Worlds Beyond Reason
Fantasy is the oldest form of storytelling and the most demanding. Every invented world must be internally consistent, every invented rule must be honored, every departure from reality must justify itself through the emotional truth it enables. The best fantasy films understand that magic is a storytelling instrument, and the instrument only works when the human stakes are real enough to justify the impossible things happening around them.
The 1980s produced a golden era of fantasy cinema that’s never been matched: a decade in which practical effects, world-building commitment, and directors willing to embrace darkness alongside wonder produced films that have outlasted everything that followed them. Conan, Excalibur, Dragonslayer, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, The Princess Bride: these films didn’t talk down to their audiences or sand the edges off their material. They brought everything.
This is the genre I’d defend hardest, and the eighties are why. Those films built their monsters by hand and trusted a kid in the audience to handle the dark. Too much of what studios call fantasy now is polished to a shine and scared of its own shadow, and that old nerve is what I keep looking for every time a new one comes out.
These twenty-two films span seven decades of the genre, from 1950 to 2019. The best of them are among the finest films in any genre. The worst of them: one trilogy, are monuments to what happens when unlimited budget replaces creative constraint, and when a filmmaker stops trusting the source material that made them famous in the first place.
1. Excalibur (1981)
► Read the full review of Excalibur (1981)
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
“The land and the king are one.”
John Boorman made the definitive Arthurian film by refusing to make it safe or accessible: an operatic, sexually charged, morally complex retelling of the entire Malory cycle that moves from Arthur’s conception to his death with the momentum of myth.
The film is excessive by design: too much armor, too much fog, too much Carmina Burana, too much Nicol Williamson doing Merlin as a deranged cosmic imp. Every excess is intentional. Boorman understood that the Arthurian legend works at an emotional temperature that realism can’t sustain.
The production design is the film’s defining achievement, Boorman shot in Ireland’s actual landscape, dressing his knights in armor that catches light with an almost supernatural brilliance. The visual world is both historical and mythological, never naturalistic, always operating in the tone of the legendary. This is the correct choice for the material: Arthur’s Britain was never meant to be a documentary.
Helen Mirren’s Morgana, Nicol Williamson’s Merlin, and Nigel Terry’s Arthur hold the film’s emotional arc across three acts that would defeat most productions: the rise, the glory of Camelot, the fall. The fall is the film’s finest section: the waste land, the Fisher King’s wound, the Grail quest, all compressed into a final hour that achieves tragic weight. Excalibur doesn’t simplify. It asks everything of its audience and gives everything back.
Excalibur is loud and overcooked and I adore every minute of it. Boorman went after the whole legend and got it, and every Arthur film since has looked timid beside this one. The fog gets thick enough in places that I lose track of who’s swinging at whom, and that’s the only complaint I’ve got.
2. Clash of the Titans (1981)
► Read the full review of Clash of the Titans (1981)
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
“Release the Kraken!”
Ray Harryhausen’s final film is reviewed in detail in the Stop-Motion and Dynamation section of this site. It belongs here too because it’s as much a fantasy epic as a Harryhausen effects film: a full Greek mythological adventure with Medusa, Pegasus, the Kraken, and the pleasure of watching a hero survive a world in which the gods are present, capricious, and dangerous. Perseus’s quest is the hero’s journey before Hollywood turned the hero’s journey into a template.
The film’s handmade quality is its defining aesthetic quality in the context of this list, Harryhausen’s stop-motion creatures show the marks of something made by human hands, and those marks make the impossible feel more real than CGI perfection. The Medusa sequence in particular achieves a quality of dread that the 2010 remake with its digital budget couldn’t approach.
The CGI remake exists. It’s better special effects and is a considerably worse film. The original is available on physical media and worth every effort to find. For full analysis see the Harryhausen review on this site.
3. Conan the Barbarian (1982)
► Read the full review of Conan the Barbarian (1982)
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.”
