TheRetroCritic

Talking about this year's Midsommar .

Based on a novel by Yann Martel,  Life Of Pi  was directed by Ang Lee, who won the Best Director Oscar that year. It was a significant commercial and critical hit back in 2012, banking on its impressive 3D visuals and unusual scenario. The plot sees a Canadian journalist (Rafe Spall) meet a man called Pi Patel (Irrfan Khan) who has a wild story to tell that might be worth writing about. He describes his childhood and how he wrestled with various faiths throughout, from Christianity to Hinduism. His father eventually decides to leave India with all the animals from his zoo so the family, including a teenaged Pi, sets off on a long boat trip. One night, a storm suddenly sinks the boat and only Pi appears to survive. He sails off on a lifeboat with a couple of animals, one of which, we eventually find out, is a tiger he calls Richard Parker who turns out to be both the biggest liability and the one thing keeping Pi alert and alive. While the first act of the film sets the main theme

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, mother! is a psychological thriller from 2017 about a couple living in the countryside who get a strange visit from another couple before things get truly out of hand, to say the least. Jennifer Lawrence is the titular mother who lives in an unfinished house with her rather intense husband, a writer (played by the ever-intimidating Javier Bardem) suffering from writer's block until he is visited by a fan and his wife. The latter couple, played by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer, show up randomly one day as Lawrence's character becomes increasingly suspicious of their bizarre behaviour and nervous about their influence on her husband. "mother" isn't all that normal herself as she appears to be obsessed with fixing her house and spends pretty much all her time walking around looking confused by everything. You're never quite sure what this awkward dynamic between her and her much older husband is all about since they're r

A year after the release of Monty Python's groundbreaking religious spoof Life Of Brian , we got Marty Feldman comedy In God We Tru$t , another satire this time focusing on the money-grubbing aspects of those pretending to speak on the Church's behalf. The film's plot is very Blues Brothers in spirit as innocent monk Ambrose (Feldman) is sent out of the monastery for the very first time with the respectable mission of bringing back $5000 to save the place. At the same time, Brother Ambrose encounters his share of charlatans working in the name of God including a church truck-driving drunk (Peter Boyle) and a diabolical televangelist played by a show-stealing Andy Kaufman. Ambrose also meets his first love-interest, a friendly prostitute played by Louise Lasser. There's a lot going on in this movie and yet you never feel it knows where it's going. Unlike Life Of Brian which was so clever in its writing that taking away one scene from it would be, well, blasphem

Left Behind was sold to us as a disaster movie with only a soupçon of religion included in it to benefit the film's big concept. We were promised mostly CGI destruction with some Nicolas Cage thrown in and that didn't sound too bad, even if the film itself looked ridiculous. And ridiculous it is! Ah if only that was this movie's biggest flaw... If you don't already know, the film follows a pilot (Cage) fly a plane while, everywhere, the Rapture is taking place: people are disappearing out of their clothes leaving chaos to settle on the Earth. While that may sound entertainingly apocalyptic, Left Behind makes it feel about as plausible and threatening as that event did in Seth Rogen comedy This Is The End , a far superior film in every single way, I should point out. The disaster part of the movie doesn't kick off until half an hour of mostly Cage-less exposition where the pilot's daughter Chloe (a godawful Cassi Thomson) has sleep-inducing discussions