TheRetroCritic

Directed by Steven Spielberg, Always is a 1989 romantic comedy/drama starring Richard Dreyfuss as an aerial firefighter who is killed while trying to save someone else and who then comes back as a spirit to guide another pilot in his life. Loosely based on WWII drama  A Guy Named Joe , Always tends to be one of Spielberg's most forgotten films mostly due to the fact it's arguably his cheesiest effort so those not too keen on sentimental stories or those expecting an action film won't exactly go wild for this one. Having said that, this is still a gorgeous-looking film with a lot going for it. The criminally underrated Richard Dreyfuss is at his most charming and cocky here as reckless pilot Pete who constantly worries his girlfriend Dorinda (played by Holly Hunter) with his careless flying. Pete almost crashes on her birthday and, while this leads to a heartfelt romantic moment, it also leads to Dorinda giving him an ultimatum to get him to stop risking his life at ev

Here's the video version of my review of Heartbeeps .

There's something kinda perfect about the fact that Andy Kaufman's only proper movie remains Heartbeeps , an off-beat romantic comedy about two robots who fall in love and leave their factory to go on a life-changing adventure. Much like with most of Kaufman's comedy, critics and audiences back in the day just didn't get this movie and it was quickly dismissed as a bomb and a failure. Watching the film now, it's obvious why Heartbeeps didn't exactly wow the public: initially aimed at a young audience, the humour is at times much too weird or adult-themed and both Kaufman and Bernadette Peters look positively freakish. There's a cute baby robot thrown in there but, otherwise, this is one that only fans of the lead's unique sense of humour could possibly enjoy. Anyone else should find themselves scratching their heads, wondering why this movie even exists. Not that Heartbeeps isn't funny, quite the opposite, it's just that the jokes are so biz

Here's a movie which, on paper, sounds like the worst thing you'll ever see: an Adam Sandler rom-com starring Drew Barrymore as a girl with no short term memory, a girl Sandler has to woo every single day. The Hawaii-set romantic comedy, as expected, is a pretty cheesy affair with more than its share of infuriating moments. For one thing, Rob Schneider cameos as Sandler's slobby pal so expect loads of bad jokes and borderline racist stereotyping, plus awful child actors speaking loudly around him as a bonus. Then there's the plot which is about as believable as whatever happened in The Adventures Of Pluto Nash and the earnest way in which it's handled often clashes with the usual mostly low-brow Happy Madison brand of humour. Walrus vomit jokes, anyone? Then there's Drew Barrymore who really does her utmost to hammer in how adorable she is, often to irritating effect. Though one scene sees her hitting Schneider repeatedly with a baseball bat, something

What if a zombie fell in love? Surely a question we've all asked ourselves at one point or another. It's also Warm Bodies ' unique concept, introducing to the world the odd notion of a rom-zom-com. A world that's way into zombie-themed things these days, what with the likes of The Walking Dead , World War Z and Zombieland doing so well and all. Despite the odd premise, Warm Bodies looked like a winner. After all, Fido had proven that zombie movies didn't always have to be depressing affairs and that familiar zombie lore could be toyed around with a little in order to make it fit into more off-beat settings and genres. This movie opens like a cross between Zombieland and Wall-E , following Nicholas Hoult's lumbering zombie who spends his days mindlessly walking around an airport grunting, eating the occasional brain and playing music in his abandoned private jet home. Several new zombie ideas are soon introduced to us: zombies can think and actually t

Long before Ben Stiller travelled the world looking for Sean Penn, or a piano, or whatever that Walter Mitty movie was about, he starred in light-hearted comedy Along Came Polly alongside Jennifer Aniston and introduced the notion of blind ferrets and naked Hank Azaria to the world of cinema. As a romantic comedy, Along Came Polly is exactly what you'd expect: typical by-numbers boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-new-girl, boy-loses-new-girl, boy-gets-new-girl-in-the-end fare with the obligatory corny moment here and there and the obvious third act epiphany. Nothing original there, alas. That said, as just a goofy comedy, it works surprisingly better than you expect. Remember The Heartbreak Kid ? That movie wishes it was Along Came Polly. The Stiller/Aniston pair-up works and admittedly makes for a solid central relationship to focus on but this is the supporting cast's movie. I mean, it's like these side characters were written and cast first, long before the

So few movies I've seen on the big screen that left me with a feeling of "what the hell did I just watch?". There was The Time Machine , which just kinda ended, Broken Flowers , which I just didn't get, a couple of others and Zack And Miri Make A Porno . I mean, it's not like the subject matter was a big surprise, after all, the title is pretty darn clear! That said the movie I got was very different from what I had imagined. For one thing: they don't actually make a porno. We're teased early on with the possibility of Jason Mewes and co. taking on "Star Whores" but that just crashes and burns and the film becomes about making a porno in a coffee shop but then it turns out the film's not about that all but in fact is all about the Seth Rogen/Elizabeth Banks romance. This would work had the film been substantial enough in various domains (laughs, heart, smarts) but this is a bare movie which... I guess fits the porno theme in a way.

