Movies in the Fantasy genre

It’s said that one of the reasons George Lucas deferred making the Star Wars prequels from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s is because the special effects technology he needed wasn’t available. I was reminded of this while watching Wolfgang...

There are many words that could be used to describe Night Watch, but "conventional" and "dull" are not among them. The film has the twin virtues of being bold and dizzying, but it features a cramped and chaotic narrative that concludes with a clim...

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...

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is a miscalculation of Magic Kingdom-sized proportions. Designed for and targeted at prepubescent girls, the holiday-themed fantasy adventure drowns in CGI, underdeveloped characters, and a plot utterly devoi...

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...

If you were to begin watching Once Upon a Time, Cinema with no knowledge of what you were seeing, you might initially mistake it for a lost silent film made during the 1910s or 1920s. In terms of style, approach, and technique, it’s a nearly perf...

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...

Groundhog Day was released in 1993. For the next 20+ years, no major production touched the Twilight Zone-ish premise. Recently, however, a new generation of filmmakers has discovered Groundhog Day and decided to try their hands at expanding t...

How's a studio to proceed when it wants to do something with a classic, family-friendly property but believes a straightforward remake to be redundant? The solution, as recently explored by several would-be franchises, is to expand the canvas. Ma...

One of the most anticipated releases of the 2006 holiday season is the latest offering from Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, whose previous credits include The Devil's Backbone, Blade 2, and Hellboy. With Pan's Labyrinth, del Toro opens a lands...