Movies in the Fantasy genre

The temptation is to remark that if Hellboy was the appetizer, then Hellboy II: The Golden Army is the main course. To an extent, that's true. The second film is more assured, better paced, and has a stronger emotional component. It takes chances...

Warning! You have reached the SPOILER version of the Hellboy II review. To re-direct to the non-spoiler version, click here. The temptation is to remark that if Hellboy was the appetizer, then Hellboy II: The Golden Army is the main course. To...

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...

The awkwardly-titled The House with a Clock in Its Walls is a classic example of a film that works better for children than adults. Seemingly made with the under-10 crowd in mind, the screenplay (credited to Eric Kripke, adapting the book by J...

I have made my peace with an unsavory truth: the Hollywood of today is going to continue crafting live-action remakes of the animated films of yesteryear until they run out of material. Why? Because audiences like them – more often than not, the...

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...

The concept of a child creating an imaginary world as a retreat from reality isn’t new to either movies or literature. In fact, one of the most beloved of all family films, The Wizard of Oz, employs this conceit. More recent endeavors like Pa...

In making IF, writer/director John Krasinski’s heart was almost certainly in the right place. The movie wants to be an ode to the innocent magic of childhood and how we might be in a better place as adults if we could remember those qualitie...