I know what you're thinking: " Ruby Sparks ? Wait, isn't it that Stranger Than Fiction rom-com knockoff?" Yes, yes it is. Complete with white people problems and lots of 'em! Right off the bat, Ruby Sparks is every Woody Allen/Nora Ephron rom-com you've ever seen: shrinks, stereotypical neurotic writers, cookie hippie relatives... It's good, don't get me wrong, but you've seen it all before. Same goes for the movie's surreal "hook" involving Zoe Kazan's Sparks, a fictional character written by Paul Dano's writer Calvin, who inexplicably comes to life one morning. What follows is a rollercoaster ride of emotions and forced quirkiness which finally develops into a kind of 500 Days Of Summer meets Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind -type bittersweet tale of the impact relationships have on us and how we screw them up, basically. It's cute, it's sweet, it's all-over-the-place, it's heartbreaking,

Oh dear... This is what happens when you go snooping around a popular actor's filmography. Benny & Joon , a Johnny Depp-starring weirdo comedy in which he plays a Charlie Chaplin wannabe who, for whatever reason, starts baby-sitting some moody guy's mentally challenged (or, in movie talk: artistic, quirky and misunderstood) sister, sounded like fun. I mean, Johnny Depp wouldn't sign up to a rom-com unless there was something a bit more to it. Right? As it turns out, the guy clearly just wanted an excuse to be Chaplin/Buster Keaton for a day and show off his... slapstick magic... 'skills'? The problem? Benny & Joon isn't funny. Furthermore, Depp isn't funny in it. And by god he tries... I mean, ok, parts of the movie get close to being charming (near the very end, mostly) but most of the time you're just waiting for Benny to punch Sam's (Depp) face in. This is a manipulative little film not so much concerned with developing its

Cruise and Diaz are reunited for the first time since Vanilla Sky in this silly, sunny Hitchcockian spy comedy and although the film never reaches high levels of intelligence, what it lacks in brains it makes up for in gusto. Although it has been compared with the likes of North By Northwest , this is actually much closer to the lighter To Catch a Thief or even the Goldie Hawn/Chevy Chase 80's comedies. Cruise is clearly having a ball in a Mission Impossible -style role with added OTT silliness and Diaz is fine as his ditzy sidekick, if slightly annoying in places. The plot is nothing to ride home about, something about a powerful battery (MacGuffin) which may or may not be useful to something or other. Whatever. It provides little more than silly lines ("Because it's filled with POWER!") and a thin strand of reason to hold everything together. What really hurts the film strangely is the CGI. It works mostly but sometimes the green screen is jus

Robert Pattinson sparkles in this inexplicably hugely popular first outing of the Mormon Sexless Teen Vamp Saga...sorry, I meant Twilight . The film starts promisingly in a little town where we meet Bella (a whiny Kristen Stewart), her dad and her new life as the new girl in high school. The one thing the film actually has going for it, to be fair, is the way it portrays small town ennui so enjoy this first twenty minutes as you will sorely miss them. And then the vampires come in (lol), strolling in like Purity Ring-wearing badasses into the school canteen looking not-at-all suspiciously pale and blinking with their not-at-all strange yellow eyes. Pattinson's hair defies gravity and he always looks like he's lost a small olive and he's trying to figure out where he might have dropped it. He has tantrums about the perils of biology class and takes 5 days off school because his new lab partner smells like putrid virginity. In a highly perplexing scene, both meet for

Blaming Twilight entirely for the recent burst of corny teen nonsense (shriek! abs!) is easy but one mustn't forget all the Hannah Montanas and High School Musicals which helped kick start the new trend of (shriek! abs!) pseudo-romantic teen movies. Yes Dear John , I'm pointing at you too. You wartime-set, letter sending...bastard. Anyway, so one could say Twilight is partly to blame for the spread of (shriek! abs!) naivety throughout modern cinema but the real culprit really is Disney. And with the company now proud owner of the rights to Marvel films, god help us all... And so we get to Zac Efron (shirek! abs!). I managed to avoid 17 Again but I have to say the trailer for Charlie St Cloud was unintentionally funny enough to spark my interest. The High School Musical alumni's puppet-like stare and Mentos-selling grin might just provide some welcome comedy! Charlie St Cloud, indeed, was pretty funny. But also pretty harmless. As a film I was expecting something n

Another year, another extended Chanel advert. Unfortunately, unlike Coco Before Chanel , this doesn't have much to work with. What we get is not so much a Chanel biopic as a vague Stravinski biopic awkwardly stuck inside a sexy Chanel bubble. The main problem is that, really, the film has nothing interesting to say: Chanel and Stravinski had an affair...they had sex...buy our perfume! This is literally it. Having said that, Jan Kounen does a remarkable job making such an empty narrative interesting. The cinematography is stylish and well crafted and the score is beautiful. A terrific scene involving a Stravinski concert going awry is definitely a highlight. There's good performances here. Anna Mouglalis' over-cool but genuinely manipulative and really pretty dislikable Chanel is a lot of fun and Mads Mikkelsen conveys a lot with the shameful 5 lines he was given to work with (!). His performance, although practically silent, is nevertheless the most compelling in the e