The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The twelfth film from Hayao Miyzaki at age 82, a quasi-autobiographical if a slightly less classic work. A renaissance of many Miyazaki themes as a boy follows a heron though into a strange fantasy otherworld
Brazilian animated film that comes with a lovely simplicity – all jagged washes of colour, characters as simple lines, endless patterns and a minimalist plot – out of which it manages to weave an incredibly pretty eye candy
Gil Kenan dips into motion-capture animation to make this charming and likeable Christmas film that in effect tells a Santa Claus origin story, one that works without drowning in saccharine sentiment
A film where you are struggling to find any easy labelling. What it is is an hilariously ultra-violent and over-the-top parody of an action movie that will have your sides splitting
A beautifully sweet and tender film where teenager Lucy Deakins moves to a new home and befriends Jay Underwood, the autistic boy next door who dreams of being able to fly
Michael Powell was one of the greatest and most underrated post-War British directors. This was his last film, a bizarre children’s film about a boy being turned yellow and visited by an alien
A very young Dean Stockwell stars in this strange anti-war fable about a boy who wakes up to find his hair has turned green
A wickedly irreverent and even occasionally blasphemous comedy in which God is a scruffy, bad-tempered man living in Brussels who spends all his time devising ways to make humans miserable
Another of Guy Maddin’s silent movie pastiches, all shot in a deadpan style throwing together a hilariously convoluted madcap plot involving child detectives, mad scientists and spy capers
Comedy with a head-scratching premise where a couple discover a teapot that produces money whenever they hurt themselves. Such a loopy premise could work as a black comedy but this plays itself as a frothy light fantasy
A real head-scratcher from Pixar that seems to have been pitched as a cross between Braveheart and Disney’s Brother Bear. The usual Pixar humour and polish makes for a mostly amiable film but never lifts the show out of a lame duck premise
This is a charming and delightful animated film about a group of talking household appliances appliances that set out on a quest to find their young master. Little seen at the time but two sequels followed.
Third of the Brave Little Toaster films, this takes the talking appliances to Mars and comes with an appealingly zany sense of humour
The first of two Brave Little Toaster sequels, this plays more along the lines of a regular animated film formula but has its charms
Stunning, emotionally raw work from Lars von Trier with Emily Watson as a wife in a small religious community who is driven to extremes of masochistic self-sacrifice in the belief she is saving her husband’s life
Disastrous Brooke Shields starring film adaptation of the famous comic-strip about a girl reporter. Nobody involved is taking the show seriously and everything is blown into camp farce.
One of the most eccentric and strangest films in the oeuvre of Robert Altman in which Bud Cort set out to build a set of wings to fly, amid aid from angels and lots of bird symbolism
Classic Hong Kong Wu Xia film featuring much aerial swordplay and lushly dressing/lighting but also a work of wildly uneven tone
Sequel to the earlier Wu Xia film, which brings back the leads in an enjoyable adventure that places much more emphasis on flying swordplay
A Dolph Lundgren starring action film about a coup in a kingdom that exists as an oddly atemporal mix of clashing historical periods
Made by Walden Media following the success of their The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, a well-made adaptation of a Christian children’s book even if it sits uncertainly between gentle realism and the push to make it a fantasy film
The film adaptation of a hit musical from Alan Jay Lerner and Fredreick Loewe in which Gene Kelly discovers love in a village that exists outside of time in the Scottish highlands
Set in an alternate version of the present where fantasy creatures – orcs, elves, fairies – live alongside humans, this comes with a cleverness, while being played as a buddy cop drama that anchors it with a realism
Martin Scorsese returns to the vision of urban hell he gave us in Taxi Driver with Nicolas Cage as an ambulance driver haunted the dead he sees. Powerful, blackly funny at times, if not quite up there as another Taxi Driver
One of the flop Disney animated films of the 2000s, set among the Inuit with the head-scratching premise of a warrior who is transformed into a bear
Probably the least satisfying of Terry Gilliam’s films that turns the real-life fairytale authors into scam ghost hunters in an adventure. Purportedly the subject of behind the scenes troubles, the film never quite comes to life on screen
Vincent Gallo’s muchly ridiculed directorial effort is an unbelievably indulgent film consisting of long, tedium-inducing scenes where nothing happens. It does arrive at a a surprise left field ending that travels into genre territory
