caped crusader, an unlikely choice but one which proved to be surprisingly spot-on: he brings humour and likeability to a character which could easily be bland and "one-note". Of course, the real scene-stealer here is Jack Nicholson's devilish joker who prides himself on being the world's first "homicidal artist" by trashing a museu

Had Morning Glory not been directed by the man behind *shudder* Notting Hill and had it not been built specifically for the Devil Wears Prada audience, we could have had a decent, original, funny, even touching little film here. Unfortunately though, what we get is Anchorman's great grandmother. There was potential here to really explore the inherent absurdity of morning TV daytime shows: the subject matter pretty much gives everything on a plate. Alas, the film finds Rachel MacAdams' painfully irritating lead way more interesting than all that and we are forced to sit through endless scenes of her acting all cute, all professional, all self-involved before we get to the good stuff, namely: Ford and Keaton. Devil Wears Prada worked because of its seemingly heartless "villain" and a just about bearable protagonist in Anne Hathaway. Pretty much exactly the same formula is applied here with a terrific "villain" in Harrison Ford (on wonderfully grumpy fo