The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Anime from Yoshiaki Kawajiri about a war with a demon dimension that falls halfway between H.P. Lovecraft and a hard-boiled detective thriller and brims over wit fascinatingly pathological sexual imagery
Live-action version of a manga that was previously made as an anime. This Hong Kong-made version lacks the perverse sexual imagery of the anime but does feature the wildly fantastical action scenes of HK fantasy
The second half of the film adaptation of the musical Wicked. This essentially operates as Wizard of Oz fanfiction and substantially wrenches the characters and backstories from the 1939 film out of shape to write its own story
The first half of a two-part adaptation of the hit Broadway musical that is a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, showing The Wicked Witch’s origin story
The worst film from the usually great Larry Cohen, an unfunny comedy in which a household is taken over by a witch. Bette Davis quit soon into shooting and is replaced partway through by Barbara Carrera
Likeable animated film about a group of zoo animals making an escape that ended up being overshadowed by the similar, more high-profile Madagascar
One of David Lynch’s finest films, with lovers Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern on the run in a road movie that travels through deranged places of the mind and explodes with crazy energy
Quirkily eccentric comedy written by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan about two feuding brothers with pyrokinetic abilities
Outside of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, George Lucas has not had much success. This epic fantasy was a big flop where Ron Howard’s lightweight touch fails to make a one-dimensional plot fly
A Roald Dahl children’s film that has become a cult classic, set in a deliriously nonsensical world with Gene Wilder give a sinisterly threatening performance in the title role
Monty Python’s Terry Jones conducts a live-action adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s story
Amiable live-action adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s work made for the BBC with an all-star cast
Wim Wenders’ exquisitely lovely film about angels that hover over West Berlin invisibly observing the human condition. One of the most beautiful of all paeans to the human condition.
On the slight side as a Disney theatrical film, nevertheless this keeps to the essence of the original tales and comes with some appealingly playful fourth-wall breaking visuals
Akiva Goldsman, a screenwriter who has laid a trail of devastation through the genre, attempts to film a classic fantasy novel that has aptly described as unfilmable, resulting in a curtailed story that works in individual scenes but is mostly a spawling patchwork of fantasy elements and a romance that never seems to spark
Flop and muchly hated biopic of John Belushi that turns his life into a bad farce. Included here for the presence of an angel that guides Belushi through his life
Imagine a version of The Craft with a few dashes of The Breakfast Club – all shot as a Found Footage film. This is far more entertaining than one expects it to be
Nicolas Roeg and Jim Henson collaborate on an adaptation of a Roald Dahl book. Roeg leaves the grotesquerie and gleeful malice intact making this one of the best Dahl adaptations
Robert Zemeckis’s remake of the Roald Dahl story and Nicolas Roeg film proves a head-scratching effort that misfires on almost every cue
Deliriously frothy and enjoyable George Miller film with Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer as three witches who conjure forth Devil figure – Jack Nicholson in full barnstorming mode
Sequel/modernisation (it is confusing what) to The Wizard of Oz relocated in New York. This tv mini-series may be the cheapest work ever served up bearing the Oz name and flounders amid the shabbiness of its effects and utter lack of magic its director conjures
Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia makes what is essentially a comedy version of From Dusk Till Dawn albeit with witches instead of vampires. This has one of the funniest openings I’ve seen in some time but thereafter dissipates into broadly farcical and overlong runnings around
A low-budget film that prefigures the big-budget Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters in turning the fairytale brother and sister into witchslayers in a generic fantasy adventure plot
Musical modernisation of The Wizard of Oz relocated in New York City with an All-Black cast. Despite a clear budget arrayed, the film lumbers and never much comes to life
A majorly unfunny variant on the Arabian Nights comedy featuring Dick Shawn as a demoted genie. The Thief of Bagdad as shabby flying carpet burlesque
The earliest surviving film version of The Wizard of Oz , one of a number made during the silent era. It makes interesting contrast to the 1939 version but at best serves as a series of highlights from the story and drawing heavily on the stage version in its often crude methods of presentation
An indisputable classic fantasy … a gorgeous sparkling fantasy that made full use of Technicolor in an era dominated by black-and-white and is told in such bold and earnestly heartfelt tones that it becomes the nearest we have to a piece of genuine American mythology
An earlier silent version of The Wizard of Oz, which twists the story considerably out of shape as a vehicle for the slapstick comedy of star Larry Semon who plays The Scarecrow
Film based on the character created by Mike Jittlov about an amateur filmmaker/effects artist trying to make it
Ralph Bakshi left behind counter-culture animation to embark on this original fantasy film that comes with a trippily surreal quality, mixing fantasy tropes with a science-fictional rationalisation
A painfully cheap entry in the 1980s fad for sword and sorcery films.
