The Passion of the Christ (2004)
Mel Gibson wants to give us a film that shows Jesus’s suffering leading up to the Crucifixion but has taken it to such an extreme that he has actually created a Torture Porn film that gives the Saw and Hostel franchises a run for their money
The Patriot (1998)
Steven Seagal action film in which he plays a former virologist fighting a militia group threatening to unleash a deadly virus
The Peanut Butter Solution (1985)
Strange Canadian children’s film about a boy who goes bald and is then given a peanut butter solution that causes wild uncontrolled hair growth
The Peanuts Movie (2015)
The comic-strip Peanuts is a wryly whimsical depiction of childhood. The movie version has been taken up by Blue Sky Studios, the ones guilty for the repetitive sequelitis that most modern animation has descended to – somehow you suspect that Charles Schulz’s intention wasn’t to reduce it to a series of slapstick set-pieces
The Penny Dreadful Picture Show (2013)
Not to be confused with the recent tv series Penny Dreadful, this is another in the recent spate of multi-director horror anthologies – The ABCs of Death, V/H/S films etc. Directed with a retro vibe, the episodes are expectedly uneven but better than might be expected from the hands involved
The People (1972)
Quite magical Francis Ford Coppola produced film about a schoolteacher who discovers she had taken a position in a town of alien refugees
The People That Time Forgot (1977)
The third in the trilogy of Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations with Doug McClure. This has much imagination despite the special effects often not being up to the task
The People Under the Stairs (1991)
Wes Craven in which a young thief breaks into a home where a crazed couple imprison children and have turned the house into a series of deathtraps
The People vs. George Lucas (2011)
Documentary about Star Wars fandom that critically takes on George Lucas’s merchandising and disappointment with the prequels
The People Who Own the Dark (1976)
Spanish film about a group of orgiasts at a villa who survive a nuclear explosion outside but are then held at siege from an attack by blinded villagers
The Perfect Nanny (2000)
Modest psycho-thriller with Tracy Nelson as a psychopathic babysitter who kills all in the way to romancing her employer
The Perfect Tenant (2000)
Okay psycho-thriller with Maxwell Caulfield as the tenant who moves into Linda Purl’s sleepout with the intention of taking revenge against her
The Perfect Weapon (2016)
Steven Seagal makes an SF film. Even more bizarrely, Seagal plays the villain for one of the few times in his career, namely the dictator of a dystopian future. An overweight and aging Seagal has a handful of scenes philosophising, while the bulk of the film is a super-soldier plot carried by others
The Perfect Wife (2001)
Psycho-thriller with Shannon Sturges as a woman who marries Perry King with the intent of destroying his life
The Perfect Woman (1949)
One of the first depictions of an android on film, a madcap British comedy of manners about the creation of an android woman
The Perfection (2018)
Quite the most insane film I have seen in recent memory. The rivalry between two classical music students reminds of Black Swan albeit wound up to the histrionic level of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, all added to the most pleasingly twisty mess-with-your assumptions script
The Perils of Pauline (1967)
Pearl White was the original serial heroine in The Perils of Pauline. During the 1960s Batman craze, the serial was revived as this campy comedy
The Phantom (1943)
Serial adaptation of the famous comic-strip superhero. One of the better serial comic-book adaptations, featuring some great cliffhangers and maintaining great faith to the comic-strip original
The Phantom (1996)
Big screen adaptation of the popular comic-strip superhero. This aims for the tone of an old fashioned serial adventure and is nicely mounted but crucially never comes to life.
