Fantasy at its best builds worlds that feel lived-in and true, whether that means Miyazaki's hand-drawn Japan in Spirited Away or the mud-and-grief of Middle-earth across Peter Jackson's trilogy. The genre earns its magic by grounding the impossible in real feeling. Browse Macca's reviews below and see which worlds hold up.
Rating: 4.0★
Few films have managed to straddle two genres as confidently as An American Werewolf in London. Released in the summer of 1981, John Landis's horror comedy arrived at a curious crossroads in mainstream cinema, when the slasher boom kicked off by Halloween and Friday the 13th was still
Rating: 3.0★
Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's picture book The Gruffalo's Child arrived in 2004, five years after the original The Gruffalo had become one of the best-selling children's books in British publishing history. Where the first book introduced a clever little mouse spinning predators
Rating: 3.0★
Roald Dahl's 1983 novel The Witches occupies a particular corner of children's literature: charming on the surface, genuinely alarming underneath. Dahl never much softened his edges for younger readers, and the book, with its bald premise that witches are real, hate children, and walk among us
Rating: 3.0★
By 1992, Sam Raimi had already built a reputation as one of American independent cinema's more resourceful and inventive directors, having dragged The Evil Dead (1981) and Evil Dead II (1987) out of near-nothing budgets and into genuine cult immortality. Army of Darkness, the third instalment in
Rating: 4.0★
There are films that become so thoroughly absorbed into seasonal ritual that it becomes almost impossible to see them clearly anymore. Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, released in 1946, is perhaps the defining example of this phenomenon in English-speaking film culture. Screened annually in
Rating: 3.0★
By the early 1980s, the American animation industry was in a peculiar state of drift. Disney, the dominant force for decades, had produced a string of pictures through the late seventies that felt safe and somewhat tired, and audiences were beginning to sense it. It was into this gap that
Rating: 2.5★
There is a particular kind of prestige that arrives pre-loaded, and The Red Turtle carried more of it than most. A co-production between the French outfits Wild Bunch, Why Not Productions and CN4 Productions, the Belgian studio Belvision, and, most eye-catchingly, Japan's Studio Ghibli, the
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that arrive quietly, made on modest budgets by small studios in countries not traditionally associated with feature animation, and then somehow end up nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The Secret of Kells is precisely that kind of film. Released in 2009 and co-
Rating: 2.5★
By the turn of the millennium, Walt Disney Feature Animation found itself at a crossroads it had been approaching for some years. The so-called Disney Renaissance of the late eighties and nineties, that remarkable run from The Little Mermaid through to Mulan, had produced a string of films that
Rating: 3.5★
Video game adaptations have had a notoriously bumpy road to the big screen, but the Mortal Kombat franchise has always occupied a slightly different corner of that conversation. The original 1995 film is, for a certain generation, a genuinely beloved piece of nineties nonsense, and when Simon McQuoid's
Rating: 1.5★
Czech cinema had a remarkable and tragically brief flowering in the 1960s and early 1970s. The movement now known as the Czechoslovak New Wave produced a string of films that pushed hard against the constraints of state-sanctioned socialist realism, using allegory, surrealism, and a loose, improvisatory energy to say
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that feel like they arrive from a particular place and moment so completely that watching them is almost anthropological, and Time of the Gypsies is very much one of those films. Released in 1988 and co-produced across Yugoslavia, Italy, and the United Kingdom, it arrived at
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