The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Aimed at the same audiences as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Blake Lively is a woman who hasn’t aged since the 1930s. This comes with the nostalgic weepiness and solemn self-importance of a work pitched to Academy Awards voters
Young Adult fantasy in which two girls befriend a mermaid. A film very much made for teenage girls, bubbly, silly and lightweight
The hit 1960s sitcom is repackaged as a frothy Nora Ephron romcom that suffers from a fatal mismatching of a showboating Will Ferrell and a more subdued Nicole Kidman who do not seem to connect in any way as Darren and Samantha
Wilderness survival horror in the same vein as Deliverance but with a Chick Flick spin. This starts promisingly but director/star Katie Aselton fails to push the survival scenes for anything dramatic
Amiable romantic comedy with Demi Moore as a clairvoyant who dispenses prophetic advice to everybody while caught in her own romantic entanglements
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
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
A contemporary take on Cinderella that relocates the story to a modern high school with a downtrodden Hillary Duff trying to make it to the prom
In undergoing a Hollywood remake, Wim Wenders’ exquisitely lovely angel fantasy Wings of Desire becomes a weepy romance with angel Nicolas Cage wooing Meg Ryan
Oddball and whimsical – welcome to the world of Miranda July who serves up a quirky relationship drama peopled with talking cats, conversations with The Moon and time-freezing abilities
From the period when Matthew McConaughey was coasting through romcoms without making any effort. This rewrites A Christmas Carol where playboy McConaughey is visited by the ghosts of three ex’s
An odd light fantasy romcom where Mark Ruffalo is suddenly haunted by the ghost of Reese Witherspoon as she lies in a comatose state on life support
A painfully unfunny Lindsay Lohan romcom in which she has good luck and Chris Pine has bad luck and they swap after a kiss. Lohan seems to regard this as an exercise in her adulation
Lightweight and likeable Meg Ryan romcom in which she is romanced by a chivalrous and perfectly mannered Hugh Jackman travelled through time from the 19th Century
Remake of the South Korean film Il Mare, this is a romantic fantasy where Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock write letters to each other while living in the same house two years apart in time
Bland romantic comedy with a miscast Angelina Jolie as a tv newswoman who receives a prophecy of her death and begins to reconsider her life
A great tv mini-series where modern girl Jemima Rooper is transported back into Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice but disrupts the story with her modern ways
A Susan Seidelman romantic comedy where Ann Magnuson finds the answers to her love life with android John Malkovich after being assigned to teach him human behaviour
An Australian variant on Sliding Doors in which single woman Rachel Griffiths suddenly finds herself in an alternate timeline where she is now married and has kids
Nora Ephron romantic comedy with John Travolta cast as angel who is a slob. A rather aimless shapeless comedy that thinks it is funnier than it is
Unfunny comedy in which Eva Longoria dies and returns as a ghost to make life miserable for fiance Paul Rudd as he becomes involved with another woman
This has the intriguing idea of two Demi Moore’s living on either side of the world, each dreaming that they are the other but the premise pans out as no more than a routine Chick Flick
This is Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Back to the Future wherein housewife Kathleen Turner wakes up back as her high school self and gets the opportunity to remake her life’s choices
Chick Flick with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock as two sisters from a family of witches. The film never really settles on a consistent tone between comedy, thriller or romance and veers all over the place
Beautifully written film where newlywed bride Meg Ryan ends up swapping bodies with an old man
Weepie drama in which Sandra Bullock becomes unstuck in time flipping back and forward with the foreknowledge that her husband Julian McMahon will befall a tragedy
Weepie romantic chick flick adapted from a Nicholas Sparks novel, included here for a fantastic twist ending. Sparks has stolen much of his plot from Stephen King’s Rose Madder. Even as such, wife-beating as the backdrop to a romance casts a distasteful shadow over the exercise
Popular Gwyneth Paltrow hit that spawned a series of films that follow a woman’s alternate life pathways
A romantic comedy in which Amanda Pays has a curse that gives her the ability to read thoughts
Old-fashioned romantic weepie with Christopher Reeve hypnotising himself into travelling back in time to 1912 to woo actress Jane Seymour
Essentially a rehash of Big in which a tormented teen wishes she was thirty and wakes up as Jennifer Garner. Amiably average without ever finding the wistful charms that Big had
Film adaptation of the best-selling story about a romance between a woman and a man with the ability to travel through time. Nicely made if not quite holding the emotional involvement the book did
Appealing and well told fantasy in which a couple are each individually offered the opportunity to go back in time and change the circumstances that led to their breakup
Lifetime Channel Valentine’s Day movie that rewrites A Christmas Carol to have Emma Caulfield visited by the ghosts of relationships past, present and future
Essentially a frothy British romantic comedy version of Weird Science where a girl manifests the perfect guy. The VR aspect is no more than a trendy buzzword appropriated as explain-all
Amiable romantic comedy in which Mel Gibson comes round after an accident in the shower to find he now has the ability to read women’s thoughts.
Agonisingly awful romantic comedy about a Fountain of Love. The plot is utterly vapid, its resolution never in the slightest doubt, while director Mark Steven (Daredevil, Ghost Rider) Johnson sets the entire film up around a series of painfully unfunny slapstick routines