The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
There are few films that do not feature some romantic element to them somewhere, traditionally an attraction between the leading man and lady or in more recent years between same sex couples. Romance can be both a subplot in a film or else an entire genre on its own focusing on the attraction between two people, usually delivered with a maximum of heart-tugging emotional catharsis.
Genre variants include attractions between humans and non-human entities that can range from angels to ghosts and androids to persons in different eras of time to even love being something that has the power to transcend life and death.
The Romantic Comedy is its own genre and concerns a light, upbeat fantasy where the focus is on romance with the addition of comedy elements. Not all romance films fit into this category. Some can also be relationship dramas ie. what happens after the initial attraction, or else take their romance more seriously and sometimes tragically. For what happens after people take their clothes off see Sex in Fantastic Cinema.
Time travel film that feels like a romantic comedy version of The Time Traveler’s Wife (with Rachel McAdams in the same role in both films). Played with a good deal of feelgood warmth and likeability by all
Bollywood film that is a blatant copy of Back to the Future with the young hero going back in time to prevent his parents from divorcing. Lame comedy routines but some extremely colourful song and dance numbers
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
One of Steven Spielberg’s more overlooked and quieter films, a remake of the 1940s guardian angel fantasy A Guy Named Joe. Spielberg never much ignites the love story but the film has some magical moments and a scene-stealing John Goodman
A modern girl pining for the perfect man is transported back into the world of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice where she ends up disrupting the story
The Russian Aquaman. One of the most popular hits from the Soviet Union, a film about a merman who comes onto land to woo a woman. Said to have influenced Guillermo del Toro with The Shape of Water
Young Adult fantasy in which two girls befriend a mermaid. A film very much made for teenage girls, bubbly, silly and lightweight
This is a romance film with conceptual ambitions that starts out by killing the heroine in the first scene and then has she and the guy meeting in lucid time-travelling dreams
The interesting idea of the fairytale Beauty and the Beast retold in a modern high school setting. Despite itself, the film manages to wring a reasonable sincerity out of the premise
Attempt to create another Twilight franchise that quickly becomes the anti-Twilight, shucking the pro-chastity message for a decidedly inflammatory stance against small-minded Christian prejudice
A quite enjoyable attempt to modernise the story of Beauty and the Beast with Martin Clunes as a disfigured reclusive aristocrat and Sienna Guillory as a plumber who connects with him
Jean Cocteau makes one of the greatest of all fantasy films and the finest of all fairytale adaptations, elaborating the original story out with a visual magic that still manages to dazzle audiences today
Largely forgotten version of the fairytale that is too rudimentary and pedestrian to find much flight of fantasy compared to other classic versions
One of the cheap fairytale adaptations produced by Cannon Films. John Savage and Rebecca De Mornay star in the titles. One of the Cannon fairytales that emerges slightly better than the others
The start of the 90s renaissance of Disney animation, a beautifully made adaptation of the fairytale that hearkens back to the Disney Golden Age. The only animated film nominated for an Academy Award Best Picture
Adaptation of the fairytale that takes place in an exquisitely dreamy sumptuousness – a stunningly designed, costumed and photographed world that has a genuine magic. However, the motion-capture animated Beast looks far too much like a CGI effect
This live-action remake of the Disney animated film is mounted with a lavishness. On the other hand, the romance at the centre never fully warms up, while the human characters have the show stolen from under by the cutlery and furnishings
Charming fantasy in which James Stewart is tempted by capricious witch Kim Novak. This almost certainly served as the inspiration for tv’s Bewitched
A comedy with the amusing premise where Brendan Fraser is raised in a nuclear fallout shelter since the Cuban Missile Crisis and emerges into the present for the first time, mistaking it for a post-apocalyptic world
David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer directs a film about a surgeon who abducts a woman and amputates her limbs to make her love him. A critical bomb, it is a not uninteresting work about woman’s desire handled with more taste than you would think
The point where the Twilight series collapses under its pretensions and draws every detail of its wedding out for an excruciating hour. A series that has been all about preaching chastity then segues into Right to Life advocacy
Perhaps the best thing about this is that the Twilight saga is finally ended. This provides a moderately spectacular showdown but also wraps its plotlines up with absurd deus ex machina wimp outs and an infuriating twist ending
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
Amiable romantic comedy with Demi Moore as a clairvoyant who dispenses prophetic advice to everybody while caught in her own romantic entanglements
A Clive Barker adaptation capped by a magisterial performance from Tony Todd. This was greeted as a horror masterpiece when it came out and went on to spawn two sequels. Not too bad if it falls short of the classic status
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
Colourful and frothy whimsy from Fina Torres in the Magical Realist tradition about a woman engaged in a series of romantic mishaps in Paris
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
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
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
Live-action remake of the Disney animated film. This varies little from the well-worn elements of the story to the point of over-familiarity but director Kenneth Branagh manages a lush and beautifully staged effort
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
From Mr Robot creator Sam Esmail, this is supposedly set in a parallel universe but is merely a relationship drama that quickly disappears into a puff of its own cutely ironic, self-admiring dialogue
Work of Russian horror that heads into pleasingly dark places as a woman enacts a love spell to bring her boyfriend back to her where you just know that something horrible is going to happen
The first film from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, a parody of a various romance movies. The duo went on to make some of the excruciating and unfunny comedies of the next decade
Classic fantasy film in which Death takes human form to visit a party and experience the human condition. Frederic March gives us Death as a comically eccentric outsider and the film has some great moments of imagination
Albert Brooks directed/starring comedy in which he plays a man in the afterlife on trial, required to defend the dull and ordinary life he led, at the same time as he begins a romance with Meryl Streep
An early Fritz Lang film clearly influenced by D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance in which Death offers a woman visions of her and her lover reincarnated throughout different eras of history
Would be quirky, surrealistic indie film with lovers on the run in Las Vegas. Quentin Tarantino appears as the spirit of chance from an interdimensional swimming pool
Beautifully pure-hearted French Wartime allegory set during the Middle Ages about The Devil who has sent out envoys to tempt mortals into damnation via affairs of the heart
A South Korean film that came out around the same time as Frequency and has an almost identical premise about two people who start talking by radio while separated in time by twenty years.
