TheRetroCritic

We review War For The Planet Of The Apes on The Big Rewind .

Reviewing each film in Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings Trilogy individually or picking a favourite out of the three is actually not an easy task. They're pretty indispensable to each other but let's try and single this one out for now regardless. This is where it all began:  The Fellowship Of The Ring . You know the plot, bearded dude shows up on some old Hobbit's doorstep, sends his nephew on some huge, crazy suicide mission involving a ring of power that could potentially destroy everything good on Middle Earth through some big orange angry vagina eye on top of a scary tower. Preposterous? Yes. But in J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson's hands: magic. No fantasy epic has even come close before or since to reaching the scale and sheer grandeur of this trilogy and doing it this well (sorry Narnia), these are big far-out stories involving elves, dwarves and goblins and yet it feels important: you're invested. Not an easy thing to achieve. Back in the 80&

   

After director Bryan Singer did his best to introduce Marvel’s team of multi-talented mutants to the world and develop their story further in a superior, if still somewhat restrained, second instalment, he eventually chose to leave the franchise opting for a chance to direct 2006’s  Superman Returns  instead. This was a blow to the series which, after that, underwent several changes in directors and cast members even threatened to leave the franchise. In the end, Brett Ratner, mostly known at the time for giving us the   Rush Hour  movies, took the job and completed a film which had already gone through a lot of messy rewrites. Not an easy feat, in all fairness. X-Men: The Last Stand  is one of those comic-book movie adaptations that gets a handful of things right but drops the ball on 90% of everything else. X-Men  lacked the scale it should have had and its plot revolved around the usual doomsday machine cliché. The sequel provided us with a bigger film, more villains, mor

I talk The Dark Knight Rises and Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy in general.

SPOILERS AHEAD!  And so the Dark Knight rises... At last "the legend ends" and Christopher Nolan's Bat-reboot comes to its thrilling conclusion. The character's re-invention, after his disappointing campy late 90's turns, made him respectable again and brought the hero back with a vengeance.   Batman Begins spent half of its time showing us Bruce Wayne's progress from Billionaire orphan to Billionaire orphan with a penchant for bats and ass-kickin' and the other half of its time giving us a taster of Batman in action complete with megalomaniac villains, cool-as-f*** gadgets and loads of action. What Nolan and co. brought to the table was a serious, semi-realistic approach, an emphasis on plot and a scale worthy of the character. The Dark Knight was the money shot: taking everything that was good about Begins and cranking it up to 11 with two fantastic villains, a deep, bittersweet plot, thrilling action by the buckets and raised stakes. Neithe

Watching this third Alien film after a re-watch of Alien Resurrection certainly offered a contrast. Where one was somewhat reminiscent of Ridley Scott's original vision, the other felt more like a fun, if stupid, cartoon. It is quite a big leap between Alien 3 and Resurrection so lets see how the Alien Trilogy ended before it... began again. From the offset, Alien 3 stylistically pays homage to the first Alien with it's white/greenish tones and clinical feel rather than the bluey, sweaty look of Aliens . We are led to believe that this will be a back-to-basics outing with a focus more on atmosphere and subtle horror with less action but more impact. To a certain extent, this proves to be an accurate assessment: Alien 3 most definitely approaches the horror aspect of the franchise the way Scott went about it. You get several scenes where something thoroughly unpleasant is going on, whether it's gory surgery or an autopsy, and we mostly see the event through the charac

Shyamalan produces this first instalment of his "Night Chronicles" and surprisingly creates an entertaining, if uninspired, horror tale. After a truly engaging Hitchcockian first half the film unfortunately chooses to go down the familiar path of every silly supernatural horror film ever made and pick off its characters one by one only to build up towards a hammy revelation which doesn't really make sense. It's a shame because Devil really didn't need to be a supernatural horror. Had it stuck with its original premise and gone for a more Speed / Phone Booth -style thriller it could have been a genuinely tense and clever film. Alas, Shyamalan's head-explodingly naive religious message and childish take on the horror genre boils down an otherwise decent outing to a very watchable but flawed first attempt. One hopes the silliness is either kept quiet or full blown to its maximum in further instalments.