Retro Cafe

“There Are Some Places In The Universe You Don’t Go Alone.”So said the tag line advertising the main feature at London’s Odeon Leicester Square in August 1986. The film on show was Aliens, the eagerly anticipated sequel to the 1979 sci-fi horror movie Alien. Fans of the first film had waited a long time to see what new [...]

Modern thrillers, and action films to an extent, seem to me to take themselves pretty seriously. I love the ‘Bourne’ films, which are probably the new benchmark of modern thriller filmmaking, but there seems very little time taken in contemporary thrillers to give the audience little respites of humor, even in the rela [...]

West London’s Ealing Studios, the oldest studio in the UK, was a prolific producer of top-quality British filmmaking from around 1930 until the BBC purchased it in 1955. They had traded as an alternative on this side of the pond to the big studios in the US, churning out a consistent and relatively successful line of [...]

Portraying true genius, or even talent, is incredibly difficult in narrative filmmaking for the simple reason that, for the most part, the majority of actors simply do not possess the requisite ability to fulfil the task. That’s not to say they don’t have their own abilities as actors and performers, but it is rare [...]

In the opening scenes of the classic British crime thriller The Long Good Friday, London underworld gangster Harold Shand (played to perfection by Bob Hoskins) says to his partner Victoria (played by a lovely 34 year-old Helen Mirren) on their Thames yacht, “It’s Good Friday, have a Bloody Mary.”You just know you’re of [...]

There comes a point in the life of nearly every critic living that they experience a film which exceeds any boundaries of basic deconstruction. The films exist in a rarefied space in which you become unable to find the words, similes, metaphors and allegorical comparisons which can achieve the kind of grandiose descrip [...]

On Tuesday, May 27, the first season of a ’60s television series that influenced an entire generation of later science fiction shows, most notably, The X-Files, arrives on DVD in a five-disc set of 17 episodes from Paramount. The series is The Invaders.The Quinn-Martin show, which aired for two seasons on ABC between [...]

Foreword: When we were conceptualizing CinemaSpy, one of the columns we felt we ought to offer — and which appear on few, if any, other sites — was one devoted to exploring the classic age of film and television; essentially any properties 25 years old or more. Admittedly, that’s a lot of properties. Given that c [...]

Why I watched Magnum P.I.Of all the detective shows that were so popular in the ‘80s – and there were many, including Simon and Simon, Spencer for Hire and Matt Houston – none was as great as Magnum P.I.Created by Donald Bellisario (who also created JAG and Quantum Leap) and Glen Larson (who was responsible for Battl [...]

San Francisco has been the setting of a lot of exciting movie car chases over the years, but this 1968 police thriller is still the one to beat when it comes to high-octane action on the steep hills of the city by the Bay. The outstanding car chase earned an Oscar for best editing, but the rest of the movie is pretty g [...]