John Milius made the sword-and-sorcery epic as a philosophical statement. Conan the Barbarian is as much a meditation on will, suffering, and the forging of character as it’s an action film. The opening act, in which a boy watches his parents killed and spends his formative years enslaved and then trained as a fighter, is more emotionally grounded than most fantasy films manage across their entire running time. Milius understood that the adventure means nothing without the person it’s happening to, and he built a person before he built the adventure.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast not despite his limited acting range but because of it. Conan is a man defined by physical presence, physical capability, and a code of behavior, not by psychological complexity, and Schwarzenegger embodies all of these with complete conviction.
His silence is more expressive than most actors’ dialogue. Sandahl Bergman’s Valeria and James Earl Jones’s Thulsa Doom complete the film’s emotional triangle with performances that match the material’s operatic tone.
Basil Poledouris’s score is one of cinema’s great achievements in any genre: a choral and orchestral work that makes the film’s emotional argument in its rhythm and its scale. Remove the score and you lose half the film. Together they produce something that’s larger than either its budget or its premise would suggest possible.
People who write Conan off as muscle cinema have missed the film. Milius made a grim, serious picture about what suffering does to a man, and Poledouris gave it a voice. The middle sags a little before the last act pulls it back together, and I don’t care. This is the sword-and-sorcery film the rest of the genre should be studying.
4. The Dark Crystal (1982)
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
“What was sundered and undone shall be whole: the two made one.”
Jim Henson and Frank Oz built an entire world from puppetry and practical effects, not a world that contains puppets, but a world in which every living thing is a puppet, a world without a single human face, a world of Gelflings and Skeksis and Mystics inhabiting a planet that feels ancient and alien. The ambition is staggering and the execution matches it. The Dark Crystal remains the most complete handmade fantasy world in cinema history.
The film is dark in a way that Jim Henson’s other work wasn’t. The Skeksis are physically repulsive, the film’s violence has weight, and the mythology of the world works with complexity. Henson understood that children respond to darkness as readily as adults do, and that the sanitized fantasy is less satisfying and less meaningful than the one that acknowledges what darkness is.
The practical effects work is the finest achievement of its kind in the fantasy genre: every creature is specific, every environment has texture, every scene holds detail that rewards repeated viewing. A Netflix prequel series attempted to capture the original’s quality thirty-seven years later and achieved it surprisingly well before Netflix canceled it. The original stands alone as the definitive statement of what the form can do when applied to world-building with complete commitment.
5. Dragonslayer (1981)
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
“The age of magic is ending. Men will rule the world now.”
Matthew Robbins made the finest dragon film ever produced, not the most spectacular, not the most expensive, but the one most honest about what a dragon would be. Vermithrax Pejorative is an ancient predator protecting her offspring in a kingdom that’s decided she must die, and the film treats her with the ambivalent respect that a dangerous animal deserves. She’s terrifying and she’s magnificent and the film’s moral position is that killing her, however necessary, is also a loss.
Peter MacNicol’s Galen is the anti-hero that the fantasy genre rarely produces: a young sorcerer’s apprentice who’s not gifted, not brave, and not competent, who succeeds through improvisation and luck and one act of courage that costs him more than he expected. The film refuses the genre’s usual confidence in its protagonist. Galen is scared most of the time, and his fear is credible because the dragon is the kind of thing a person should be scared of.
The ILM effects work on Vermithrax remains the finest practical dragon animation on film, she moves with the weight and logic of a creature that exists, not the weightless CGI dragons that followed. The film was a modest commercial success in 1981 and has grown steadily in reputation in the decades since. It deserves everything the reputation says about it.
I’ve got real affection for a fantasy film that lets its hero be scared stiff. Galen’s no chosen one and Vermithrax is no cartoon, and a frightened kid standing up to something that big moves me more than any glowing sword ever has. It took the world a while to catch up with this one, and it was about time.
6. Time Bandits (1981)
► Read the full review of Time Bandits (1981)
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
“God isn’t interested in technology. He cares nothing for the microchip or the silicon revolution. Look how he spends his time, forty-three species of parrots! Nipples for men!”
