Movies in the Fantasy/Adventure genre

Over the years, there have been countless cinematic tellings and re-tellings of the Arthurian mythos, ranging from the sublime (Robert Bresson’s Lancelot of the Lake) to the ridiculous (by intent: Monty Python and the Holy Grail). There have been...

As a stand-alone spin-off that takes us back to the enchanted world of Harry Potter, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them provides an engaging two hours. As the beginning of a new fantasy/adventure series intended to span several chapters, its suc...

The concept of a movie being “so bad it’s entertaining” is often employed as a way of disparaging a film that doesn’t work in the way the director planned. It’s a valid description but the word to focus on is entertainin...

If this is the future for motion pictures, god help us all. A major collaboration between the Chinese film industry and Hollywood, The Great Wall features a primarily Asian cast with a few big-name American actors sprinkled in. The brainless story is...

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....

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...

Special effects have always played an important role in Peter Jackson's adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's books but, with The Desolation of Smaug, the middle chapter of The Hobbit movie trilogy, they take center stage. This isn't necessarily a positi...

When Snow White and the Huntsman was released four years ago, it successfully transformed one of movie-dom’s beloved fairy tales (known primarily through the Disney animated classic) into a fantasy adventure. The Huntsman: Winter’s War, a part-pr...

If I was a teacher and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was a student's paper, I would give it an "incomplete." After all, how can one assess a project whose nature was irrevocably altered when the lead actor died? Whatever vision director Ter...

Immortals plays like the illegitimate offspring of 300 and Clash of the Titans, but while it represents a substantial improvement over the latter, it falls short of the former. As is typical of films directed by Tarsem Singh (The Cell), a weak narr...