Comedy in which God appears to Jim Carrey and grants him His powers for one week. Expectedly the film is of zero theological depth and all about Carrey going completely over-the-top
Akira director/creator Katsuhiro Otomo returns with this live-action manga adaptation about a wandering exorcist. Very different to any of Otomo’s anime, this is much quieter and rooted in Japanese folklore but has some undeniably way out scenes
The second film from Pixar. One of their slighter and usually overlooked works, this is nevertheless an enjoyably eccentric reworking of The Seven Samurai set amidst a circus troupe of talking insects
The first film from the great Alan Parker, a 1920s gangster film but where the entire show is played out with kids, which include a young Jodie Foster. Regarded as a classic by many, this is a one-gimmick film dependent on kids (not) being able to play a complex range of adult emotions
Painfully derivative US-made attempt to jump aboard the popularity of Wu Xia following The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. There are talented people involved who should have known better
Pitched as another Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, this has multiple stories, a cluttered look and a bizarreness that comes out more like a Wu Xia version of Scott Pilgrim vs the World
Amiable romantic comedy with Demi Moore as a clairvoyant who dispenses prophetic advice to everybody while caught in her own romantic entanglements
Every so often a film stops you dead in your tracks with its WTF premise. This is one such – a film about a man who develops a fetish for sticking objects up his ass and causes household objects, pets and children to disappear up there
One of the most amazing of the Wu Xia (flying swordsman) films from Hong Kong in the 1990s, this explodes with out of this world fantastical action scenes
A conte cruel that delights in piling humiliations onto obnoxious rich kid Chris Elliott who is shanghaied aboard a ship. This comes in an absurdist vein not dissimilar to the works of producer Tim Burton
This was Hollywood’s first film featuring an all-Black cast, a musical in which enjoys from both Heaven and Hell come down to engage in a war over a man’s soul
Film about the disappearance of a girl in a lakeside community, this unexpectedly builds out with a considerable conceptual dexterity into something else altogether
A South Korean film that remakes The Caller about a girl who finds she can make phone calls across time to another woman only to find that the caller is a psychopath who begins to wreak havoc with her timeline
A horror version of Frequency where Rachelle Lefevre has phone conversations across time with a disturbed woman who then starts causing people to disappear and altering the timeline. Cleverly told and with some chilling twists
The Arthurian legends become the basis of this filmed version of a musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. On screen with a name cast, the film is slow and stodgy
A Canadian film where a corrupt politician makes the slow realisation that he is a character inside a film. The comedy heads for obvious places at times but the film is carried by the originality and amusement of its premise
This French film is an uncredited copy of Peggy Sue Got Married wherein director/star Noemie Lvovsky a dissatisfied divorcee who is propelled back to her high school graduating year and gets to relive her life choices
Eddie Murphy – one of the funniest talents of the 1980s – has been largely absent for much of the 2010s. He returns here with a Christmas comedy in which he is the recipient of a curse given to him by an evil Santa elf
The film that Bill Maher would prefer to forget. Beyond the deliberately absurd title, this is an amusing spoof of the jungle adventure and contains a far cleverer degree of wit than you expect
A low-budget Coming of Age story about growing up in an Italian-American neighbourhood. Ralph Macchio turns up as a ghostly saxophonist to offer advice
Amiable comedy adapted from an Oscar Wllde story with Charles Laughton as a ghost condemned to walks the family castle for his cowardice. Contains much Wartime comedy about the clash between British and American cultures
A cheaply made Arabian Nights fantasy adventure that came out seeking to copy ride the coattails of the success of Ray Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
The second of the Care Bears films, light, insubstantial and rather sweet as pre-adolescent creatures of indeterminate gender romp around in their cloud kingdom banishing bad feelings
The third of the Care Bears film conducts a crossover with Alice in Wonderland, although it is an adaptation that is liberal in its treatment of Lewis Carroll to say the least
The third film from Guy Maddin film. This feels like a parody/homage to German Expressionism all filmed on deliberately unreal sets and purple dialogue played with an hilarious deadpan
A mockbuster from The Asylum released to take advantage of Pixar’s Cars 3, this is actually a much better film that you expect it to be
A Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that has gained a classic status. On the other hand, it doesn’t resonate so well today in its story about the redemption of a wife-beater.
