fantasy
American Fable doesn’t quite strike all the right chords, lacking just one spark that might have turned this movie into a lasting cult classic.
While not as perfect as the original, Beauty & the Beast is an elegant and magnificent display that true love for a film never dies.
Kong: Skull Island is fleeting entertainment, but given its massive budget and the audience’s predisposition to Kong, that’s not a terribly impressive feat.
There’s no living with, with a killing. There’s no going back from it. Right or wrong, it’s a brand, a brand that sticks.
Everything about The Great Wall should be fun and goofy, but it takes itself too seriously to be enjoyed for its silliness.
Your Name is the latest anime from Makoto Shinkai; grounded in a contemporary setting, it is as endearing as it is gorgeous to watch unfold.
Prevenge is a film about revenge from the womb; it succeeds both as a satire of how pregnant women are seen and as a hilarious comedy.
A Monster Calls is an entertaining and beautifully presented fantasy, which also imbues deeper universal themes of grief and loss.
Though with no dialogue, The Red Turtle is a profoundly moving work of art, culminating in one of the better animations in recent memory.
Fantastic Beasts is a mostly satisfactory return to the world of Harry Potter, though it also suffers from confused and muddled plot-lines.
The very idea of “The Batch” being in a Marvel film with Tilda Swinton, Mads Mikkelsen, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Rachel McAdams was an incredibly inviting prospect.
Willow has a special place in many film lovers’ hearts. Many of those who love the 1988 fantasy epic saw it as children, and at that young age, the film was possibly the greatest cinematic achievement they had ever seen. There were unlikely heroes, wondrous creatures and imaginative magic filling nearly every frame.
When the title card appears in Daguerrotype, it announces the film as “Le secret de le chambre noire”. That title reflects the film’s goals as a dark, foreboding ghost mystery, and it probably does so better than the title “Daguerrotype” does. But what I like about the title Daguerrotype (misspelled though it might be), is that it refers to the most interesting part of the film:
Imagine you are given a TV remote that has the power to transport you into another dimension and back in time. Imagine you accidentally allow the remote to do it. Well, that’s exactly what happens in the 1998 film Pleasantville.
If you’ve ever wondered why fantasy has always been a popular genre in fiction, it might help knowing that all fiction is a form of fantasy, and that stories are a type of self-preservation. Take Martin Scorsese’s wildly entertaining and greatly underappreciated Shutter Island, in which the main character, Teddy, is on a mission to prove he is innocent, only for the truth to reveal that he is anything but. As Teddy becomes fully aware, he finds out that he has created an elaborate fantasy, a hyper-fiction as a ruse to shield himself from the harsh reality.