Retro Movie Review – 127 Hours
James Franco plays Aron Ralston, a hyper young man who can climb, cycle and navigate with the best of them while sprouting existential dialogue and giving all those around him a running travelogue. Unfortunately for him in this case, his loner characteristics take over and he ventures forth into Robbers Roost, Utah by himself.
The isolated area, once used as a hide out by Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch gang is filled with huge rock formations and an almost hidden underworld between the ...
Retro Movie Review – American Made
Tom Cruise in one of his strongest roles in years plays Barry Seal, a pilot, government operative, drug runner and so much more. As the number of government agencies he works with add up, so does the level of insanity. The actual sequence of events in Seal’s real life differ quite a bit from the movie’s timeline but why let the truth get in the way of a good story and what a story it is.
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As a period piece, the clothes, hair and music reinforce a time that ...
Retro Movie Review – The Disaster Artist
Now using one of the most unintentionally funny films of all time as fodder for a film about a film has yielded comic gold. James Franco nails the role of The Room’s creator Tommy Wiseau (minus the middle age creepiness) and has never been more fearless or funny. It’s also a family affair and features his brother Dave as a co-lead actor.
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The Room was beyond bad and feels as if it was alien in origin while The Disaster Artist feels Hollywood through and ...
Retro Movie Review – Battle Of The Sexes
Emma Stone is quickly becoming the Meryl of her time and she is consistently outstanding in this and pretty much every film she stars in as of late. Steve Carell is also perfectly cast as the buffoonish Bobby Riggs. Using the actual audio from the original match (recorded back in 1973) really does show how ingrained the male chauvinism was at that time.
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The film plays out like a time capsule of the day and the attention to seventies detail is outstanding. Even ...
Retro Movie Review – Snowden
Snowden was a young and prodigious computer geek that got involved in the US government network of spies and its American citizen electronic scrutiny. He got pulled in, chewed up and spit out when the morality of the domestic spying regime overwhelmed him. He ended up paying a very heavy price for his ethics.
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt is outstanding as Snowden and it’s almost eerie how close his portrayal comes to the real person (especially brought to light in the film’s ...
Retro Movie Review – Deepwater Horizon
Mark Wahlberg and Kurt Russell are the heroes of the piece as their salt of the earth characters rise to the occasion and help to prevent a more serious loss of life through selfless heroism. The action is suitably claustrophobic as the isolation of the out-to-sea oil platform plays into the disaster.
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Berg’s decision to focus on the accident on the oil rig and reduce the ecological disaster that was cased by the oil leak to a small footnote at the end of the ...
Watch the trailer for RESPECT, starring Jennifer Hudson as Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin!
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RESPECT stars Jennifer Hudson, Forest Whitaker, Marlon Wayans, Audra McDonald, Marc Maron, Tituss Burgess, Saycon Sengbloh, Hailey Kilgore, Tate Donovan, Heather Headley, Skye Dakota Turner, and Mary J. Blige and will be released in cinemas 2021!
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Retro Movie Review – Steve Jobs
Screenplay writer Aaron Sorkin’s influence can be felt in more than just the words in the film as the Sorkinisms just keep piling up. The famous walk and talk shot is used throughout, as is the uber intelligent and quick witted conversational style. The brain pool on display is never short of exceptional as are the acting chops.
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Michael Fassbender as Jobs is fantastic as is Kate Winslet as Job’s right hand woman Joanna Hoffman. Winslet’s take on Hoffman with ...
Retro Movie Review – Everest
The film is incredible tense and from the first frame you feel the rising level of impending doom. Even for those that have little knowledge of the actual events of the disaster, the film fills you with that dark sense of foreboding. It frames the climbers (accurately or not) as a group of driven people with little regard for their own safety or the tons of rubbish that modern day mountain climbing leaves behind.
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The film is big in almost every way, a big cast, a ...
Retro Movie Review – Hidden Figures
The story revolves around the space race of the mid-sixties and the contribution of three extraordinary female African Americans. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe are outstanding as the three leads and their intelligence and humour illuminates every scene they are in. Their quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) dignity show a resolve few posses.
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The Space Race as it was called back then really was a race as the threat of communism and the fact the ...