Terry Gilliam made a fantasy film for children that’s also, with complete seriousness, a theological argument about the nature of evil and the indifference of divine authority. A boy travels through time with a gang of thieving dwarves who have stolen a map of the universe’s holes, encountering Napoleon, Robin Hood, and Agamemnon along the way, pursued by Evil and apparently guided by the Supreme Being. The film ends with the boy’s parents dying because they touched a piece of Evil. Gilliam doesn’t soften the ending for the children watching.
Gilliam’s anarchic structure: each time period a sketch, the overall shape more picaresque than plotted, is the correct form for a story about holes in the fabric of creation. Nothing holds together because nothing is supposed to. The universe is badly made and only partly supervised, and the comedy comes from the gap between the grandeur of the concept and the shabbiness of the execution. Gilliam had been making that observation about everything his entire career.
Sean Connery’s Agamemnon, John Cleese’s Robin Hood, and Ralph Richardson’s Supreme Being are the film’s finest passages: each one a comic set piece that’s also a philosophical position. Richardson’s God as a mild-mannered administrator who considers Evil a necessary component of his plan, and who can’t quite be bothered to supervise the consequences, is the film’s darkest and funniest idea. Children understand it perfectly.
Time Bandits is Gilliam at his most gleeful, and I enjoy how little he cares about being polite to children. My reservation is the shape of it. Some episodes run long and a few barely work, so the middle can feel like a string of sketches waiting for a plot to show up. Richardson’s bored God makes up for most of that.
7. The NeverEnding Story (1984)
► Read the full review of The NeverEnding Story (1984)
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
“It is the Nothing. It is eating Fantasia.”
Wolfgang Petersen made a German production that out-imagined most of what Hollywood was doing with fantasy at the same time: a film about a boy reading a book about a boy saving a world, in which the frame story and the nested story are more deeply connected than they appear. The Nothing destroying Fantasia is the consequence of children who stop believing in stories, stop needing imagination, and the film’s argument is that fantasy isn’t escapism but a survival mechanism for the human spirit.
Its practical creature work is excellent: Falkor the luck dragon, the Rock Biter, the Gmork: each one designed with a distinctiveness that sets this production apart from the generic fantasy output of its era. The Gmork, especially, is one of the finest monster designs in fantasy cinema: a creature who’s the Nothing’s agent, who exists to hunt hope, whose dialogue about the nature of nihilism is more philosophically honest than most adult fantasy manages.
The Swamp of Sadness sequence, Atreyu watching his horse sink, is the most emotionally devastating scene in 1980s fantasy cinema. Petersen didn’t cut away. He showed it happening and let the children watching feel exactly what it was designed to make them feel. That willingness to inflict emotion on a young audience is the mark of a filmmaker who respects children enough to take them seriously.
The NeverEnding Story trusts children with grief, and I’d put it above a hundred cheerful family films for that alone. The swamp scene is cruel and it’s necessary. My small gripe is that the ending feels rushed after all that weight, as if Petersen ran short of time before Bastian gets his full turn.
8. Conan the Destroyer (1984)
⭐ IMDB: 5.9/10
“What do you value most?” “To crush my enemies.”
Richard Fleischer’s sequel is a lighter and less philosophically serious film than Milius’s original, which the producers intended and which is the film’s primary limitation. The decision to pursue a PG rating softened what should have been hard edges: the original’s willingness to show consequence was replaced with bloodless action and broader comedy. Conan the Destroyer is the sword-and-sorcery genre as entertainment, not as statement, and it succeeds on those terms without pretending to be more.
Schwarzenegger is still Schwarzenegger, which is still sufficient, his physical presence fills the frame with the authority that the character requires, and his comfort in the role has increased since the first film. Grace Jones’s Zula is a real addition to the ensemble, bringing an energy and physicality that nobody else in the cast could provide. Wilt Chamberlain as Bombaata gives the film its most entertaining single performance: a seven-foot basketball player playing a treacherous royal guard with cheerful conviction.
It was never going to be the original. Taken on its own terms: an honest adventure with good production values, reliable action, and a cast that clearly enjoyed the work. It delivers what it promises. The original’s philosophical ambition is absent. The original’s entertainment value is largely intact.