The Phantom (2009)
A mini-series based on the classic comic-book masked hero but the attempts to modernise The Phantom for the post-Dark Knight era seem bizarrely awkward
The Phantom Carriage (1921)
Silent film whose greatest footnote is that it was Ingmar Bergman’s favourite film. Has some extraordinary fantastic images, even if these are technically primitive today. Less effective is the modern attempts to view it as a ghost story, when it is more a morality play akin to A Christmas Carol
The Phantom Empire (1935)
An oddity from the heyday of the serial that has singing cowboy star Gene Autry discover the doorway to an underground kingdom on his ranch Made with a crude pulp vigour
The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1955)
A rather dull 1950s atomic monster movie about a series of bodies that are found on a seashore that lead to a scientist who has created a radioactive mutant monster
The Phantom Gunslinger (1970)
A mind-boggling oddity – a slapstick comedy Western where there seems no limit on how nutty things are allowed to go, including characters venturing to Heaven and Hell
The Phantom of the Megaplex (2000)
A Disney Channel film, this has the amusing idea of translating The Phantom of the Opera to a modern multiplex and telling it as a children’s story
The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
The first and still the best version of the story. Made when The Phantom was a horror story rather than a weepie romance, everything from Lon Chaney’s performance to the amazing Gothic design and directorial set-pieces is classic
The Phantom of the Opera (1962)
Hammer Films’ attempt to update the classic story went astray – the Paris opera becomes a dreary English repertory house and Terence Fisher misses the tale’s grandeur
The Phantom of the Opera (1989)
On the back of popularity of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and the Elm Street films, Robert Englund was cast in this version where the emphasis is on the slasher element, which works far better than you might think
The Phantom of the Opera (1990)
Lush tv mini-series with Charles Dance as the Phantom, this stands too much in the shadow of the then recent Lloyd Webber musical and its making The Phantom into a romantic figure as opposed to a horror icon
The Phantom of the Opera (1998)
Dario Argento rescues The Phantom from musical romance and returns it to being a horror film. Despite a beautifully mounted production, Julian Sands’ Phantom is too weak and wimpy
The Phantom of the Opera (2004)
The long-planned film adaptation of The Phantom musical emerges as disaster under Joel Schumacher. The Phantom’s presence has all been watered down and the film exists as no more than a series of scenographic poses
The Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Predating The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Brian De Palma conducts a very funny parody of The Phantom of the Opera (and several other horror films) as a glitter rock musical
The Phantom Planet (1961)
Dull and forgettable space exploration film where an astronaut is stranded on a planet and ends up in a romantic triangle and an alien invasion
The Phantom Tollbooth (1970)
Chuck Jones, the director of numerous Warner Brothers cartoons, adapts a popular children’s book that comes with a dizzying array of surreal visuals and puns
The Phantom Treehouse (1984)
Australian animation about a boy’s adventure on an island amid pirates, inventors and magic creatures that in its better moments suggests a collision between Peter Pan and Pufnstuf. Unfortunately, the film is made with a budget that must have been well within four figures
The Philadelphia Experiment (1984)
Based on a non-fiction, fringe science book that makes claims that the US Navy conducted experiments that turned a ship invisible during WWII, this spins the idea out into a modest time travel story
The Philadelphia Experiment (2012)
This Syfy Channel production can’t seem to decide if it is a sequel or a remake of the 1984 film. Michael Paré turn up in both versions but goes from being the hero to a menacing heavy. The original had its moments but this is generic and routine in all ways
The Phoenix Incident (2015)
An earlier treatment of the Phoenix Lights incidents, also a Found Footage film and with an almost identical plot to Phoenix Forgotten. The Found Footage has delved into the alien abduction theme before and this is an average treatment without any notable distinction
The Phoenix Project (2015)
Film contained in the single location of a house as a team of four scientists struggle to perfect a process that will resurrect the dead. Normally, you would expect this is to come out as a horror film but the approach here is more akin to a film like Primer
The Photon Effect (2010)
Passable amateur-made superhero film clearly inspired by DC’s The Flash. While the film is written with some at times snappy dialogue and has two good lead actors, it suffers from spotty digital effects
The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes (2005)
The second feature film from the Quay Brothers, a bafflingly incomprehensible work of surrealism, strange designs and non-sequitir dialogue
The Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
Voted the Best Australian film of all time, Peter Weir creates an incredibly haunting mystery about four girls who disappear while on said picnic. A film full of unexplained answers that remains just beyond your fingertips
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)
Adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel about an unaging libertine starring Hurd Hatfield. This is regarded as a classic but reads as fairly melodramatic and tame today
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1973)
From producer Dan Curtis, creator of tv’s Dark Shadows and The Night Stalker, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel about a libertine who remains eternally youthful while his debaucheries are transferred to a portrait. This has to count as the best version of the story to date.
