TheRetroCritic

Review available on the new website .

I talk briefly about new sci-fi horror film Life .

A few months before the release of Alien: Covenant ( Ridley Scott's latest entry into the long-running sci-fi franchise), comes Life : another creepy space-set horror thriller in which a group of astronauts are forced to face a thoroughly unpleasant monster. While some reviews for this movie might not go much further than mentioning how derivative it is since it is essentially a mix of Alien , The Thing and Gravity , one could argue that what it lacks in originality it makes up for in sheer terror and, in fact, surpasses some of the aforementioned films in some ways. Life may seem like a B-movie but it is so well made that dismissing it as just that would be unfair. The way in which the inside of the space station is shot really makes you buy the setting with its zero gravity and tight compartments as we follow the crew members floating through the station convincingly, something that Gravity didn't quite capture. The reasonable running time actually means the tension is

I talk about the latest R-rated comic-book blockbuster Deadpool .

The idea that Marvel was not only going to be introducing a rather unique crime-fighter to its already plentiful collection of movie superheroes but also was going to give the film itself an R rating made Deadpool instantly appealing as a project. The casting of Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson made sense despite a shaky attempt at bringing the disfigured anti-hero to the screen in Wolverine: Origins and having starred in the hugely unpopular Green Lantern movie. A promising leaked trailer led to a legion of fans demanding to see the full movie and... here we are! The playful yet violent tone of the film is introduced right off the bat as the opening titles show a paused car crash with credits replaced by piss-take descriptions of the cast and crew. What follows is a narrated, fourth wall-breaking journey inside the mind of the mouthy, twisted superhero who is hunting down bad guy Ajax (Ed Skrein) in order to get him to fix his mutated body. Along the way, we're taken back to W

Rip-offs are a funny thing... Some can pass off as homages, some have to be rip-offs in order to survive in a world of big, crushing blockbusters, others are just lazy. R.I.P.D. is, indeed, one of the lazy ones. We get it, we got it from the trailers: it's Men In Black . The M.I.B.-style initials, the cliched buddy cop movie scenario with one young guy being paired up with an older guy with a Southern drawl as they shoot their fancy, shiny toy guns at alien-looking things... we're not idiots. We get it. It's no wonder that by the time this film came out people were already tired of it: they knew exactly what it would be! R.I.P.D., I must admit, did not offer any surprises and that's really what I wanted from it. I wanted the trailers to scream Men In Black but for the film itself to bring enough new, fun things to the table that it would be eventually elevated, through a cult following, to something a little bit different, a decent action comedy with a slightl