Movies in the Fantasy/Adventure genre

At least at first, a viewer can be forgiven some consternation understanding what director Jean-Jacques Annaud is attempting to achieve with Quest for Fire. With its Neanderthal-like characters leaping around like apes, the film sometimes feels mo...

With the arrival of Rob Marshall’s live-action The Little Mermaid, Disney has now successfully converted all four of their major late ‘80s/early ‘90s animated musicals into updated iterations. Of the quartet (which also includes Beauty and t...

In order to be successful, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves needed to achieve at least three objectives: remain sufficiently faithful to its source material not to alienate the core audience, offer a broad enough story to attract non-gamers...

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...

Although some aspects of RRR may seem foreign to mainstream North American movie-goers, the meat of the tale – an epic adventure featuring two mighty figures – is the kind of thing that American motion pictures used to do well. RRR tosses asid...

The majority of this review is taken from what I wrote in 2009. I have tweaked and edited it to update it for 2022. Following the main review are a few new comments written following my re-watching of the film on September 23, 2022.Avatar has been d...

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...

Calling a movie a “fairy tale” and having Julie Andrews provide “Once Upon a Time…” bookend narration are not sufficient reasons to abandon things like intelligent plotting and compelling character development. For years, various Disney ...

The Witches was the third and final foray into feature film fantasy made by the late Muppets creator, Jim Henson. Released shortly after his death, the movie followed in the footsteps of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth as opportunities to use H...

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...