Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)

[5] Writer/director Wes Craven returns to the franchise he started, providing a unique coda to the original series of seven Nightmare on Elm Street movies. New Nightmare gives us a glimpse of the meta-awareness that would be foundational to Craven's later Scream…
The Guardian (1990)

The Guardian (1990)

[6] New parents (Dwier Brown and Carey Lowell) unwittingly welcome evil into their lives when they hire a British nanny (Jenny Seagrove) who plans to feed their baby to a tree monster in the woods. The Guardian may suffer from a muddled,…
X-Men (2000)

X-Men (2000)

[7] The first X-Men movie came along at an interesting time in the history of so-called 'comic book' movies, long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe became a reliable box office phenomenon. It was only a few years after the infamously goofy Batman…
Peter Pan (1953)

Peter Pan (1953)

[6] Walt Disney adapts J.M. Barrie's story about three children from London -- Wendy, Michael, and John Darling -- who take a magical trip to Neverland with a hero only children can see: Peter Pan. Pan, an eternal boy who'll never grow…
Scars of Dracula (1970)

Scars of Dracula (1970)

[3] Christopher Lee dons the fangs for Hammer Films a fifth time, but to every-diminishing returns. Scars of Dracula has little continuity with previous installments, feeling more like a reboot than a sequel. The first half of the film mirrors Bram Stoker's…
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

[3] I guess we were lucky to get five good Freddy movies before the franchise finally shit the bed. In Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, there's only one remaining teenager (Shon Greenblatt) in the neighborhood and Freddy uses him to gain access…
Alice in Wonderland (1951)

Alice in Wonderland (1951)

[3] I've never read Lewis Carroll's novel, but I loathe every film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland I've ever seen. Walt Disney's animated version is marginally better than the studio's hideously garish 2010 remake, but it's just as aimless, pointless, and tediously…
A Monster Calls (2016)

A Monster Calls (2016)

[7] A twelve-year-old boy (Lewis MacDougall) is visited by a towering tree monster (voiced by Liam Neeson) who helps him deal with school bullies and his mother's terminal cancer. A Monster Calls is a beautifully crafted film directed by J.A. Bayona (The…
Masters of the Universe (1987)

Masters of the Universe (1987)

[7] If you had to make a movie based on the ham-fisted He-Man toy line and you had no choice but to cast Dolph Lundgren (Rocky IV) in the lead, you could do far worse than first-time director Gary Goddard did with…
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)

The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)

[10] William Dieterle's adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster is a winning combination of rustic Americana and dark fantasy. A cautionary tale of greed and power, the narrative centers around the character of Jabez Stone (James Craig), a…