The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Dramatisation of the prickly relationship between P.L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, and Walt Disney during the making of the 1964 film. While the true story may have been cleaned up somewhat, this is a film of enormous charms that is largely made through a triumphant performance from Emma Thompson
Another wackily improbable entry in Hong Kong’s Wu Xia cycle featuring all the wildly fantastical and way over-the-top moves that the genre is renowned for
Sequel to their earlier Wu Xia film, although having nothing in common with it. All the moves are pushed to a level of cartoonish absurdity that proves amazingly silly
Mamoru Hosoda conducts the bizarre notion of an anime version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is a Hamlet that Shakespeare would barely recognise, following a heroine as she makes a journey across the afterlife
Director Paul Bartel and a reasonable name cast make a comedy about the sex lives of the Beverly Hills elites
One of the most obscure films in the oeuvre of Steven Soderbergh, a strange and head-scratchingly surreal satire of workplace and domestic life
In the vein of frat house comedies like Animal House and Porky’s, an embarrassingly cringey film about a teen who is killed while trying to get laid and insists on returning to finish the job
A Michel Gondry film that blurs the line between dream and reality with hilariously offbeat regard. Gondry indulges his eccentricities to the maximum with quite sublime results
An animated film revival of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? This also makes an misguided attempt to build a shared universe among assorted Hanna-Barbera characters
The live-action film version of the popular Hanna-Barbera animated tv series. Despite James Gunn on script, this is not very good, a one-dimensional, no-brain film trying to look like a one-dimensional, no-brain cartoon
Sequel to the live-action Scooby-Doo, this is at least a better film than its predecessor, being more polished in its slapstick and effects but still has no more ambition beyond being a silly no-brain film
One of the more forgettable Woody Allen comedies with Scarlett Johansson as a journalism student who gets tips from the afterlife
Back when Dwayne Johnson was a wrestler billing himself as The Rock, this was a forgettable sword and sorcery effort spun off from his appearance in The Mummy Returns. This led to a surprising number of sequels
The best of an otherwise lightweight, throwaway series. Roel Reiné directs some good action scenes, even if the hackneyed plotting never lets the show rise to anything more than average
Fourth entry in the eminently forgettable sword-and-sorcery series, this heads down into bad movie stakes by writing a series of grating quips over everything, while the action scenes exist in the realm of unbelievability that show that nobody is treating anything with the slightest seriousness
The Scorpion King films are such a low expectation series that it is hard to drum up enthusiasm for a fifth entry. The rehashes stock sword and sorcery cliches and passes its time forgettably
Prequel to The Scorpion King. Unfortunately director Russell Mulcahy allows his broad hand with comedy free reign and the plot is overrun by glib character banter and constant flip modern one-liners
An Edgar Wright directed comic-book adaptation made in a bewildering restless visual style that feels like two different films happening at once, one a sweet nerd romance and the other a completely gonzo superhero film
This is usually regarded as one of the best versions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a British-made production starring Alistair Sim
Musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol starring Albert Finney as Scrooge, this is made on a big budget, leading to an extravagant and often over-produced film
A modernised version of A Christmas Carol that seems to have been construed in the shadow of Ghostbusters right down to casting Bill Murray as Scrooge
Standout thriller with Kim Stanley as a medium who fakes a child kidnapping with husband Richard Attelborough to prove her powers
Dramatic recount of a true-life sensation during the 1950s when an amateur hypnotist claimed that he had regressed a housewife to recall her past life in 19th Century Ireland. The film has an earnestly prostheletysing belief in its own case but sceptical examination pulls holes in its credibility
Lesser budgeted sequel to the 1994 remake of The Jungle Book, which actually comes closer in tone to the original Rudyard Kipling stories
An attempt to copy Ghostbusters concerning a psychic detective agency that degenerates into painfully bad slapstick
One of the most excruciatingly painful films ever made – a softcore comedy in which God and The Devil make a bet to replay the Garden of Eden by reincarnating Adam and Eve throughout history. Filled with ghastly over-the-top performances and much eye-rolling innuendo
Bizarre stop-motion animated version of the farytale that resembles Gumby that takes place in a surreal Eraserhed-like world
This is an appealingly strange Charles Band produced children’s film about a kid who discovers a miniature magical kingdom that is located under the kitchen sink
I really enjoyed Illumination Entertainment’s debut film Despicable Me but thereafter they just seemed to slip into formula and following what every other animation studio is. Despite low initial enthusiasm, they regain their form here, doing nothing radically out of the ordinary but producing a modestly engaging work
Illumination’s The Secret Life of Pets came with a winning concept – a Garfield like series of wry observations on humanity by pets – and this is one amongst the current plague of animated sequels that emerges equally likably
A light whimsical short story about a daydreamer is turned into a bloated and ponderous vehicle for the musical and comedy set-pieces of the perpetually wet-eared Danny Kaye
