Movies in the Fantasy/Adventure genre

This review is based on an IMAX 3-D screening. Lewis Carroll's "Wonderland" stories, much like the collected works of Roald Dahl, can be perceived from a number of perspectives. Although traditionally seen as a children's tale, Alice's Wonderla...

Alice through the Looking Glass may represent Disney’s first big-budget failure in quite some time. More likely to inspire thoughts of Michael Bay than Lewis Carroll, this sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland borrows sparingly ...

What is it about fantasy novels that makes them so difficult to translate effectively to the silver screen? It’s not impossible – J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings adaptations are proof that i...

E.T. There, I’ve gotten it out of the way - the obligatory mention of the classic 1982 collaboration between director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Melissa Mathison that every critic will make when reviewing The BFG. The truth is, howev...

On the surface, Clash of the Titans would seem to be mixed using a sure-fire recipe for success, so where did things go wrong? How did a film that should have captured the imagination of the young Star Wars generation end up failing? Some of it h...

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...

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...

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...