The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The Coming of Age story is one of the staples of cinema. It takes place on the cusp between childhood and adulthood and centres around the defining events that leads to the protagonist(s) growing up.
Coming of Age stories are usually quasi-biographical realistic and not fantastic. There are however a number of occasions where Coming of Age story has been blended with the fantastic as in films like E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) or in horror like the various films versions of Stephen King’s It (1986), along with a good many others that wind in encounters with the alien, magical creatures, ghosts and other elements.
For more detail and an overview of the genre see the Theme Essay Coming of Age Stories
Richard Linklater makes a charming animated film about a kid selected for a secret Moon Landing. Most of all a film with a lovely nostalgia for growing up in the era of the Moon mission
Suspiria director Luca Guadagnino sinks his teeth into making a film about cannibalism. Forget the Young Adult label the film was sold with, this is quite an impressive work
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
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
A surprisingly better than expected film from the Disney Channel, a Coming of Age story set on The Moon about a group of kids who break out to go on a jaunt across the lunar surface
Canadian family saga told through the eyes of a young boy growing up amid a strange extended Newfoundland family. Featuring a number of fantastical elements.
Found Footage film that nostalgically homages, if not outrightly borrows, from E.T.. It does build a sense of wonder well but then dissolves into far too much near-identical running around
Perhaps the greatest children’s film ever made, the story of the affection between a lonely boy and a stranded alien. Steven Spielberg paints in beautiful, tender emotions from the heart that can only not touch the most cynical
Actress Kasi Lemmons directs a strong African-American Coming of Age story set in a backwater Louisiana town, one where voodoo is a regular part of the culture
Joe Dante’s successor to Gremlins and a box-office flop. This nevertheless evokes a genteel sense of wonder in its story with Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix as teen inventors who build a backyard spaceship
This feels like Children of the Corn remade by Terrence Malick. The film does nicely with the wry, quietly observed naturalism of its Coming of Age story, less so when it moves into horror territory
Forget The Fabelmans, this is a superlative autobiography of a filmmaker and the influence Star Wars had on his life. Neck-deep in fannish enthusiasm for the genre and the love of Super 8 filmmaking
A charming Coming of Age story about kids who think they have discovered the Frankenstein monster. Comes packed with numerous genre homages and quotes
Another in the spate of serious Stephen King adaptations that seeks to avoid the horror label. Although psychic powers do feature, this is more of a wistful 1960s Coming of Age story
The second film from animator Ralph Bakshi, follow-up to Fritz the Cat. As opposed to Fritz‘s surreal trippiness, this is more down-to-earth and sees Bakshi conducting a loose, bawdy trip through his own childhood in Brooklyn
While the title suggests a self-help manual about someone going to live off the land, this depicts an imaginary invasion of England similar to Red Dawn having been pitched as a Young Adult work
The title leads you to expect a variation on Jack the Giant Slayer but instead we get a very good story about a troubled girl who believes in giants. Very similar to A Monster Calls, this is carried by a fantastic performance from 15 year old Madison Wolfe
An almost unclassifiably strange film about fandom for a weird 1990s tv show, this seems to be heading for David Lynch territory and becomes an allegory for trans identity
Stephen King adapted mini-series and one of the best. A dark Coming of Age tale, Tim Curry makes an unsettling Pennywise (in doing so popularised the figure of the killer clown)
I far preferred the 1990 mini-series to the cinematic remake of the Stephen King book. This emerges as a lesser copy of tv’s Stranger Things, which did the whole 80s nostalgia/horror story far better
One of the loveliest of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime, the story of a young witch who creates a parcel delivery service using her broomstick. As always, Miyazaki gives the film a simple beauty and an adult emotional complexity
This is a beautifully made Coming of Age ghost story from the greatly underrated Frank LaLoggia wherein a bullied Lukas Haas is led by a ghost to uncover a murderer
Joe Dante film set during the Cuban Missile Crisis about a childhood in B movie fandom and with John Goodman paying homage to filmmaker William Castle
A nicely made Stephen King adaptation about a teen who starts to receive text message from beyond the grave. From Ryan Murphy, the producer behind tv’s Glee and American Horror Story
Possibly the most perfect of all Hayao Miyazaki’s anime, a work about childhood featuring an array of charmingly eccentric creatures. It is a film of absolutely magical charms beneath which lies a swim of adult emotions that children’s films rarely touch upon
At first glance, this film about a teenager meeting her future self seems too cute and lightweight, but emerges as something extraordinary
The 22nd animated film from Pixar and also the least successful (being released only a week before theatrical chains closing down due to Coronavirus). This has an appealingly quirky and original concept not unakin to Bright that takes place in an alternate reality where magic creatures live in a world akin to our own
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
Absolutely extraordinary British tv play that was one of the formative works in the development of Folk Horror on screen
Rare flop from Richard Donner, a Coming of Age story where a young Elijah Wood receives visions from a buffalo and dreams of flying away from an abusive childhood
Ridiculous red-blooded, flag-waving film in which the Soviets invade the USA and a group of high-school teenagers maintain a lone guerilla campaign
The idea of remaking John Milus’s ridiculous 1984 survivalist fantasy about a Communist invasion of the USA maybe counts as one of the most absurdly unnecessary of all remakes. The film laughably tries to deal with the absence of a Soviet Union by creating a boogeyman out of North Korea
A dark Coming of Age story set in a surreal depiction of the midwest populated by what might be vampires and angels
Fine Coming of Age story set in 1950s New Zealand with John Carradine as a sinister stranger come to town
Film that concerns itself with slash – a form of fan fiction that imagines sexual relationships between the two male leads of various film and tv series. Some passable discussion of the fandom has been grafted onto a Coming of Age story in ways that only awkwardly gel
Visually extraordinary Coming of Age story set during the Spanish Civil War in which a young girl imagines seeing the Frankenstein monster
The single most influential science-fiction film of all time, one that created a massive industry of sequels and spinoffs, not to mention copycats, and changed the way that people thought of science-fiction
The second film from the trio that made Turbo Kid. This taps 80s nostalgia focusing on a group of kids who believe a neighbour may be a serial killer but was overshadowed by tv’s very similar Stranger Things
J.J. Abrams makes a homages to 8mm filmmaking and the films of his youth – you could easily imagine this as a Steven Spielberg-produced film of the era. On the other hand, after the obsessive secrecy in pre-release, the results emerge as underwhelming
This is a 1950s Coming of Age story with Patrick Swayze as a mysterious stranger dispensing wisdom, before the film arrives at a very peculiar fantastic ending
An Australian version of Red Dawn – prettily mounted but feels more like Dawson’s Creek Goes to War than it has does a realistic war film
Terrence Malick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, maybe the best work yet about the great Lost American Childhood yet – a film that doesn’t seem to be about anything but has far more to say than almost all other multiplex films
Classic tv mini-series about rebellion in a future where Earth is controlled by giant alien tripod machines, this still holds up as something great today
Japanese Coming of Age tale about two mischief-making twin brothers growing up in the 1940s
Eccentric Coming of Age story set during the 1970s punk era where, among the usual other funny travails, the protagonist’s father starts demonstrating psychic abilities
A ghost story from Studio Ghibli – although rather than any Western equivalent that sets out to scare the pants off us, this is a sweetly tender story of friendship between two girls. The result more than capably approaches some of Hayao Miyazaki’s best
Film that imagines what might have happened if the Y2K Bug had occurred and resulted in a machine revolution