TheRetroCritic

Review available on the new website .

Based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer and directed by Alex Garland, Annihilation is a science fiction film about a team of researchers who are sent into the mysterious Area X: a gradually expanding coastal area surrounded by an inexplicable shimmer. Unlike the book, the film slowly builds to the team's entry into Area X, instead of throwing you into the unknown right off the bat. Natalie Portman is Lena, a biology professor and ex-US Army soldier whose husband (played by Oscar Isaac), who was believed to be dead, comes back to her one day after going into the "shimmer" himself. Lena and four others, including Jennifer Jason Leigh's psychologist, are sent in to explore as increasingly unexpected events start to occur. Adapting this story was never going to be easy as there's a myriad ways you could approach it. This could have been a very arty, impenetrably abstract affair or an Alien -style straight-up horror movie or even something else entirely. Garland ma

It's not exactly breaking news that fans were generally disappointed with DC's animated film adaptation of The Killing Joke  so this new attempt at taking on one of the most popular Batman graphic novels seemed like a perfect opportunity to get something right. Batman takes on Jack The Ripper himself in this steampunk story loosely based on Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola's one-shot  Gotham By Gaslight set in the late 1800's. When an exotic dancer (Poison Ivy) is brutally killed by The Ripper and the latter's victims keep piling up, the people of Gotham City start to suspect Batman. With the help of James Gordon and the police, Batman (voiced by Bruce Greenwood) attempts to stop further killings but Bruce Wayne is eventually jailed on suspicion of being The Ripper, which delays the Dark Knight's investigation somewhat. The film makes decent enough use of the familiar characters it does have including a trio of Robins as orphans, Hugo Strange, Selina Kyle (w

Loosely based on the popular 90's television series, Baywatch is a blockbuster comedy starring Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron as lifeguards who investigate a potential drug lord suspected of conducting their business around the beach. The comedic approach to Baywatch makes sense: everyone knows how silly the show was and everyone made fun of it to a certain extent back when it was on, even if you enjoyed it. Friends celebrated its goofiness back in the 90's and there have been countless spoofs since, including a memorable cameo by David Hasselhoff in  The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie . Unfortunately, dated TV shows rarely translate all that well into big blockbusters: CHiPs (also released last year) got panned, everyone forgot there even was an A-Team movie and the  Starsky & Hutch  movie didn't exactly re-invent cinema, though it was admittedly a fun watch. With a project like this, arguably the best approach is to take a page from Airplane! 's book and play

CLICK HERE for the review, which was posted for the first instalment of Review A Bad Movie Day on September 8th.

I talk a bit about new Stephen King movie adaptation The Dark Tower .

Much to most anime fans' displeasure, Hollywood finally delivered on its promise to adapt the hugely influential animated classic Ghost In The Shell from 1995, directed by Mamoru Oshii, with Scarlett Johansson playing the lead role. After a controversy which saw the project get accused of "whitewashing" and persisting complaints that such an adaptation is basically sacrilegious, this looked set to be the least popular remake since Ghostbusters . Indeed, after hardly glorious anime adaptations like Dragonball: Evolution and Speed Racer , it's no surprise why so many were nervous about this new venture. Early trailers looked uninspired yet the more we saw from the film, the more interesting it looked with its slick Blade Runner -meets-Neo Tokyo look and all the potentially cool action scenes on display. It's very clear, right off the bat, that a lot more effort was put into this film than the criminally lazy Dragonball: Evolution. Visually, this new Ghost In T

Welcome to another of my Top 10s! This time I'm looking at Nicolas Cage movies and if you know me at all then you know that Mr Cage is something of an obsession with me... I'll be counting down the Top 10 Cage films that I personally enjoy watching the most. I'll be leaving out loads of good movies of course ( Lord Of War ), as well as movies I haven't seen in a long time and really need to re-watch ( Snake Eyes , 8MM , The Rock ) so I might revisit this list eventually. Some films that I actually quite like, I'm thinking Trapped In Paradise , Matchstick Men or Peggy Sue got Married just missed out on the list which includes genuinely good movies and movies which may not be particularly great (or simply so bad they're good) but are worth watching since The Cage is at his most entertaining. On that note, lets "Cage" that shit up: 10 DEADFALL/THE WICKER MAN In the so-bad-they're-good category, here we have two films, both clunky