9. Legend (1985)
► Read the full review of Legend (1985)
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
“I am the Lord of Darkness.”
Ridley Scott made a fairy tale as a visual experience instead of a narrative one: a film that exists primarily in its images, its production design, its costumes, and Tim Curry’s defining performance as the Lord of Darkness.
The story is thin: a forest boy must save the last unicorns and a princess from a demon lord who wants to end the light and bring eternal winter. It’s the occasion. The world Scott and his designers built is the achievement.
Tim Curry’s Darkness is the finest fantasy villain in 1980s cinema: a performance of complete physical commitment, built on three hours of Rob Bottin’s prosthetic makeup applied daily, that transforms Curry into something other. He’s massive, he’s seductive, he’s evil as a philosophical position instead of a character limitation. His scenes with Mia Sara’s Lili, attempting to corrupt her through glamour and desire, not force, are the film’s most interesting dramatic sequences.
The Director’s Cut with Jerry Goldsmith’s score is the correct version of this film. The theatrical release substituted Tangerine Dream’s electronic score. That fights the imagery instead of supporting it. Goldsmith’s orchestral work matches Scott’s visual tone and produces a considerably different and better film. Find the Director’s Cut.
I enjoy Legend for Curry and for the pictures, but the story doesn’t hold up its end. The forest boy and Lili are paper-thin next to that demon, and whenever Darkness is offscreen I catch myself waiting for him to come back. Watch the Director’s Cut and forgive the rest.
10. Ladyhawke (1985)
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
“Always together, eternally apart.”
Richard Donner made the fantasy romance built on the most elegant curse in the genre: a man who becomes a wolf at night and a woman who becomes a hawk by day, always together, never at the same time human. The curse is the love story’s architecture: they travel together, protect each other, communicate through the liminal moments of dawn and dusk when one is transforming and the other has just transformed, and the thief Phillipe Gaston is their intermediary with the human world they can’t quite inhabit together.
Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer at the peak of their physical presences are the correct casting. Their beauty isn’t incidental but structural, the film asking you to believe that this bishop would damn his soul to possess her and this knight would endure this curse to stay with her. Matthew Broderick’s Phillipe is the film’s comic relief and its moral center: an escaped thief who becomes a hero because the situation required it and because he found people worth being a hero for.
The anachronistic synthesizer score is the film’s most discussed limitation. Alan Parsons Project in a medieval setting is a jarring choice that the film overcomes but never fully resolves. The emotional logic of the story is strong enough to carry the audience past it, and the final scene earns everything the film promised about what it would feel like when the curse finally breaks.
11. Highlander (1986)
► Read the full review of Highlander (1986)
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
“There can be only one.”
Russell Mulcahy made a film that shouldn’t work (a Scottish Highlander who can’t die fighting immortal warriors across centuries until a final confrontation in 1986 New York, with Queen providing the score) and produced a fantasy film that ranks among the most moving of its decade. The premise is absurd. The film takes it completely seriously, and the seriousness makes it work. Connor MacLeod’s centuries of loss, watching everyone he loves age and die while he remains, gives the film an emotional core that the action sequences serve.
Christopher Lambert’s Connor is a man defined by grief accumulated across four hundred years: the sadness of someone who has outlived everything, who has loved repeatedly and lost repeatedly, who shows centuries of loss in his face in the present-day sequences. Sean Connery’s Ramirez is the film’s pleasure: an Egyptian-Spanish Immortal played by a Scottish actor as the most charming man in any century, whose teaching relationship with Connor is the film’s warmest section.
There should have been only one film. The sequels are an extended lesson in ignoring everything that made the original work. The original’s time-spanning structure, Queen’s rock opera score, and the melancholy of immortality as a burden instead of a gift produce something that’s more than the sum of its parts. It shouldn’t be as good as it is. It’s as good as it is.
Highlander is ridiculous on paper, and I don’t care at all. Lambert plays four hundred years of grief with his face alone, and the sadness under all that swordplay moves me every time. The sequels infuriate me.
12. Labyrinth (1986)
► Read the full review of Labyrinth (1986)
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
“You have no power over me.”
