TheRetroCritic

Review available on the new website .

Review available on the new website .

In 2016, Warner Bros. released The Legend Of Tarzan , an attempt to give Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic character a proper blockbuster franchise with Alexander Skarsgård as Tarzan and Margot Robbie as Jane Porter. The film was a domestic flop despite performing quite well abroad. Picking up after Tarzan has already been accepted back into civilised society, the film then briefly flashes back to the character's familiar origins (being raised by apes etc.) a few times before sending him back home to the African jungle where his beloved Jane is captured by a cruel Belgian diamond hunter. Yes, this is one of those super-serious gritty reboots that attempts to introduce us to a well-known (yet revamped) hero but also tell a brand new story by working as some kind of sequel to a never-made film. The idea being that people who are very familiar with Tarzan and expect a more adult take on the character like 1984's Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Lord Of The Apes could enjoy t

With cinematic superhero crossover universes currently competing, so too it looks like monster universes are about to fight it out with The Mummy possibly being the first of a modern Universal Monsters reboot franchise and Godzilla facing Kong in an upcoming sequel. Kong: Skull Island introduces us to the mighty King Kong in a prequel of sorts where a group approved by the US government travels to the evasive Skull Island with a military escort in the 1970's. Don't expect Kong to get chained up and brought back to New York City where he climbs up the Empire State Building etc. in this one. There are some clever nods to these familiar events throughout the film but it's mercifully not just a straight-up retread and, stylistically, it is very different than Peter Jackson's King Kong from 2005. Kong: Skull Island owes a lot more to the likes of Apocalypse Now , Predators and the more over-the-top classic Kong sequels than the 1933 original or any remake. The ea

Tim Burton returns with Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children , a new movie based on Ransom Riggs' popular Young Adult novel. The plot, which involves monsters, bizarre teenagers, suburbia and time travel certainly seemed like an ideal vehicle for the director. Asa Butterfield is Jake, an ordinary suburban kid who, one night, finds his grandfather (played by Terrence Stamp) dying with both his eyes missing. Following the path outlined by the late old man's bedtime stories, Jake travels to Wales with his father where, supposedly, he would find the school for oddball children he'd heard so much about. Initially disappointed by what he finds, he eventually stumbles upon one of the students who leads him to the school which happens to be purposely stuck in a time loop. Jake meets the rest of the pupils including an invisible boy, a girl who can float, a kid who spits out bees and a super-strong little girl, among others. It's easy to see why Burton would be k

Based on a Michael Crichton novel, Sphere was a 1998 sci-fi film about a team of experts in various fields exploring some crashed underwater spaceship. Directed by Barry Levinson, the film boasts an all-star cast with Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, Peter Coyote and Liev Schreiber all being part of the main team. Sphere is a psychological thriller that's a bit like a cross between The Abyss , Event Horizon , The Thing and Alien as the more the selected experts investigate the spaceship, the creepier the tone of the film becomes. Eventually, characters start dropping like flies as various unexpected threats start popping up randomly from killer jellyfish to giant squids. The discovery of a gold alien sphere in the middle of the spaceship leads to growing paranoia among the crew and various twists and turns. There are references here and there to 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and, indeed, the film attempts to capture the book's sense of adventure and cla

After much deliberation, Quentin Tarantino's 8th movie The Hateful Eight  finally exists and is finally out on the big screen where it belongs. After Django Unchained , here we have another Western, this time presented in a 70mm format with Ennio Morricone himself scoring it. I have a good feeling about this. Indeed, from the get-go the film sucks you in with its beautiful snowy setting, its haunting theme and its reliably great cast not to mention some sharp writing from the maestro himself. The plot sees two bounty hunters meet right before a blizzard is about to hit the region. One of them is John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell) who is planning to bring a dangerous criminal (played by an unrecognizable Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the town of Red Rock to be hanged. The other is Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a mysterious man who proudly carries around with him a letter from Abraham Lincoln. On the way to Minnie's Haberdashery, they meet Chris Mannix

After the double dose of disappointment Marvel offered us a year prior ( The Wolverine , Iron Man 3 ), I was certainly nervous about the direction the company was taking for its second phase, even though  Thor: The Dark World wasn't too bad. Thankfully, Marvel came back to prove me wrong, very wrong, with Captain America: The Winter Soldier , the present day-set sequel to The First Avenger . The real worry I had going into this one was that it would just feel like yet another Avengers Assemble , giving up on the retro feel of the first Captain America movie altogether, something I personally love about the character and that particular flick. As it turns out, The Winter Soldier is deeply rooted in the character's history and we actually get to see how that history had an impact on Steve Rogers' present. Sure, the film goes for a decidedly modern thriller vibe but it still manages to feel like a superhero movie and keep some good old-fashioned camp intact. With Jo

Why is America so reboot-phobic? Because some stories just don't need to be retold, especially when they were told extremely well the first time and are beloved by all just the way they are. Over the years, we've had so many awful horror remakes, from Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Evil Dead , and with the criminally boring, unnecessary Total Recall remake still fresh in our minds, a RoboCop reboot just sounded like a bad idea. The idea of a more earnest RoboCop movie grounded in reality, with a grittier, more down-to-Earth feel and a mostly CGI hero with more self-awareness and an inexplicable human hand was missing the point of the original film entirely and, after watching the film, I can confirm that it has, indeed, missed the point on various levels. That said, unlike Total Recall, this is, miraculously, not a complete disaster. Where some changes either don't really work or simply backfire, some make sense in the new world introduced within the movie and ther