Ben Stiller’s remake of the unfunny Danny Kaye vehicle about an impractical daydreamer has no more depth than an inspirational postcard and takes a long time to deliver it
Beautifully made animated film that won surprise recognition at the Academy Awards. More a festival film than necessarily a box-office one
Beautifully filmed Victorian-set fantasy in which orphan Dakota Blue Richards moves to her uncle’s estate and discovers the magical secrets it holds
The first film from Don Bluth, a Disney animator who formed his own company vowing a return to the studio’s classic tradition. The results are beautiful and quite magical
John Sayles became one of the foremost independent American filmmakers. In a change of pace here, he makes a film about rural Irish culture and legends
A gay version of Don’t Look Now – a film that takes forever to go anywhere and fails to wind its twists up to anything interesting
Adaptation of Susan Cooper’s popular fantasy series handled by people who have no interest in the material and badly rewrite/mangle it in order try to turn it into a Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings knockoff
Kari Wuhrer stars in a tawdry erotic thriller as an art student who gains clairvoyant abilities and gets caught up in solving a murder
Romance film where John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale meet and leave their details on random items in the belief luck will bring them back together
Not to be confused with the Joss Whedon film, this starts out seeming like a weepy romantic drama before pulling one of the most absurd M. Night Shyamaalan-esque conceptual twists ever put on screen on us
A real what-were-they-thinking turkey where someone had the idea of turning the Beatles’ album into a disco-era film starring The Bee Gees … In trying to contrive a plot around the songs and their surreally psychedelic lyrics, the film frequently makes no sense
Cheap mockbuster from The Asylum that was designed to exploit the success of the flop Prince of Persia. While ostensibly a Sinbad film, this confusingly abandons the Arabian Nights milieu and is set contemporary where Sinbad is not sailor but a corporate CEO stranded on a desert island
Cannon Films produced remake of The Seven Samurai as an Italian gladiator film starring Lou Ferrigno
Ageswap fantasy in which middle-aged Matthew Perry is rejuvenated as a teenage Zac Efron. A glib fantasy that seems made by abstinence campaigners
German animated film about the adventures of Snow White’s Seven Dwarves. Lightweight and trivial, this feels like it has come along ten years too late to the fad for fairytale parodies and mash-ups we had in the mid-2000s with films like Shrek and Hoodwinked!
Ingmar Bergman’s classic work where Max Von Sydow plays a game of chess with Death. A film that seems to carry the philosophical weight of the modern world on its shoulders
An object lessons in how not to adapt a Young Adult series – take a book series about an apprentice witch hunter set in an alternate England and turn it a generic Lord of the Rings copy
One of the classic films from cult stop motion animator Ray Harryhausen, an Arabian Nights fantasy adventure where Harryhausen’s creations prove to be quite wondrous
A unique film about a seamstress who is wound up in a drug deal gone wrong and improvises solutions with her needle and thread. Like Run Lola Run, this rewinds to offer very different versions of events
What starts out seeming like a frat boy comedy about a guy receiving a list of all the women he will sleep with turns into an intriguingly different beast altogether
Sequel to the Hong Kong erotic film, an entirely unrelated work that inflates the original into a madcap Wu Xia film filled with crude, rude humour
Charming and delightful Hong Kong erotic comedy about a scholar who sets out on a journey of sexual freedom
A revival of the 1990s Sex and Zen series of erotic comedies, this comes with the novelty of being presented in 3D
One of the more amusing and better made Troma films – their take on the superhero fad of the early 90s featuring a Japanese-themed superhero
This comes with a fantastic conceptual hook “Man is invited to a meeting with God at a hut in the woods”. Alas, what we get is no more than a work of faith-based cinema that drowns in its feelgood Christianity Lite sentiments and appeal to Middle American wholesomeness
An incomprehensibly, baffling film about a psychic that leaves you wondering what people were thinking when they were making it, let alone how it obtained funding
A serial adaptation of the popular radio superhero, which gets the look of the character perfect but drops all his mystical powers
Beautifully produced film version of the old radio superhero where director Russell Mulcahy does a wonderful job with the period design and adventure
Documentary about Mary Poppins creator P.L. Travers that delves into the questions of her secretive past and often fictionalised biography, while also covering the making of the Disney film
One of the not-quite-rans in Woody Allen’s oeuvre, a homage to Franz Kafka and German Expressionism with Allen as a mousy clerk caught up in the hunt for a strangler
The first of Disney’s live-action comedies, a comic variant on the werewolf story with Tommy Kirk turning into a dog. Mildly amusing but later efforts would do this type of comedy better
The remake of the old Disney comedy becomes a vehicle for Tim Allen, played with a manic slapstickery wherein Allen demonstrates there are few levels of silliness he will travel to in imitating dog-like behaviours
Farrelly Brothers comedy where Jack Black is hypnotised by Tony Robbins and 300 pound Gwyneth Paltrow as beautiful
The Marvel onslaught continues with this resurrection of a martial artist superhero character from the 1970s. Amid the mostly ho-hum MCU offerings of the 2020s, this becomes an energised action vehicle
Hilarious Stephen Chow directed/starring film where he parodies The Matrix et al with Buddhist monks using flying martial arts moves to aid a failing soccer team
