Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
Rating: ★★
Jun 6, 1999Space Opera
George Lucas's return to the Star Wars series after a sixteen year absence and a build-up rivaled only by the Second Coming. Instead most audiences went away disappointed. Lucas has used the interim to push the technology to its heights but the story and characters are lacking

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)
Rating: ★★
Jun 20, 2002Space Opera
The second of George Lucas’s Stars Wars prequels is no particular improvement. The romance is stiff and awkward, badly written while the effects sequences seem to be running out of new things to do and so just up the scale of what has happened before with so much going on it reaches a point of visual overload

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)
Rating: ★★★
May 22, 2005Space Opera
The last of George Lucas's Star Wars prequel trilogy and the last opportunity for him to get it right, which he generally does. The effects are expert but are not allowed to dominate as much as they did previously and the focus has come back onto the story and Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader

The Island (2005)

The Island (2005)
Rating:
Jul 24, 2005Clones on the Run/Action
What should have been a modest conceptual SF story about people coming to discover the true nature of the world they live in is killed by having its surprise given away by the publicity department and by being turned into an loud and over-inflated Michael Bay action vehicle

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)
Rating: ★★★
Nov 14, 2009US Army's Psychic Warfare Division Comedy
Film based on the supposed Psychic Warfare Division of the US Army. Based on a non-fiction book, this is played by director Grant Heslov as a broad farce and sits on an uncertain line as to whether the powers are real

Jackboots on Whitehall (2010)

Jackboots on Whitehall (2010)
Rating: ★★½
Nov 1, 2012Nazis Invade England/Satiric Alternate History/Puppet Film
A puppet film about a satiric Nazi invasion of England in World War II. Imagine It Happened Here by way of Team America. This has its amusements but is uneven to the point you are not sure at times whether it is taking the patriotic jingoism seriously or satirically

Perfect Sense (2011)

Perfect Sense (2011)
Rating: ★★★½
May 26, 2014World Where People Start Losing Their Sensory Perceptions
Remarkable film set in a world where people start to progressively lose each of their senses. Much of the film works as a character drama rather than a catastrophe film but its portrait of how the world tries to cope in the aftermath of the loss of another sense makes for top-notch science-fiction

Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)

Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)
Rating: ★★
Feb 28, 2013Fairytale Adaptation/Epic Fantasy
A decade ago Bryan Singer was the great white hope of fanboy cinema but then seemed to lose his touch. This attempt to turn Jack and the Beanstalk into an epic fantasy does nothing to reverse that – the result feels exactly like a piece of formula studio product that could have been made by any hired director

Beauty and the Beast (2017)

Beauty and the Beast (2017)
Rating: ★★★
May 27, 2017Fairy-Tale/Disney Live-Action Remake
This live-action remake of the Disney animated film is mounted with a lavishness. On the other hand, the romance at the centre never fully warms up, while the human characters have the show stolen from under by the cutlery and furnishings

Christopher Robin (2018)

Christopher Robin (2018)
Rating: ★★
Jan 20, 2019Live-Action Winnie the Pooh Film
A live-action adaptation of the Winnie the Pooh characters. This is a mix of Hook with Christopher grown up and having forgotten about the animals and the Paddington films with the animals conducting slapstick chaos in London

Zoe (2018)

Zoe (2018)
Rating:
May 5, 2019Android Relationship Film
Films about androids and artificial intelligence have taken off in the 2010s. This comes produced by Ridley Scott who made Blade Runner, the defining classic on the theme; on the other hand, it ends up in the hands of a director who specialises in relationship dramas

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020)

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020)
Rating: ★★
Apr 4, 2020All-Girl Superhero Team/Comic-Book Adaptation
The DC comic-book Birds of Prey is hijacked to become a vehicle for Harley Quinn, the breakout character from Suicide Squad. Margot Robbie gives the impression she has zero interest in making a film for comic-book fans

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)
Rating: ★★★½
Dec 17, 2022Living Puppet Boy/Stop-Motion Animation
Guillermo Del Toro offers up his dark, more adult take on the classic children’s story in this beautifully made stop-motion animated film. Winner of that year's Academy Award for Best Animated Film.