Search for Fantasy/Adventure

The majority of this review is taken from what I wrote in 2009. I have tweaked and edited it to update it for 2022. Following the main review are a few new comments written following my re-watching of the film on September 23, 2022.Avatar has been d...

In 2005, genre fans were able to celebrate the day when the entire six-film Star Wars saga was available for public consumption. Nine and one-half years later, the same can be said of Peter Jackson's Middle Earth epic. As George Lucas learned, th...

The Northman is Hamlet. Or at least both were derived from the same source material, a Norse legend set in the early 900s about the revenge of a prince upon the uncle who murdered his father and wed his mother. However, while there was a surfeit o...

In recent years, some of the most outlandish and edgy movies have emerged from South Korea, where directors like Kim Ki-duk, Park Chan-wook, and Bong Joon-ho have challenged norms and defied conventions. The results, although not always succes...

In 2001, only a few months after the fall of the World Trade Center, Peter Jackson swept us away to Middle Earth with The Fellowship of the Ring. It was a wondrous three-hour achievement: the first major attempt at serious, big budget epic fantasy....

Know, O Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of... Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen eyed, sword in han...

Jack the Giant Slayer is an enjoyable fantasy/adventure whose magic is partially undermined by marginal 3-D. Once again, the ugliest aspects of this format rear their heads: dim and fuzzy images, lackluster colors, and poor definition. Everything i...

There's a little Roald Dahl in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, and that leads one to wonder what a twisted director like Danny DeVito (Dahl's Matilda) or Tim Burton (Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) could have made out of ...

Oz the Great and Powerful is director Sam Raimi's prequel to The Wizard of Oz. This new vision of The Land of Oz is an imaginative mix of live-action and CGI that pays homage to the iconic images and timeless sense of wonder in the classic The Wiza...

Maleficent might best be described as an alternate universe re-imagination of Sleeping Beauty. Taking a page from Wicked (the stage show that presents Oz from the witches' perspective), Linda Woolverton's screenplay presents an inverted version of ...