Lushly produced, big-budget adaptation of Bram Stoker starring Frank Langella that places much more of a romantic emphasis on the story than any other version. Here is the beginning of the darkly romantic vampire film
The third of the Twilight films. This extrudes the dramatic irresolution of the last film’s cliffhanger – should Bella marry Edward or does she really love Jacob? – with over-padded momentousness
Lightweight, rather silly effort where Lenny Von Dohlen’s home computer becomes sentient and the two compete for the love of neighbour Virginia Madsen
An old-fashioned weepie melodrama about a cottage that allows a disfigured soldier and a plain woman to find love where the magic there allows them to see the other as perfect
A modern remake of an old play filmed twice before about a magical cottage that allows plain and disfigured lovers who stay there to see the other one as beautiful
Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman collaborate on a mind-bending film about erased memories. The film comes with a series of characteristic eccentricities and whiplash twists that are positively ingenious
Witty and very charming retelling of Cinderella that strips out all of the fantasy elements and substitutes a pseudo-historical realism. The cast positively shine.
Don’t be put off by the Young Adult label. Look past this and you will end up with one of the most original premises and one of the most beautifully written films seen in some time.
Woody Allen makes a musical. It is Allen in a much lighter mood than he was in the early 1990s and the film comes with some appealingly eccentric and often downright surreal touches
Adaption of a Young Adult series of books – this is essentially Twilight but with angels instead of vampires. Another YA effort where we never saw successive chapters due to its box-office flop
Popular film with Mel Gibson as a man who is cryogenically frozen in the 1940s and thawed out in the present. The romantic focus of the film is undone by some absurd plotting. An early script from J.J. Abrams
A popular hit in which Patrick Swayze is killed and becomes a ghost. Bruce Joel Rubin’s script has enormous fun in interpreting aspects of the ghost story from the ghost’s point-of-view.
One of the most beautiful of all 1940s light fantasy films about the sweet and tender relationship between widow Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison as the ghost of the sea captain in the house she moves into
Mamoru Hosoda delivers an appealingly sweet anime about a girl who discovers that she has the ability to travel through time. Based on a popular Japanese Young Adult novel
A live-action version of Cinderella starring Leslie Caron. This is a rather staid version with ballet sequences where the magic and romance never much ignites
Surely the most outlandish film premise ever slung together for an animated film – a version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet conducted between talking garden gnomes in rival backyards
One of the most gorgeous and beautiful of all Hong Kong fantasy films A lush, dreamy work of Wu Xia from Tsui Hark filled with wild, fantastical martial arts scenes
Classic 1940s afterlife fantasy with Spencer Tracy as a pilot killed in action who is sent back as a guardian angel. This works fantastically well due to a great character arc and a sharp Dalton Trumbo script
Clever and intelligent comedy where Marisa Tomei finds the perfect man (Vincent D’Onofrio) who also claims to be a time traveller from the future. The film sits in an appealing state of ambiguity about whether this is true
This is considered the film that torpedoed Andy Kaufman’s film career – a dippy romance between two robots. This gets very silly but the film has undeniable charms
Spike Jonze addresses virtual relationships in this story of a romance between a man and an A.I. A film that is astonishing in its freshness, naturalness and avoidance of any of the cliches that have dogged other treatments.
