Wicked (2024)
A maximalist fantasy that never loses the friendship underneath all that green paint and pageantry.
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The smallest shelf here, on purpose — every one of these earned its spot rather than padding out a quota. Myth, monsters, and one very odd nature documentary about dragons.
Fantasy is the smallest shelf here so far, and we'd rather grow it slowly with titles we actually believe in than pad it out with anything that technically has a dragon in it.
What counts as fantasy on this shelf is deliberately loose — big-budget myth-adaptations sit next to scrappy stop-motion and one gleefully dumb sword-and-sandals throwback, because the genre itself has never been just one thing. The only real requirement is that the world on screen runs on its own rules, and the film actually commits to them instead of hand-waving the magic whenever the plot needs an exit.
None of that means anything goes, though. A fantasy film still has to make its own internal logic feel load-bearing, not decorative — the rules of the world need to matter to the plot, not just dress up a fairly ordinary story in robes and CGI. That discipline is exactly what separates the titles that earned a spot here from the much longer list of fantasy movies that didn't. As this shelf grows, that bar stays the same regardless of budget, studio, or how much marketing push a release happened to get.
Practical effects and animation both get a fair hearing here too — a hand-built puppet or a stop-motion set can sell a fantastical creature just as convincingly as a modern render, sometimes more so, because the texture and weight read as genuinely physical instead of obviously simulated. What matters is whether the illusion holds, not which technique built it. Expect this genre to stay the slowest-growing shelf on the site for a while yet — that's a deliberate choice, not a gap waiting to be filled.
Showing all 7 launched so far, of 15 planned
A maximalist fantasy that never loses the friendship underneath all that green paint and pageantry.
A Viking revenge myth told with the ferocity and patience of a story worth believing.
A handmade creature-fantasy built from puppets and matte paintings, not pixels — and it looks like nothing else out this year.
Stop-motion at its scrappiest and most inventive, with real bite under the charm.
An infant swapped at birth by a sorcerer's dark magic grows into a warrior who communicates telepathically with animals and sets out to avenge his village and defeat the wizard who destroyed it.
Anne Rice’s vampire mythology gets a music-video sheen. Aaliyah’s only starring role, worth seeing for that alone.
Egyptian gods walk among mortals in a big, silly, effects-heavy myth mashup. Knows exactly what kind of movie it is.
Ears (0-5) are our overall verdict on the film; the carrot meter (0-100%) is how confident we are you won't regret hitting play tonight specifically. Neither is an aggregated score — every rating here is a single editorial call.
By quality and word-of-mouth staying power, not release-week hype. Some of the fantasy reviews here are decades old, others are from the last few years — the only filter is whether we think it's genuinely worth your time.
Wicked (2024), at 4.5/5 ears — our current Editor's Pick for Fantasy.
7 published so far, with 15 planned in total as we keep working through the genre.
Ears measure how good we think the film is, full stop. Worth Your Time factors in practical things too — runtime, pacing, whether it holds up on a rewatch — so a shorter, tighter film can sometimes score higher on Worth Your Time than a heavier, more demanding one that still earns more ears.
If a rewatch genuinely changes our mind, yes. But we don't chase shifting consensus — a rating here reflects a real, current viewing, not a placeholder we quietly update to match wherever critical opinion has drifted.
Yes — the shelf isn't limited to live-action. Stop-motion and other animated fantasy get reviewed the same way as everything else here: judged on the film itself, not the format it was made in.
Only when a sequel earns a review on its own terms. Being part of a bigger franchise isn't a reason to skip it or a reason to feature it — we watch the film in front of us and rate that one, not the series it belongs to.