Wings of Desire (1987)
Angels
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.
Angels
Angels are heavenly entities. They are seen as the messengers of The Almighty. The traditional image of the angel is of a human-like being of ethereal beauty and almost always with a pair of wings and sometimes a halo. Satan was a former angel who rebelled against Heaven, for which he and a host of other angels were cast down into Hell.
Angels frequently turn up in Light Fantasy Films and comedies, where they are essentially heavenly bureaucrats come down to Earth to help individuals sort their lives out or rectify heavenly errors. Other treatments concern guardian angels.
There are a number of comedies about angels or featuring angels acting in less-than-heavenly ways. There has also been a certain body of serious angel fantasies and a number of treatments of angels that fall within the horror genre.
Winter’s Tale (2014)
Urban Fantasy/Romance/Fate and Miracles
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
Wired (1989)
Surreal John Belushi Biopic
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
Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell (2001)
Evil Wish-Granting Djinn
The Wishmaster series was a franchise based around a series of novelty effects wherein a malevolent djinn turned wishes against the wisher. This third entry is the utter nadir of the series
A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
Young Adult/Magical Journey Across the Universe
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
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
Comic-Book Superheroes
Brett Ratner inherits the X-Men franchise from Bryan Singer for the third film in the series and promptly killed it off (after this point everything became prequels featuring Young X-Men). Ratner’s handling of the superheroic action lacks Singer’s exhilaration or any affinity for the characters