Though the title seems more suitable to a book of pick-up lines, this is about a romance with an alien visitor set during the punk era. John Cameron Mitchell adapts a Neil Gaiman story but seems to have forgotten the comedy elements
The finest screen adaptation of Victor Hugo’s oft-filmed historical novel. This is visually stunning and featuring an awards-worthy performance from Charles Laughton as the malformed Quasimodo
Largely overlooked, this is the first version of the story in colour and has a lavishness that the previous versions lacked. On the minus side, Anthony Quinn’s Quasimodo is no more than a simpleton lacking in pathos
A space film set aboard a NASA space mission as two stranded astronauts debate whether to surrender to mutual attraction. In contrast to realistically grounded efforts such as Gravity, The Martian et al, this is a comedy
An LGBT romance featuring fantastic performances from Juno Temple and Riley Keough before they became better known names. This also acts as an ambiguous monster movie
A smart and intelligent SF film where two brothers both inhabit the same body and then both fall for the same woman. Great acting from Ansel Elgort in the titles role(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
A beautifully made Richard Donner mediaeval fantasy with two lovers suffering a curse that transforms them into animals only able to touch in person for a second at dusk and dawn
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
Charming and delightful Mexican venture into Magical Realism concerning a daughter frustrated in finding her true love who throws herself into cooking that brings out her suppressed emotions
Beautifully understated film set in a world where a plague is causing people to lose their memories, following Olivia Cooke whose husband Jack O’Connell gradually succumbs
A film about a teen whose face kills anyone who looks at him. This is a romantic comedy that overspills with originality, quirkiness and a really dark sense of humour.
A comedy based on the hit song starring a then unknown Sandra Bullock as a nerd scientist who synthesizes a Gypsy love potion that causes anyone she gives it to to fall in love with her
Modest and interesting Cyberpunk film that works as a melancholy future-set romance with Ryan Kwanten as a hitman. Minimalist but with some striking conceptual twists
A comedy in which Sigmund Freud’s ghost pops up to offer advice to psychologist Dudley Moore after he falls in love with patient Elizabeth McGovern
A unique film about a woman who is pursued by a demon that loves her. The film is made in a challenging style that requires considerable adeptness to follow but proves rewarding
A quite magical film in which Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis fall in love in the afterlife and then try to find the each other after they are reborn into the world of the living
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
A bizarrely ridiculous erotic film with pretensions to being a relationship drama that features appearances from angels and smartass talking seagulls. An aging Mickey Rooney is the heavenly supervisor
It is hard to believe this ever received a greenlight, a film in which Andrew McCarthy falls for a storefront mannequin (Kim Cattrall) who comes to life. The comedy has an excruciating inanity
A sequel to the Mannequin, the inane comedy about a romance with a storefront dummy come to life. Here Kristy Swanson plays a princess who is turned into a statue before being awoken in the present
South Korean romantic film about a couple exchanging letters across time. This later underwent a Hollywood remake as The Lake House with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock
British director Michael Powell creates the most visually stunning of all 1940s afterlife fantasies in lush Technicolor, depicting a heaven of dazzling architectural marvels
The second film from Leos Carax, a near-future set romance that bursts with freshness and originality
An extremely clever romantic comedy where Kaley Cuoco repeatedly returns back through time to replay her one perfect day, a date with Pete Davidson
Ponderous big screen remake of Death Takes a Holiday where Death in the form of Brad Pitt comes to Earth, engages in a romance
Sequel to Single Santa Seeks Mrs Claus where here Santa’s son (Steve Guttenberg) ties the knot – amazingly traditional and conservative in its sentiments and with everything so predictable that there is no real drama
Appealingly lightweight whimsy from Woody Allen in which Owen Wilson keeps timeslipping between the present and 1920s Paris to meet the artistic/literary greats
Amid Kenneth Branagh’s dynamic cinematic revival of Shakespeare in the 1990s, there was this all-star adaptation of Shakespeare’s whimsy about fairy enchantments
Under the umbrella title ShakespeareRetold, Shakespeare’s tale of fairy enchantments and romantic mix-ups is reimagined in a modern day British holiday camp
A filmed version of Julie Taymor’s staging of the Shakespeare play about fairt enchantments. Forget standard interpretations, Taymor opens the play up with an extraordinary visual flair
Adaptation of the Shakespeare play about fairy enchantments by Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies. Davies goes with a standard interpretation alongside radical reinvention – Athens as a fascist dictatorship
A ridiculously melodramatic Catholic historical drama wherein a statue of the Virgin Mary comes to life to take the place of a nun so she can run off and woo a young Roger Moore … A lushly made canvas but otherwise absurdly overwrought piety
Magical Realist film with Aishwarya Rai running a spice bazaar where she is able to tell fortunes
After the disastrous misstep of The Green Hornet, Michel Gondry returns to the surreal whimsy of The Science of Sleep. A film where Gondry delights in scene after scene of visual nonsense and serving up all the appealingly capricious silliness he can muster – creativity for creativity’s sake alone