TheRetroCritic

Review available on the new website .

Everyone's favourite super-spy is back with another instalment and, this time, he's taking on the head of the infamous, shady organisation SPECTRE. Directed by Skyfall maestro Sam Mendes, SPECTRE opens big and in terms of pre-titles credit scenes it doesn't disappoint. The beautifully shot sequence includes an über-long tracking shot which opens at the heart of the smoky Mexican Day Of The Dead street celebrations and ends on a rooftop with Daniel Craig's suited 007 quietly staking out a bad guy through a sniper lens. Everything you want from a Bond film is in that sequence: a beautiful woman, face-punching, buildings crumbling, a tongue-in-cheek lol moment and a smooth lead up to an elaborate credits sequence. Speaking of which, the latter looks slick but is perhaps a little too busy and distracted for its own good. Plus Sam Smith really should have let someone with more oomph sing "Writing's On The Wall" because as it stands it makes that forgetta

Very few directors these days are quite as consistently creative and spot-on as Wes Anderson, who has been developing his unique visual and storytelling style with impressive ensemble casts and quirky-looking fables over the years with no hiccup. The Grand Budapest Hotel , his latest, was inspired by the stories and life of Stefan Zweig and tells the generation-defying tale of an iconic hotel and its nutty history. The film opens and we instantly flashback a couple of times from a little girl paying her respects to the statue of Tom Wilkinson's concierge, who ran the hotel in the 60's (back when he was... Jude Law), to that time where his younger self met the hotel's mysterious owner (played by F. Murray Abraham) and then we flashback even further to hear the latter's story in full. The focus becomes the young, newly hired lobby boy Zero (promising newcomer Tony Revolori) and his relationship with Ralph Fiennes' polite, professional gigolo poet concierge Gustav