The Pied Piper (1972)
The first dark adult fairytale. Before this, fairytales on film had been in the realm of Disney. This roots the familiar tale in an historical reality surrounded by the Black Death, The Inquisition and Anti-Semitism
The Pink Cloud (2021)
Brazilian film that becomes an allegory for Covid lockdown as a toxic cloud forces people to remain indoors for years at a time
The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)
Fourth of the Peter Sellers Pink Panther films, this lets all restraints go and becomes completely madcap
The Piper (2015)
A Korean retelling of the fairytale The Pied Piper of Hamelin that in mid-film suddenly morphs from a standard telling into an incredibly grim horror film. The results are really quite striking, not to mention pulled off with considerable assurance
The Piper (2023)
One of the last films made by Julian Sands before his death, this concerns a cursed musical score that ties back to the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Sands plays an autocratic orchestra conductor
The Pirate Fairy (2014)
Another of Disney’s Tinker Bell spinoff adventures. This has some slickly produced animation and does some occasionally cute pieces of fanservice that tie in to Peter Pan but is ultimately fantasy being produced for the single digit age groups
The Pirate Movie (1982)
Widely rididculed attempt to market Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance as a teen pop film by way of The Blue Lagoon. A mind-spinning film that seems to have no limit on how silly it is prepared to be, including numerous anachronistic contemporary pop culture in-jokes and fourth-wall breaking gags
The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012)
Amiable effort from England’s Aardman Animations that doesn’t quite scale the heights of their other films but still has an entertainingly nonsensical charm that is far more enjoyable than most Hollywood competition
The Pit & the Pendulum (2009)
Another of David De Coteau’s cheap homoerotic horror films. This has almost no connection to Edgar Allan Poe’s story about a man tied up beneath a descending pendulum and is instead an absurd psycho-sexual film about a series of hypnotism murders in a big mansion
The Pit and the Pendulum (1991)
Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story gets full marks for being set during the Spanish Inquisition. On the other hand, Gordon’s unserious splatter heavy approach and a campy performance from Lance Henriksen deflates the material
The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004)
Beautiful anime from Makoto Shinkai, made in the Hayao Miyazaki style set in an alternate history Japan concerning a mysterious hyper-dimensional tower
The Plague (1992)
An incredibly dull version of Albert Camus’s novel about a city infected by plague. Camus wrote the original as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France but this talks itself to death
The Plague (2006)
Interestingly different film about zombified children set after a time when childbirth has died out. This generates a reasonable level of tension but arrives at a very confusing end
The Plague Dogs (1982)
Almost completely ignored at the time of its release, an animated masterpiece where Martin Rosen, the director of Watership Down, adapts another Richard Adams about two escaped laboratory animals. This has an incredible and at times dark emotional range far away from Disney
The Plague of the Zombies (1966)
Classic Hammer film, vividly made and rich in subtext, concerning aristocrats turning the peasantry into zombies to work in the mines
The Platform (2019)
A stunningly allegorical film that falls somewhere between Cube and High-Rise where people are trapped in a prison and forced to fight over food as a banquet table passes down the levels each day, resulting in a society where those at the top claim superiority over those below.
The Platform 2 (2024)
The Platform offered a striking allegory with a prison where a banquet table of food moved down 300 levels each day. This is a sequel
The Pledge (2001)
Slow and subtle Sean Penn directed thriller where Jack Nicholson plays a retired detective haunted by a child murder case
The Plot Against America (2020)
You might be inclined to dismiss on the basis of its title as some of lunatic fringe YouTube conspiracy video. But what we actually have is a strong and powerfully written alternate history mini-series based around the idea of Charles Lindbergh becoming US President in 1940 and the country’s subsequent slide into fascism
The Plumber (1978)
Very odd early Peter Weir film about a strange plumber who moves in and takes over cautious Judy Morris’s apartment
The Pod Generation (2023)
SF film that feels like it should be an episode of Black Mirror. Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor are a couple who sign up for a process where a baby can be gestated externally inside an egg
The Polar Express (2004)
This broke ground in being the first animated film made using the motion-capture process. Robert Zemeckis directs with a quite magical touch
The Poltergeist of Borley Forest (2013)
A film that sat on the shelf and was then retitled to capitalise on the release of the Poltergeist remake despite featuring no poltergeists … A routine run through the well and truly worn modern ghost story cliches with no originality and little atmosphere
The Pool (2018)
Grippingly intense thriller with a couple trapped in an empty swimming pool along with a hungry crocodile
The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)
A film based on the true-life figure of the Vatican’s official exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth this could have been great but descends into tedious hokum
The Portable Door (2023)
A story about an apprentice at a mysterious company that deals with magic, this could well serve as a fix for those wanting something more of the Harry Potter franchise
The Possessed (1977)
This was a copy of The Exorcist made for tv. Unable to replicate that film’s gross-out effects, all that we get is a girl’s boarding school beset by supernatural fires. An amazing cast line-up, including an unknown Harrison Ford as a teacher having an affair with a pupil before getting set on fire
The Possession (2012)
