TheRetroCritic

Zardoz is awesome: here are 10 reasons why (out of like a million).

The fact that Ian Fleming's Martini-drinking super-spy still has an audience over 50 years later is a testament to the formula set up by the writer's novels and, of course, the movies which kicked off with the 1962 classic Dr. No . Sean Connery shines as James Bond from the very first moment you meet him, casually smoking and winning some dough in a game of cards before walking away like a boss to the sound of his own theme, setting up a date with a beautiful stranger. He brings intelligence and an effortless charm to the character but he can also be tough and menacing when he needs to be, tossing minor enemies aside, killing off assassins in cold blood without giving it a second thought. Based on this performance, it's no wonder the world fell in love with this Bond, James Bond fella. The film itself boasts all the tropes you'd expect in a Bond film: girls, guns, physically impaired villains with absurd aspirations, an underwater lair, a casino scene, a Martini

While nowhere near one of the first Agatha Christie movie adaptations out there, Murder On The Orient Express was the first Hercule Poirot movie to really take off, even earning Ingrid Bergman a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as one of the many passengers/murder suspects aboard the iconic train. The cast is star-studded to say the least with the likes of Sean Connery, Lauren Bacall, Anthony Perkins, John Gielgud, Richard Widmark, Michael York and Vanessa Redgrave all there and acting their butts off trying to outdo each other. Directed by Sidney Lumet, the film sees legendary Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) board the Orient Express last minute only to find that it is packed with dodgy characters before one of them is eventually murdered. The train gets stuck halfway through its trip in the snow so it'll be up to Poirot to solve the case before any more shady goings on occur. Now you'd think that being stuck in a train for an entire movi

Alfred Hitchcock decided to torture Tippi Hedren again soon after The Birds with this little psychological thriller from 1964 also starring Sean Connery. The film sees Hedren play Marnie , a thief who changes her identity for every heist. When she is finally caught by Connery's suave publishing company owner, the film takes a weird turn as he decides to tackle her deeply rooted psychological problems himself and help her resolve them. Armed with a brilliantly erratic score by maestro Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Hitchcock puts these two characters, who could not be more different, together and lets us sit there uncomfortably as both of them reveal darker, somewhat unsettling sides to themselves. Hedren is at her best here, displaying a nervous bitterness which comes out in short, yet significant bursts. Meanwhile, Connery oozes with charisma but, throughout the film, his character reveals something of a controlling, fetishist side to him as he literally forces Marnie into marryin

The late nineties were a weird time. Nicolas Cage kept being cast in ridiculously overblown action movies ( Con Air , Face/Off ), Michael Bay was about to work with J.J. Abrams on Armageddon , dogs and cats living together: mass hysteria. Back in 1996, The Rock came out and combined the acting talents of Mr Cage and Mr Sean Connery in what seemed like an odd pairing, and, I suppose, in what  was an odd pairing, but which also worked surprisingly well. Knowing what we now know about Bay, The Rock is an interesting film to revisit because it's both very much his style and yet nowhere near as irritating or cheesy as the likes of Armageddon and Transformers 2 . I mean, of course you still get soldiers marching in slow-mo at sundown, insulting comic-relief stereotypes (look out for a gay hairdresser more concerned about hair than he is about bullets), perplexing one-liners ("How do you like how that shit works?") and ludicrous art direction but there's just somet

Alright, so I'm cheating a little bit. LXG may not technically be a vampire movie but Mina Harker from Bram Stoker's Dracula is in it so I'm still reviewing it, goshdarnit! Based on Alan Moore's cult comic-book series, this famous flop unites a group of classic literary heroes, anti-heroes and villains in an Avengers-style team-up as these new unlikely pals face a powerful foe: the mysterious Phantom who appears to be planning some sort of megalomaniac world-domination plot. The gang includes legendary adventurer Alan Quartermain (Sean Connery), Tom Sawyer (Shane West), Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), The Invisible Man (Tony Curran), Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (Jason Flemyng) and Mina Harker (Peta Wilson). Together at last! Not much in terms of information is given to us as to why any of this is going on but I suppose that, similarly to how Watchmen was set on an alternate version of the 1980's, so too was LXG, except in an alt

Sean Connery doesn't f*** around. Even in space, he gets the job done. In this Jupiter moon mining colony-set sci-fi flick, Connery plays a police marshal who shows up there and starts investigating a drug-smuggling conspiracy. The people there don't help him at all, leaving him on his own to sort everything out but tension mounts when he is marked for death and murders start occurring around him. Yes, Outland is essentially The French Connection ... IN SPACE. Take a 70's cop movie, set it on Jupiter's moon, add Sean Connery and you've got yourself Outland. The movie doesn't really need to be set in space or to be sci-fi at all but the fact that the people involved in the plot have literally nowhere to run does add tension and a sense of isolation to the proceedings. It's a slow-burning movie that demands for you to be immersed in that atmosphere, in that world. This isn't the typical slick, overtly futuristic science fiction movie you'd exp