I went to see this on the description that called it a horror film about premonitions of disaster but far less interestingly it is a fictional attempt to analyse people’s attempts to grieve over the Fukushima Disaster – not uninteresting but with little interest in being a fantastic film
DreamWorks animated talking fish film that was dismissed in the shadow of Pixar’s earlier Finding Nemo but is perfectly likeable in its own right
Probably the loudest I have laughed and the most unabashed fun I have had in a theatre all year. The most 100% successful of all of Aardman’s films to date at capturing the quirky and uniquely homesy style of their short films, this comes with gags packed in every single frame
Adaptation of the superhero comic is played for comedy, making it very different in emphasis to the other films in the DCEU. The boy into man transformation is played up as essentially Big with superpowers – with appealing results
Shazam! was one of the more enjoyable DCEU superhero offerings, placing a light-hearted spin on the superheroics. This is the sequel
The most lavish of the silent screen adaptations of H. Rider Haggard’s classic, multiply filmed adventure novel about the discovery of a lost city ruled over by an immortal queen
The first sound version of H. Rider Haggard’s lost city adventure about explorers finding an immortal queen (Helen Gahagan). From the producers of the original King Kong
Hammer Films conduct an adaptation of the classic H. Rider Haggard adventure story about the discovery of a lost city and its immortal queen but the epic spectacle never much comes to life
Madcap Hong Kong comedy variant on Firestarter where Chingmy Yau has a curse that she starts fires when aroused
Big screen adaptation of the Will Eisner comic-book and 1950s tv series about a female Tarzan. A blank Tanya Roberts in the title role and a campy script pushes it well into bad movie status
This has one of the most off the wall premises in some time – talking sheep team up to act as detectives and solve the murder of their shepherd. Think Babe meets Agatha Christie. The results are hilarious
Sequel to Gnomeo & Juliet, which retold Shakespeare with garden gnomes. This for some reason adds a garden gnome Sherlock Holmes to the mix. The high speed whirring you hear is probably Arthur Conan Doyle rotating in his grave,
Guy Ritchie’s reinvention of Sherlock Holmes seemed a miscalculated disaster in the offing. It doesn’t radically reinvent the basics but emerges passably well
A not uninteresting sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, this has widely divided reactions among fans
An anthology of short anime pieces from various directors, including creator Katsuhiro Otomo, the cult creator of Akira. The four episodes vary from historical to fantasy to futuristic warfare and, as with any anthology, vary in quality from the okay to the watchable
A second film from John Cameron Mitchell of Hedwig and the Angry Inch fame where Mitchell sets out to chart different flavours of sexuality in the 00s and does so with sometimes funny, othertimes outrageous effect. Included here for a heroine whose orgasm has the ability to cause power fluctuations
Alec Baldwin’s financially troubled modernised remake of The Devil and Daniel Webster comes to the screen as a compromised vision
Another of Robert Rodriguez’s children’s films about the wacky chaos caused by the discovery of a magic wishing stone. Nothing earth-shattering but Rodriguez has a lot of fun with the visual absurdities
A film of fascinating ambiguities that stars Alan Bates as a mystery man who appears to John Hurt and demonstrates a killing shout he learned among the Aborigines
Before this was spun out into a series of ho-hum sequels, the original was an animated film that burst with a freshness and a series of winning voice characterisations
Shrek was a fresh and original hit. The first of four insipid sequels, this seems to merely coast by on our liking of the characters while upping the fairytale parody
The fourth of the Shrek films. By this point, the freshness and originality of the first film has been buried under animated film formula, while the plot is a tired rehash of It’s a Wonderful Life
The third of the Shrek films settles in with a formulaic blandness where the characters turn up more because everyone expects them to than the film finds much for them to do
From cult director Abel Ferrara, a film described as being being about the language of dreams in which Willem Dafoe drifts through a series of surreal landscapes searching for the meaning of life
The first of a two-part silent Fritz Lang film based on the Teutonic legend. Lang directs with an epic visual majesty that rivals today’s Lord of the Rings films
This directorial debut for Mary Lambert is a stylish but empty-headed erotic mystery that eventually settles for a fantastical twist ending
Bizarre Bruce Lee conceived conceived martial arts film, a bizarre allegorical work of philosophy steeped in inscrutable Zen epigrams
New Zealand made film about a deafmute boy in a Cook Islands tribe and his mystic communion with a sea turtle
A directorial outing from actor/playwright Sam Shepard set in the West as Richard Harris buys an Indian daughter for his son River Phoenix
Adaptation of a classic Australian children’s story about a breed of mythic horses. Starring an unknown Russell Crowe.
New Age film where a psychic makes a prediction about the couples at a party splitting up and how this affects all present
Isaac Ezban makes another conceptually out there film about people trapped in a bus station who all start transforming into the likeness of the same man. Much has been modelled on The Twilight Zone and this has a fascinating weirdness
Film set in a small 19th Century Orthodox Jewish village struggling to deal with the modern world, featuring Noah Taylor as a fool troubled by visions of The Devil
Ghastly children’s film with Martin Short as an inept fairy godmother. Inanity ensues where there seems no ceiling on how over-the-top performances are allowed to go