Based on the urban legend surrounding a dybbuk box that turned up on an EBay auction, although the film throws this out to conduct an utterly generic possession story. Despite the novelty of drawing on Judaic mythology, the film still trades in the same tired cliches as the Christian exorcism film
The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972)
This predates The Exorcist in its possession themes where Perry King becomes possessed by the spirit of a Puerto Rican killer
The Postman (1997)
Kevin Costner directs David Brin’s post-holocaust tale as an epic Western. Most audiences ridiculed the film’s ardent flag-waving but you cannot deny that Costner makes a stirring and undeniably interesting film
The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)
Another Found Footage film, a mix of interviews and video footage supposedly recorded by a serial killer. Despite some initial amateurishness, the film soon gets a disturbing grip on you in depicting the astonishing cruelty and fiendishness of the killer
The Power (1968)
The second-to-last film produced by the legendary George Pal, concerning people hunted by a psychic supermind
The Power (2021)
An incredibly spooky film set at a hospital during a power cut as a nurse on night duty finds ghostly things stirring in the building
The Preacher’s Wife (1996)
Remake of The Bishop’s Wife with Denzel Washington as an angel come to aid an overworked pastor but falling for his wife Whitney Houston
The Predator (2018)
Shane Black, a writer-director with a reasonable cult following, makes the sixth Predator film (he also appeared as an actor in the original). Black shakes the series up, introduces a number of new ideas and makes an okay entry
The Presence (2010)
Ghost story that does an excellent job in creating an incredibly haunted and unusual atmosphere. On the other hand, the film falls apart during the second half where it heads in another direction altogether and leaves one entirely unclear what is going on
The President’s Analyst (1967)
Amid the mostly silly output of James Bond copies in the 1960s, this is one that comes with a sharp satiric bite in which president’s analyst James Coburn finds himself caught in the midst of a series of conspiracies
The Prestige (2006)
Christopher Nolan directs a beautiful period piece with Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as rival Victorian stage magicians. The film is an elegantly crafted Hall of Mirrors and illusions, capped by sterling performances from all involved
The Price of Milk (2000)
Quirkily eccentric and surreal New Zealand made comedy about a couple living on a farm
The Price We Pay (2022)
This has the flavour of From Dusk Till Dawn, a getaway thriller that does a mid-film morph into full horror territory as a gang of fleeing petty criminals stray into the lair of mad surgeon
The Priests (2015)
The possession and exorcism film has become a heavily exhausted one, having cycled through the same limited bag of tricks for the last 40 years. This South Korean take still mines the same territory but adds some nifty new tricks to build to a riveting climax
The Primevals (2023)
A fascinating lost world/alien lizard people stop-motion animated film that has been in production for a record 56 years, eventually pieced together and released by Charles Band several years after its creator’s death
The Prince of Egypt (1998)
The second animated film from DreamWorks, an impressively produced retelling of The Book of Exodus and the story of Moses.
The Princess and the Frog (2009)
One of the more enjoyable Disney animated films from the latter half of the 00s. Featuring Disney’s first Black heroine, this embraces its New Orleans setting and turns Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale on its head with enjoyable results
The Princess and the Goblin (1992)
Likeable animated fantasy made for young children
The Princess Bride (1987)
Swashbuckling fairytale that treads a fine line between deconstruction and parody, while reveling in a script where the dialogue positively dances. Perfectly cast – a film that few do not come out enjoying its ebullient fantasy
The Prize of Peril (1983)
French film about a tv gameshow where contestants are pursued by armed hunters. Much of this was copied by the subsequent The Running Man but this conducted the idea first and better
The Prodigies (2011)
French animated film about a group of kids with psychic powers going amok. Is okay at what it does but had much of its thunder stolen by the more recent and more spectacular Chronicle
The Prodigy (2019)
In this space of three films, Nicholas McCarthy has risen to the top of this site’s Up and Coming Directors to watch list. On a script level, this is a standard Evil Child film but is made something worth watching by McCarthy’s directorial jumps
The Projectionist (1971)
A Secret Life of Walter Mitty for movie lovers wherein a milquetoast projectionist daydreams himself into a variety of movie scenarios as an inept superhero. Quirkily charming if never more than a single idea. Something you feel should have been a cult film
The Prophecy (1995)
Standout film about angels warring on Earth that dispenses with any cutsie depiction of angels. Several sequels followed.
The Prophecy 3: The Ascent (2000)
The third of the Prophecy films with Christopher Walken as the angel Gabriel. This time the wry humour and interplay of ideas of the other films feels more thinly drawn
The Prophecy II (1998)
An okay sequel to the angel wars film The Prophecy, the first of several. As in the previous film, a returning Christopher Walken steals the show and gets all the best lines
The Prophecy: Uprising (2005)
The fourth of The Prophecy films about war between angels, the first to be made without Christopher Walken with Sean Pertwee as a detective in Bucharest who is drawn in
The Prophet’s Game (1999)
Dennis Hopper plays a retired detective brought in to hunt a serial killer who targets victims via a campus game
The Prowler (1981)
An effort from the heyday of the 1980s slasher film. Made with slightly more directorial competence that most of its contemporaries, a level of gore that caused censorship issues in some countries, although this proves weak when offering script rationale for proceedings