Mamoru Hosoda proves himself as one of the major directors in anime with this tender, lovely and enormously affecting work about a mother raising two werewolf children.
The third film from Irish animator Tomm Moore, a beautiful Princess Mononoke-like tale of a girl’s friendship with persecuted werewolves in the forest
Criminally neglected Victorian children’s fantasy. Superbly designed with a beautifully dark and much more adult emotional range than a regular children’s film
European arthouse film that feels like it should have been a horror film. This starts well but when it veers into genre territory, its big twist has been done by too many genre films of recent and holds nothing interesting in its treatment
Frothy work of Magical Realism with Penelope Cruz as a woman whose cooking weaves a magical spell
Madcap screwball comedy with Danny Kaye required to pose as his dead twin brother who is then taken over by his ghost during a trial
Fine animated version of the DC Comics superheroine that gets the character just right and tells the story in a way that eclipses all previous filmed versions
After three films of mixed success, DC Comics finally get their Cinematic Universe right. Director Patty Jenkins blows all of the others away with a series of exhilarating action sequences that have an entire audience cheering
The second of the DC Universe Animated Original Movies made as a standalone entry for Wonder Woman, clearly building on the success of the Gal Gadot film
Stuart (Re-Animator) Gordon adapts a Ray Bradbury play about five men who buy a suit that has magical properties. Bradbury is a great writer but this drowns in overripe dialogue, bad racial caricatures and Gordon’s typically over-the-top propensities
Anthology of Brothers Grimm stories from George Pal where the brothers are wound in as characters. The film’s effectiveness is killed by Pal pitching everything down at a mawkish and simple-minded level
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory has become a cult classic. This offers a Willy Wonka origin story but seems to be far too nice a work that is missing the dark bite of the original
Strange surrealist New Zealand made film that emerges as a Brothers Grimm fairytale as directed by a David Lynch or a Guy Maddin
A spinoff from Pixar’s Cars series (although is not in itself a Pixar film but comes from Disney) that sets out to do the same with anthropomorphic planes. Amiable, even likeable but more a wannabe that seems like it is trying to be than actually hits the cleverness and creative heights of Pixar
A Disney live-action comedy that puts a Tarzan character on the athletics field for some inspired nonsense
Sequel to the Clash of the Titans remake. Much the same as before except with bigger monsters and more CGI spectacle that washes over you with all the substance of the light from a disco ball
One of the best Disney animated films in ages. Has the winning concept of the secret lives of the characters inside videogames. Imagine Tron by way of Toy Story. The animators have clever fun with the idea, while the film creates a character arc that become the strength of the film
High-profile adaptation of the classic children’s work by Madeline L’Engle that has been entirely wrenched out of shape by its director to become a heavy-handed message about diversity. It is SF made by people who think the genre is just eye candy and absurdly over-the-top costumes
Oddball film set in an afterlife for suicides. You keep expecting the film to burst out into a vein of rich black comedy that never comes and you are left with a film that feels as though it is being eccentric for the sake of it.
