Movies in the Fantasy genre

Based on a perusal of reviews for Cloud Atlas, one might be convinced that the sprawling, ambitious, epic adaptation of David Mitchell's 2004 novel is either a masterpiece or an unmitigated disaster. The reality is somewhere in between. It's hard t...

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...

The popularity of Conan the Barbarian peaked during the early 1980s, with no fewer than three monthly comic books to go along with the books and the first Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. The success of the 1982 film begot a horrible sequel, Conan the...

Call it The Golden Compass rule: No multi-part movie series should be started without a reasonable certainty that the story will be told in full. And, although The Golden Compass’ planned sequels were the first recent films to fall afoul of t...

Most people believe in some form of an afterlife, although the specifics vary from individual to individual. In scripting Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks approached the subject from more of a philosophical than a religious/spiritual perspective...

For a movie about small people, Downsizing certainly thinks big…too big, perhaps. Director/co-writer Alexander Payne has done such a good job of world-building that there are far too many ideas, subplots, and opportunities for one two-hour f...

In the early summer sweepstakes, Warner Brothers has weighed in with Twister, Paramount with Mission Impossible, and now Universal with Dragonheart, director Rob Cohen's swords-and-sorcery saga. No prizes for guessing which is most likely to be th...

With a surreal atmosphere and offbeat narrative, Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario distantly recalls Being John Malkovich while offering commentary on both the warped and fleeting nature of fame and the corrosive impact...

Dumbo is a perfectly adequate family film. While that may seem like damning with faint praise, keep in mind that this movie was never considered to be among Disney’s 2019 big guns. It fills a niche and does so nicely with a style and approac...

As long ago as the early 1980s, before the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game entered the mainstream, there was talk of a D&D movie. I can recall being at a gaming convention and listening to E. Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, dis...