Jim Henson and Terry Jones built a coming-of-age fantasy around the most honest premise in the genre: a teenage girl who wishes her baby brother away and must enter a labyrinth to get him back before he’s transformed forever. The Goblin King Jareth is the fantasy Sarah has been having about a powerful man who wants her, made incarnate, offered to her as an alternative to the responsibilities of growing up.
Her rejection of him is the film’s climax and its argument: the fantasy is seductive because it’s easier than real life, and the transition to adulthood requires choosing real life anyway.
David Bowie’s Jareth is one of cinema’s great casting decisions. Only Bowie could make the character’s combination of glamour, menace, and wounded pride fully convincing. His songs are among the finest in any fantasy film.
Brian Froud’s creature designs give the labyrinth’s world a consistent visual logic: everything is slightly off, slightly dangerous, slightly more alive than it should be. Henson’s puppetry is at its peak technical achievement.
A commercial disappointment in 1986, the film has become a much-loved fantasy film of its generation in the decades since. Its reputation grew because each new generation of young viewers recognized the same thing in it: a fantasy about fantasy itself, and about the moment you stop needing it in quite the same way, and about what you keep and what you leave behind.
Labyrinth is odd and a little creepy, and that’s why it’s lasted. Bowie makes a choice no studio would dare sign off on now and sells every second of it. My small complaint is that a couple of the puppet detours drag, and I’ll gladly sit through them for Froud’s goblins and that final line.
13. The Princess Bride (1987)
► Read the full review of The Princess Bride (1987)
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
“As you wish.”
The Princess Bride is among the best films ever made. That’s not hyperbole. Rob Reiner and William Goldman built something that’s at once a love story, a swashbuckling adventure, a comedy, and a meditation on storytelling itself, and every element serves every other element without any of them crowding out the rest. The film is reviewed in full in the Greatest Romantic Comedies section of this site.
Its presence here’s mandatory because it’s also the finest fantasy film ever made about the conventions of fantasy: a genre that knows what it is and loves what it is and is never embarrassed by either.
The frame story: a grandfather reading to his sick grandson, isn’t a device but the film’s moral. The boy’s gradual surrender to the story, his progression from eye-rolling reluctance to complete investment, mirrors every viewer’s experience.
Reiner understood that the film’s job was to win the boy’s belief, and by extension the audience’s, and every comedic deflation of the romantic conventions is in service of winning it: a story can’t naively sweep you up once it has let you see through it, so the film lets you see through it first and then sweeps you up anyway.
There’s no flaw in this film. Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Revenge. Giants. Monsters. Chases. Escapes. True love. Miracles. All of it delivered at a temperature of sustained perfection. For full analysis see the Romantic Comedies review on this site.
14. Willow (1988)
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
“You are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.”
Ron Howard and George Lucas made the last great quest fantasy of the 1980s, a Nelwyn farmer with modest magical ability tasked with delivering a human infant to safety across a continent full of obstacles, accompanied by a roguish swordsman who shouldn’t be trusted and is. The quest structure is classical: the hero who doesn’t believe in himself, the journey that proves his belief wrong, the villain who embodies the worst of what the good characters might become.
All of it executed with the production values and the affection for the material that Lucas brought to his best work.
Warwick Davis’s Willow Ufgood is a hero built on underestimation. He’s small, he’s untrained, he consistently does the wrong spell, and he succeeds anyway because he refuses to stop trying. Val Kilmer’s Madmartigan is the film’s main source of entertainment: a mercenary with a code he won’t admit to, whose affection for the baby and for Willow develops across the journey with the quality of a man who has been hiding his decency for so long he’s forgotten it’s there.
The ILM morphing sequence is a technical landmark: the first use of digital morphing in a feature film, deployed in service of a transformation scene that required it. The effect is dated now. The story it serves isn’t. Willow is the 1980s fantasy film that most rewards revisiting in adulthood because the emotional logic of its hero’s arc is sounder than memory suggests.
15. Jumanji (1995)
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
“In the jungle you must wait, until the dice read five or eight.”
