TheRetroCritic

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, mother! is a psychological thriller from 2017 about a couple living in the countryside who get a strange visit from another couple before things get truly out of hand, to say the least. Jennifer Lawrence is the titular mother who lives in an unfinished house with her rather intense husband, a writer (played by the ever-intimidating Javier Bardem) suffering from writer's block until he is visited by a fan and his wife. The latter couple, played by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer, show up randomly one day as Lawrence's character becomes increasingly suspicious of their bizarre behaviour and nervous about their influence on her husband. "mother" isn't all that normal herself as she appears to be obsessed with fixing her house and spends pretty much all her time walking around looking confused by everything. You're never quite sure what this awkward dynamic between her and her much older husband is all about since they're r

The final part of the popular Young Adult movie franchise, The Hunger Games:   Mockingjay Part 2 delivers the war between the tyrannical President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and the rebellion led by Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) we were promised. Picking up soon after Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) returned from the Capitol not only physically drained but psychologically changed also, the film sees the rebellion send a team into the war-torn city in order to show that Katniss is fighting back, thereby inspiring the districts to do the same. She decides to find a way to personally kill Snow no matter what, putting an end to his cruelty once and for all. And since the city is completely booby-trapped, this leads to a somewhat grittier Hunger Games with Katniss' team having to avoid the likes of deadly black goo, sewer zombies and land mines. Before that, Katniss tries to convince another district to join the rebellion and Alma Coin's (Julianne Moore) motives are questioned. T

As the X-Men franchises continues its journey through time, Bryan Singer is back to direct X-Men: Apocalypse with Oscar Isaac taking on the role of the iconic titular villain. Set in the 1980's, the film follows the timeline of the last two movies and throws in some nods to the original trilogy. If there's one thing the pre-titles sequence promises it's a much bigger scale but also one of the most out-there X-Men movies to date. If you thought a time-travelling consciousness and big evolving robots were too much then wait till you get a load of this adventure which opens in Ancient Egypt and leads us to the world's near-destruction. With the exception of a cool poster (above), the marketing for this new X-flick was clumsy and, as a result, I had little hope it would be any good. The first pictures released of Apocalypse looked awful and the Internet soon compared him to Power Rangers villain Ivan Ooze, then the trailers made it seem like it was essentially The Je

I break my own promise to not go and see another Hunger Games movie by... Going to see the new Hunger Games movie .

Another year, another Hunger Games movie. Well, part of one, anyway. The popular pseudo- Battle Royale franchise is back as the actual "games" finally take a backseat to an actual plot and Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a hidden world outside the big city and her own district. To put it in retro movie terms: this is basically the Beneath The Planet Of The Apes of the series, except not awesome. After breaking out of the arena, Katniss finally wakes up in some kind of underground bunker/shelter occupied by a rebel army led by yet another silly-named character: President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore). She is kept up to date by Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his *sob* final roles) and Jeffrey Wright's character as they try to convince Coin that Katniss is a worthy "Mockingjay", the face and spirit of the resistance. But Katniss' beloved Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) is still held captive by Donald Sutherland's intim

David O. Russell is back with yet another Oscar-nominated film starring both Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. This time, though, we're at the heart of 70's Jersey with added Christian Bale and Amy Adams. The plot sees con man Irving (Bale) get together with Amy Adams' sexy bad-English-accent-imitating gal Sydney as they start a relationship and form a partnership which both turn sour when cocky FBI agent Richie (Cooper) decides to use them in order to expose corruption high-up. The nutty plan involves getting close to Mayor Carmine Polito (a perfect, vastly underrated Jeremy Renner), getting the mob involved using a fake Sheik and taking dodgy dealings as far as possible so the FBI can just swoop in and pick up the pieces. Unfortunately, Richie is no convincing con man and his inexperience keeps getting in the way, as does Irving's mouthy wife Rosalyn (Lawrence) and about a thousand other things. Russell's film can be seen as a homage to Martin Scorsese

After the huge success of the first The Hunger Games movie, finally we get this sequel and await not one but two more movies, the franchise therefore proudly following in the footsteps of The Twilight Saga and the Harry Potter franchise by ending in a two-parter. Catching Fire follows the story pretty much where we left it except, this time, victor Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) have become the people's rebellious inspiration and good old evil Donald Sutherland isn't happy. The latter wants to avoid a revolution at all costs so he changes the rules of "The Games" a little and Katniss gets selected once again. This makes for an interesting subplot but also for a very familiar movie. Save for what drives the characters, the political stuff that happens off-camera and the end reveal, this is basically the first film all over again. Beat by beat, we find exactly the same structure developing as we spend some time in the p