The Pyx (1973)

The Pyx (1973)
Rating: ★★
Mar 30, 2013Murder Investigation/Devil Worship Cult
Difficult to find 1970s Canadian-made occult film that doesn't quite live up to expectation. Mostly it is a police procedural and the devil worship cult angle only emerges as a left field ending in the last ten minutes.; Not tight enough as a detective story to fully work

Murder By Decree (1979)

Murder By Decree (1979)
Rating: ★★★
Dec 13, 2002Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper
A lavish and ambitious production that has the fictional character of Sherlock Holmes solving the real-life Jack the Ripper murders, even if the eventual resolution opts for one of the more far-fetched theories about The Ripper’s identity

Gandahar (1988)

Gandahar (1988)
Rating: ★★
Jun 19, 2005Animation/Planetary Adventure
The final film of French animator Rene Laloux, a planetary adventure set on a world where Laloux delights in creating exotically trippy aliens and landscapes. Released in English as Light Years with an Isaac Asimov script

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
Rating: ★★★
Jul 20, 2000Intergalactic Adventures
The last of the classic Star Trek films. Nicholas Meyer, who made the last good Trek film The Wrath of Khan, returns to give the characters a moving send off, while the plot that reenacts the fall of the Berlin Wall with the Klingons gives the films a political immediacy that was missing since the tv series

Harrison Bergeron (1995)

Harrison Bergeron (1995)
Rating: ★★
May 1, 2010Future Where Everybody Must Be Average/Kurt Vonnegut Adaptation
Adaptation of a Kurt Vonnegut story about a future where everyone must be average wherein Vonnegut's farcical satire is completely misjudged and played straight

Possessed (2000)

Possessed (2000)
Rating: ½
Jul 3, 2007The "True Story" That Inspired The Exorcist
Steven E. de Souza, behind the scripts of a number of high-profile action films, directs this film that supposedly tells the true story that inspired The Exorcist. In practice, this is just another excuse to trot out the possession and exorcism cliches but the results are ludicrous

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)
Rating: ★★★½
Sep 7, 2010Magical Circus/Deals with the Devil
This wouldn't be a Terry Gilliam if it wasn't cursed by bad luck being affected by the death of star Heath Ledger. It's the most Gilliam-esque film in some years where Gilliam and his designers leap off into deliriously madcap surrealism

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
Rating: ★★★
Dec 20, 2011Serial Killer Thriller
David Fincher's English-language remake of the Swedish film is capably made but a lesser shadow of something that worked perfectly the first time. In particular, Rooney Mara is no substitute for Noomi Rapace

Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016)

Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016)
Rating: ★★
Mar 6, 2017Animation/Young H.P. Lovecraft's Adventures
H.P. Lovecraft is a cult horror writer whose work brims over with a sense of cosmic dread. One of the most bizarre Lovecraft film adaptations is this work of children's animation featuring a young Lovecraft

Howard Lovecraft and the Undersea Kingdom (2017)

Howard Lovecraft and the Undersea Kingdom (2017)
Rating: ★★
Jun 8, 2020Animation/Young H.P. Lovecraft’s Adventures
The second in a series of animated children's films about the young H.P. Lovecraft and his encounters with the various denizens of the Cthulhu mythos

The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017)

The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017)
Rating:
Mar 5, 2018Charles Dickens and the Writing of A Christmas Carol
Among the fad for biopics about writers and the origins of famous stories, this, about Charles Dickens and the creation of A Christmas Carol, is the most lunatic – and that's not counting the blatant lie of the title