Joe Johnston made a film built around Robin Williams at his most controlled, not the frenetic improvisational performer of his comedy but the gift he’d for playing damage, for showing what a man looks like who has survived something he can’t explain to anyone.
Alan Parrish spent twenty-six years inside a board game. He comes out older than his body appears, wiser than his circumstances should allow, and still carrying the grief of the time lost and the life unlived. Williams plays all of this in the spaces between the film’s adventure sequences.
Here the fantasy logic is airtight: the film establishes the game’s rules early and honors them completely, each roll of the dice produces its threat from the card, and the consequences accumulate across the game until the final roll resets everything. The reset is the film’s emotional climax instead of its action climax: the moment Alan and Sarah get to live the life the game took from them is more affecting than any of the CGI stampedes that preceded it.
The CGI animals are dated. Williams isn’t. His performance grounds every scene it inhabits and gives the film’s fantasy elements weight they couldn’t have sustained without him. The 2017 and 2019 sequels are entertaining films in their own right that work in an entirely different tone. The original is a film about loss and time, wearing the costume of a family adventure film.
16. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) – Spain/Mexico
► Read the full review of Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) Review
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
“A long time ago, in the underground realm, where there are no lies or pain, there lived a princess who dreamed of the human world.”
Guillermo del Toro made the finest fantasy film of the 21st century by refusing to separate the fantasy from the horror or to clarify which realm is real. Ofelia exists in post-Civil War Spain under a Fascist stepfather and in a fairy tale underground kingdom where she’s a lost princess completing tasks. Del Toro never confirms which world is the true one, because the film’s argument is that both are: the fantasy is Ofelia’s response to an unbearable reality, and the fantasy’s existence transforms the reality, and both things are true.
The Pale Man sequence: the creature with eyes in its hands, sitting motionless at a banquet table, awakened when Ofelia eats despite the prohibition, is the finest single scene in 21st century fantasy cinema: a monster designed by del Toro’s own nightmares, moving with the horror of something that was dormant and is now fully awake, filmed with a patience that makes every second excruciating. The creature is practical, physical, and real in a way that CGI can’t replicate.
Sergi López’s Captain Vidal is the film’s human monster, a Fascist who’s more frightening than any of the fairy tale creatures because his cruelty works through institutions and authority. Del Toro understood that the real world’s monsters needed to be as disturbing as the fantasy world’s, and he made them so. Pan’s Labyrinth is the fantasy film that faces most squarely what fantasy is for: surviving the real world.
Pan’s Labyrinth devastates me, and I wouldn’t change a frame. Del Toro set a child’s fairy tale beside real cruelty without flinching once, and Vidal frightens me more than the Pale Man does. When somebody tells me fantasy is kid stuff, this is the film I show them.
17. Stardust (2007)
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
“You know when I said I knew little about love? That was true. But it’s not that I haven’t thought about it.”
Matthew Vaughn adapted Neil Gaiman’s novel with the same affectionate irreverence that made The Princess Bride work: a fantasy that knows it’s a fantasy, that plays with the genre’s conventions while honoring the emotional stakes beneath them. Tristan crosses a magical wall to retrieve a fallen star as a gift for the girl he loves, discovers the star is a woman named Yvaine, and spends the film discovering that the girl he loves was never the right girl and the star he was retrieving was.
The film is a romance about learning to see clearly.
The ensemble is the film’s primary pleasure, Charlie Cox and Claire Danes at the center, Michelle Pfeiffer’s witch pursuing the star’s heart for immortality, Robert De Niro’s sky pirate captain who’s not what he appears, the ghost princes of Stormhold offering comic commentary from the sidelines. De Niro’s Captain Shakespeare is the film’s greatest single performance: a flamboyant secret that the film reveals with the comedy of an actor playing against every image he’s spent forty years building.
Stardust performed disappointingly at the box office in 2007 and has been gaining its correct audience steadily since. It’s the best Gaiman adaptation on film, executed by a director who understood that Gaiman’s material requires affection as well as craft, and that the affection must be visible in every frame. Vaughn brings both.
18. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-2003)
► Read the full review of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-2003)
⭐ IMDB: 9.0/10 (avg)
★ Rating: 10+
“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.”
Peter Jackson made the impossible possible. Tolkien’s trilogy was considered unfilmable for decades: too long, too complex, too dependent on the internal logic of a world built across fifty years of writing to survive compression into three films. Jackson compressed it anyway, with the Extended Editions restoring what the theatrical releases sacrificed, and produced the defining fantasy film trilogy in cinema history. The full analysis is in the dedicated Lord of the Rings review on this site.
What belongs here’s the acknowledgment of what Jackson understood about the source material that his successors didn’t: Tolkien’s world is built on loss. The beauty of Middle-earth is the beauty of something passing: the Elves leaving, the age of heroes ending, the world diminishing. The films honor this melancholy without allowing it to overwhelm the story’s momentum, and the result is a trilogy that works at the same time as adventure epic and elegy.
Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, and the entire ensemble carry that dual tone with consistent conviction across eleven hours of film.
I’d put these three films up against anything the genre has produced, and the Extended Editions are the versions worth your time. You can feel Jackson’s love for Tolkien in every scene, and that love is what holds eleven hours together.
The Fellowship of the Ring remains the finest individual film in the trilogy. Complete in itself, perfectly structured, achieving everything it needed to achieve while leaving the audience wanting everything that followed. The Return of the King’s multiple endings honor Tolkien’s understanding that the end of the story isn’t one event but many, and that the hobbits’ return to the Shire is as important as the destruction of the Ring. Jackson trusted the source material. That trust is the foundation of everything.
19. Pinocchio (2019) – Italy
► Read the full review of Pinocchio (2019)
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
“I want to be a real boy.”
Matteo Garrone returned to the original Collodi novel instead of the Disney sanitization and made the Pinocchio that Collodi wrote: dark, strange, grotesque in places, a fairy tale about a wooden child who keeps making terrible decisions and suffering terrible consequences and surviving anyway, not through virtue but through the resilience of something that’s partly not human. This isn’t a children’s film in the contemporary sense.
It’s a fairy tale in the older sense: a story that acknowledges that the world will hurt you, and that the question isn’t whether you’re hurt but whether you survive the hurting. Throughout, the practical creature work is extraordinary: the Fox and Cat, the Coachman, Pinocchio himself, realized in prosthetics and makeup that look handmade and therefore slightly wrong. Federico Ielapi’s Pinocchio is a child performance of unusual commitment: physical, impulsive, convincing as a creature who’s both a puppet and a boy and not quite either.
Roberto Benigni, who played the title character in his own 2002 adaptation, here plays Geppetto: a more suitable casting, and he brings to the role a grief and a tenderness that the story requires. Garrone’s Italy is the Italy of Collodi’s 19th century and the Italy of folk tale, a place that exists slightly outside of time in the way that all fairy tales do. This is the definitive live-action Pinocchio.
20. The Hobbit Trilogy (2012-2014)
► Read the full review of The Hobbit Trilogy (2012-2014) Review
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10 (avg)
★ Rating: 1
“I’m going on an adventure!”
Peter Jackson adapted a 310-page children’s novel into nine hours of film and produced the most instructive failure in fantasy cinema history. The Hobbit is a simple story: a wizard recruits a homebody hobbit to join a company of dwarves recovering their lost mountain home from a dragon. It’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. It doesn’t have enough material for three films, and the attempt to fill the space with invented subplots, CGI spectacle, and bloated action sequences that dwarf anything Tolkien wrote produces something that’s both too long and too empty. The Hobbit trilogy is the entry on this list I resent. Tolkien wrote a lovely little book, and Jackson buried it under cartoon physics and a video game’s worth of orc fights. I think somebody wanted three tickets out of one story, and it’s a damn shame, because Freeman was ready to carry the real thing.
The Hobbit’s primary failure is the loss of scale. The Lord of the Rings worked because its scale was earned through the weight of what was at stake.