A horror film about the life of Jesus as a child. That’s not quite what we end up getting but it is enough to give this a bizarre freakshow appeal and get this site watching. Behind that though, this is surprisingly traditional
Winning animated film from Pixar based around the appealingly original idea of vehicles having personalities. The idea is spun out with considerable wit and sophistication. Two sequels followed.
Sequel to Pixar’s Cars. While the original was a cutely appealing concept with a gentle contemplative message, this plays as more of an out-and-out spy caper
Another of the weaker Pixar sequels. This lacks the fun among the anthropomorphic vehicles that its predecessors had with a hardly inspiring story about its hero feeling old and over-the-hill
Quite magical debut film that showed great promise for director Sean Ellis in its unique premise about a bored supermarket employee on the night shift who appears able to freeze time
Film adaptation of the popular Casper the Friendly Ghost comic book ends up being like its title character – cute but insubstantial. Mostly this feels driven by slapstick scenes.
The first of the video-released sequels to the Casper the Friendly Ghost film, this is played down to children and comes with much in the way of slapstick
The second of the video-released sequels to Casper where this time he crosses over to meet Wendy the Good Little Witch as played by Hilary Duff
British quota quickie that is a likeable light fantasy comedy about a haunted Scottish castle and comes peopled with a cast of eccentrics
French film that was nominated for the 2011 Best Animated Film at the Oscars. Cute but over-rated, the film is all highly stylised hand-drawn caricature that looks great but never works very hard to engage in terms of its characters
Adaptation of the Dr Seuss book made following the success of Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The book is dragged down into noisy slapstick chaos, capped by a badly unrestrained Mike Myers as The Cat
Studio Ghibli anime in which a girl saves the life of a cat only to be drawn into a world of cats where a cat prince decides she will be his bride
Baffling and pretentious Canadian-made surrealist film with Scheherazade (from Arabian Nights) in a psychiatric asylum making up stories all derived from tabloid headlines
The film version of the smash Andrew Lloyd Webber musical phenomenon was widely ridiculed. Seen, it is a colourful and absorbing entity and by no means as bad as its rap gives it
Here the cutely appealing idea of a talking animals film conducted in live-action a la Babe has been blended with a tongue-in-cheek spy adventure. The results are enjoyably silly
Cats & Dogs was amiable but this sequel struggles against the irritatingly cutsie elements that have come to dominate this mini-genre of live-action talking animals films
The long-planned Halle Berry-starring Catwoman movie proved a widely ridiculed bomb. The film throws out the comic-book Catwoman and instead opts for an approach the frequently collapses into the risible
Animated adventure given over to Catwoman that comes with an appealing sense of humour that easily erases all memory of the Halle Berry film
Colourful and frothy whimsy from Fina Torres in the Magical Realist tradition about a woman engaged in a series of romantic mishaps in Paris
Vastly over-praised French New Wave film that is a ghost story of sorts. Three hours plus of tediously protracted happenings that don’t seem to be about anything at all
A rather hilarious live-action manga adaptation that depicts the inner workings of the human body in terms of a series of talking blood cells. Not dissimilar to the US-made Osmosis Jones
Critical favourite that he is, I find Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s have some incredibly eerie, haunted moments. But these sit alongside banal, uneventful happenings that never seem to intersect in a plot
From the director of the hit Dirty Dancing, an inane romantic comedy in which Cybill Shepard thinks her daughter’s boyfriend Robert Downey Jr is her reincarnated husband
The film adaptation of a popular radio series about a Westerner who has trained in the Eastern mystic arts and uses his powers to create illusions in the fight against crime. One of the first screen superheroes.