A Chinese work of meta-fiction where a man is tasked with killing the author of a book that is having effects on the real world
Unique venture into meta-fiction by Wai Ka Fai that creates fascinatingly wound layers of fiction and reality that eventually become so complex that one gets lost
Quentin Dupieux’s follow-up to the hilariously culty Rubber, an absurdist film about a man setting out to find his missing dog. You keep expecting something as mind-bendingly hilarious as Rubber but this is more of a mild amusement in the David Lynch-ian deadpan surrealist vein
Martial Arts/Wu Xia fantasy with various people involved in a competition while hunting for a fabled sword
Frenetic Hong Kong comedy about fairy enchantments involving all the cast undergoing gender reversals
The much-anticipated sequel to the Gal Gadot starring Wonder Woman is a highly divided success, partly due to an inane plot centred around a magic wishing stone
Anime involving a superheroic battle for the fate of the world. Dazzling eye candy but too many characters and subplots make things confusing
Bizarre disco fantasy that could have only been conceived out of 80s cocaine madness. Olivia Newton-John is a Greek muse come to Earth to inspire the building of a roller disco. Frequently cited as a bad movie classic, this has mind-boggling scenes that have to be seen to be believed
Japan’s Takashi Miike gained a cult with a series of films that went to extremes or crossed way over taboo lines; his films from the mid-2000s have become more experiments that produce a head-scratching “huh?”. Case in point being this Yakuza vampire film that frequently feels like much of it was being made up on the spot
Not very funny comedy from Harold Ramis and Judd Apatow where Jack Black and Michael Cera are cavemen who stumble through many incidents from the Old Testament
Dull live-action tv remake of the Rankin-Bass stop-motion animated Christmas special
Film with minor Magical Realist touches about life in rural Malaysia that appears to be made without a plot and in which nothing happens. Dull to the point of inertia
The third of The Beatles films, in this case an animated work that features likenesses of The Fab Four as they trip through some amazing nonsensical psychedelic visuals
Feelgood Danny Boyle film that most audiences missed was also an alternate history film set in a world where The Beatles never existed and one sideslipped singer is able to claim their songs as his own
A Chinese-made Wu Xia film with an exquisitely polished blend of CGI and visuals. This rather intriguingly operates as a blend of Wu Xia and murder mystery
The live-action adaptation of the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon series is a film construed entirely around slapstick sequences that never requires you to engage your brain in any way
An absolutely extraordinary work of Folk Horror about a young witch who learns the ability to inhabit the bodies of others
Tsui Hark delivers a prequel to his 2010 Detective Dee film. This takes the character back far more to his original nature as a Chinese equivalent of Sherlock Holmes. That is if you can imagine Sherlock Holmes taking place as a flying swordsman film filled with sea monsters and wildly fantastic martial combat scenes (*)
Steven Spielberg produced film about an adolescent Sherlock Holmes often feels like it is Holmes being pitched as an Indiana Jones adventure but comes with some beautifully made touches
The epic fantasy quest film is well due a parody, unfortunately this majorly unfunny effort written by its leading man Danny McBride only makes a beeline for the witless and vulgar
Makoto Shinkai anime that starts as a light and fluffy piece about a boy and a girl who keep waking up in each other’s bodies but expands out into a wholly different story, gaining unexpected emotional depths
Francis Ford Coppola film that came out the same time as The Case of Benjamin Button where Tim Roth regains his youth after being hit by a lightning bolt
An animated film based on the hit playing card phenomenon, which proves largely incomprehensible to anybody not versed in the game
A very rare anime film about a fairy who descends to Earth from the heavens and takes the side of downtrodden peasants in standing against a greedy landowner and a demon god
Cleverly made Woody Allen mockumentary in which he plays a human chameleon who has managed to appear in the margins of historical events
Lush, visually extravagant Chinese-made Wu Xia film, shot with an epic widescreen eye that looks amazing. It falls down somewhat when the two leads become replaced by CGI and only look like the avatars from a videogame
Animals in a zoo offer schmuck zoo keeper Kevin James romantic advice based on their mating behaviours. The premise runs out of steam soon in, the rest is an irritating smartass CGI talking animals comedy
This nominally tells three slice-of-life tales but in each the principal character is creating a book or film about one of the other characters. This becomes a meta-fiction of considerable cleverness as we see how the problems of one character end up reflected in the other character’s story
A really good Disney animated film set in a world that imagines what might happen if animals lived in cities, this is an ingenious reworking of the talking animals premise that overflows with visual ingenuity and warm humour
Zootopia was one of Disney’s freshest animated works in a decade largely marked only by mediocrity. This is a sequel where the fantastically original world of the first film slips into being just another Disney IP
Tsui Hark’s follow-up to Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain the film that popularised Wu Xia cinema. The point where Tsui discovered CGI and latches onto it to do more than just show flying swordsmen but create an exquisitely dreamy world of pure fantastique imagination
The modern beginnings of Wu Xia and the flying swordsman film. Tsui Hark creates a totally nutso film filled with wild martial arts battles with demonic forces. The results are out of this world