Everything in those films meant something. The Hobbit’s endless battles mean nothing because the stakes are never established with sufficient care, because the characters are too numerous to track, and because CGI armies fighting CGI armies produce no emotional response regardless of how spectacular the choreography. The barrel sequence, the Goblin King’s domain, the Battle of Five Armies: all spectacle, no consequence.
Martin Freeman’s Bilbo is the film’s only consistent achievement: a performance of warmth and specific comic timing that the films don’t deserve. The Riddles in the Dark sequence between Bilbo and Gollum, practically the only scene in nine hours that matches the source material’s quality, shows what the trilogy could have been if Jackson had trusted Tolkien’s small, intimate story instead of attempting to recreate the epic scale of Lord of the Rings with material that required the opposite approach. The lesson is permanent: more isn’t more. Scale must be earned.
21. Orpheus (1950)
► Read the full review of Orpheus (1950)
“Mirrors are the doors through which Death comes and goes.”
Before anybody on this list built a fantasy world, Jean Cocteau built one inside a mirror. His Orphée, a famous Paris poet played by Jean Marais, follows Death through the glass into an underworld that looks like a bombed city run by a tribunal with forms to fill out. Death, played by María Casares, arrives in a Rolls-Royce with motorcycle outriders and falls in love with him.
The fantasy here runs on rules, and the rules are strange and exact. The mirror is liquid only if you wear the right gloves. The dead communicate through a car radio in lines of broken verse. The zone between worlds has its own wind and its own gravity. Cocteau never explains why any of it works, and he never lets it slip.
He had a small post-war budget and made his effects with reverse footage, mirrors and sets built at strange angles.
They hold up because they’re rooted in the physical world instead of painted over it. This belongs on any list of fantasy films, and it might be the one the others owe the most. Nine out of ten.
22. Michael (1996)
► Read the full review of Michael (1996)
“An archangel who smokes, pours sugar on everything, and picks fights in bars.”
Nora Ephron sent the archangel Michael to a small Iowa town, and he turned out to be John Travolta with wings, a beer belly and an appetite for everything the world has to offer. A tabloid sends William Hurt and Andie MacDowell to get the story, and Michael, who’s on his last visit to Earth, takes them on a road trip instead.
The fantasy is gentle and it’s played for character.
Travolta, fresh off Pulp Fiction, plays the angel as a man enjoying physical existence with his whole body. He dances, he eats, he brawls, and he smells like cookies. The joke is the gap between what you’d expect an angel to be and this one, and Ephron keeps finding new corners of that gap.
I’m fond of Michael, but it’s slight. The road trip meanders, and the Hurt and MacDowell romance never catches fire the way Travolta does. When he’s on screen the film glows, and when he’s off it I start checking how much is left. It made about $96 million on a $55 million budget, and it’s not trying to be anything more than a warm evening. I rate it a seven. Jean Stapleton is lovely as the woman who’s been putting him up, and the film justifies all its sentiment.
What Fantasy Is For
The best fantasy films on this list share a quality that distinguishes them from the spectacle-delivery machines that have dominated the genre since the mid-2000s: they take their worlds and their characters seriously enough to let them mean something. Dragonslayer’s dragon is a tragedy. Labyrinth’s Goblin King is a seduction. Pan’s Labyrinth’s fairy tale is a survival mechanism. Lord of the Rings is an elegy for a world that’s passing. The Hobbit trilogy is a cautionary tale about forgetting all of this.
Fantasy is the oldest form of storytelling because it’s the most honest: it takes the things that can’t be said directly (grief, fear, the seduction of power, the cost of growing up) and puts them into forms that can be approached. The dragon, the labyrinth and the ring are what they are, and they’re also something else, and the something else is why the stories last.
The 1980s understood this, and I miss it badly. Those films trusted their darkness and never pretended the world past the magic was safe. Too much of today’s studio fantasy is expensive and hollow, and I’ll take one of Henson’s Skeksis over a whole army of digital orcs. Show the old ones to a kid who’s never seen them, because that kid can handle far more than the studios think.
What Do You Think?
Which fantasy film belongs on this list? Which one did we get wrong? Drop a comment. In a genre this beloved, strong opinions are required.