A raucous and eminently predictable variant on the bodyswap comedy that also manages to be expertly played by leads Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds and pulls off some genuine laugh-out-loud moments
Adaptation of a book by NZ author Margaret Mahy. Mahy has a sublimely poetic turn of phrase in the writing but the film strips the book down to the point we get no more than a by-the-numbers Young Adult work
A very strange surrealist film about the strange characters that populate a rundown hotel. Includes reincarnation, alien bug people and John Malkovich as a psychiatrist with red hair in a bow
Tim Burton’s remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a peculiarly lifeless confection that fails to find any of the zaniness of the original, something that one would have thought would have been Burton’s forte
A banal Zac Efron starring attempt to rewrite The Sixth Sense for the mopily sensitive teenage Gothic Chick Lit audience weaned on Twilight with Efron as a cemetery groundskeeper who talks to the dead
A classic animated film. A delightful film about a young pig that seeks to change his fate and gets aid from a spider that can spell. A theatrical outing for Hanna-Barbera, creator of tv’s The Flintstones et al
Charlotte’s Web gets the Babe treatment and is turned into a live-action film with CGI barnyard animals and name actors. Here the enormous charms of the original are replaced by cute and mawkish cues
The films of Bill Plympton have gained a cult following for their absurdist humour and surreal animation. This is Plympton’s take on relationships, a wild fantasia of imagery and transmogrifications that is a world away from Disney/Pixar offerings
Head-scratching animated oddity from Disney that adapts the talking animal fairytale only to throw in a series of bizarre plot elements that end up as an alien invasion story
The first full-length Claymation film from the UK’s Aardman Animations. With typical Aardman eccentricity, this is a parody of a WWII escape film conducted with talking chickens
After 23 years, Aardman Animation make a sequel to their first feature film. Another chicken caper film where they try to capture some of its dotty charms and largely succeed
Famous surrealist short film made as a collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, full of the shock juxtapositions and symbolism you associate with either
Makoto Shinkai conducts a flawless capturing of Hiyao Miyazaki’s style – the clean simplicity of the animation, reverence for nature, the tender intimacy of the characters – in this beautifully animated work about the discovery of an underground realm
My introduction to Wu Xia – imagine some vision of Kwaidan as directed by Sam Raimi, filled with sensationally beautiful and out of this world imagery and completely nutsoid fantastical battles with ghosts and demons
A Chinese Ghost Story was one of the greatest Hong Kong fantasy films; this remake gets everything wrong. The aerial combat scenes are replaced by CGI, the characters rewritten and the Buddhist elements eliminated
Sequel to the sensational A Chinese Ghost Story, this reunites the principal talents and actors but is not quite as snappy as the original, placing more of an emphasis on comedy
The second sequel to A Chinese Ghost Story, a slighter effort too reliant on the plot beats of the original. Where it does work is in the enormous degree of slapstick energy with which proceedings are conducted
A Chinese Ghost Story was a classic in Hong Kong cinema, followed by two sequels and then animated spinoff sold in the West under the name of series producer and cult director Tsui Hark
Another adaptation of Journey to the West. Coming from Jeffrey Lau, a director who specialises in rowdy, slapstick films, this is the most nutso adaptation of the story ever, winding in everything from alien visitors and Transformers
Rather funny film that parodies the Hong Kong fad for lush erotic films that popped up in the 1990s. It even manages to wind in a parody of A Chinese Ghost Story
Adaptation of a children’s book by James Bond creator Ian Fleming concerning a magical flying car. This is clearly trying to be another Mary Poppins and has been mounted as a lavish musical
Magical Realism film where Juliette Binoche’s magic chocolates serve to unleash passions in a conservative French village. An incredibly overrated film that was for some reason nominated for an Academy Award Best Picture