The Threepenny Opera
This 1931 adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s German play follows Mack the Knife (Rudolf Forster), a kind of celebrity crook à la the Krays or Jared Kushner. The […]
Tag Archives: Retro review
Blithe Spirit
Author Charles Condomine and his wife Ruth (Rex Harrison and Constance Cummings) invite a spirit medium (Margaret Rutherford) to dinner as research for a new book. But the séance goes […]
Great Expectations
Pip’s life gets pepped after he pops into a graveyard in David Lean’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ penultimate novel. Watching it now, Pip’s story is less than revelatory and perhaps […]
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
The bastardisation of John Carpenter and Debra Hill’s masterpiece continues with Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, even though he already returned in the first film. Released and set […]
Death Becomes Her
Madeleine and Helen (Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn) will stop at nothing to stay looking young, so when they reach the limits of plastic surgery they’re tempted to drink an […]
Bridget Jones’s Diary
Bridget (Renée Zellweger) is jonesing for a man so badly that she’s not prepared to wait for one who’s actually nice to her. This 2001 rom-com is as lazy as […]
The Sound Barrier
David Lean directs this fictionalised tale of the early attempts to break the sound barrier. It follows the head of an aviation company, John Ridgefield (Ralph Richardson) and his daughter […]
Brief Encounter
A bored housewife (Celia Johnson) encounters a handsome doctor (Trevor Howard) at the train station in the appropriately named Milford. But these acquaintances on a train have a profound effect […]
Predators
This 2010 sci-fi sequel follows another band of humans (including Adrien Brody, Mahershala Ali and Topher Grace) who find themselves hunted by Predators, like an inverted version of the episode […]
Phantasm
A hooded dwarf. A guitar-playing ice cream man. A shapeshifting mortician. But enough about the Brexit Party MEPs; let’s talk Phantasm. This 1979 cult horror is written, directed, produced, edited […]
