TheRetroCritic

The poor man's Knight and Day ? Perhaps not. Depp and Jolie are hardly the B sides of Cruise and Diaz. If anything The Tourist is a more laid-back alternative to the pumped up nonsense of Knight and Day. Both films have similarities though in that they are both throwbacks to Hitchcockian spy movies in the vein of North By Northwest and To Catch a Thief . So which works better? I suppose it depends what you're in the mood for. If you're in need of some Mission Impossible -style silliness with multiple chase scenes and explosions then Knight and Day just about hits the spot. If however you want something just as silly but a tad more focused and sophisticated then The Tourist is a better bet: no dodgy CGI or slo-mo plane explosions there. Although The Tourist is far from perfect and is closer to Salt than anything else, it feels like it's suffered some unfair bashing. The chemistry between both leads and the predictable end "twist" being the k

Cruise and Diaz are reunited for the first time since Vanilla Sky in this silly, sunny Hitchcockian spy comedy and although the film never reaches high levels of intelligence, what it lacks in brains it makes up for in gusto. Although it has been compared with the likes of North By Northwest , this is actually much closer to the lighter To Catch a Thief or even the Goldie Hawn/Chevy Chase 80's comedies. Cruise is clearly having a ball in a Mission Impossible -style role with added OTT silliness and Diaz is fine as his ditzy sidekick, if slightly annoying in places. The plot is nothing to ride home about, something about a powerful battery (MacGuffin) which may or may not be useful to something or other. Whatever. It provides little more than silly lines ("Because it's filled with POWER!") and a thin strand of reason to hold everything together. What really hurts the film strangely is the CGI. It works mostly but sometimes the green screen is jus

It has been a while since a film has sparked so many discussions. Inception, whether you liked it or not, most probably already got you to debate about a million ridiculous dream-within-a-dream scenarios. With a film this rich, this dense, there's certainly a lot to ponder. Philip K Dick meets The Matrix in one of the biggest concept movies ever in which a team of dream...thieves pull their resources to try something different for one last big job and attempt to implant an idea into some guy's head. We are then thrown into multiple layers of dreaming as Tommy from 3rd Rock From the Sun flies around a hotel room, Di Caprio gets hit by a train in a city street and Marion Cotillard goes psycho. This is all great stuff! Great action, impressive special effects, very good cast, a complex and gripping sci-fi story...what more could a sci-fi nerd such as myself ask for? And yet there is something a tad underwhelming about Inception, a film which, in its trailers, promised the a