Volume one in Philip Pullman’s lauded “His Dark Materials” trilogy makes a lavishly put together yet essentially inert movie.

Could any creature be more intense and depressing than a Russian vampire on the prowl?

Benjamin Button is as curiouser and curiouser as they come: he grows ever younger as he grows up.

A troupe of oddball performers rattle around London in a towering wagon that is part stage and part tumbledown home.

An older, despondent Harry Potter starts his sixth year at Hogwarts School with the weight of the witchy world upon him.

Director Spike Jonze’s charged and fleshed-out adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s children’s story hones right in ona banished boy’s aloneness and rage.

Deep beneath Finland’s Korvatunturi Mountains, a group of miners make an otherworldly discovery.

Johnny Depp is a spacey chameleon as the Mad Hatter, and director Tim Burton’s Wonderland is a subterranean kingdom of hazardous, deranged beauty.

A monster-slaying monk tries to save a young herbalist from a thousand-year-old humanised reptile.

For everyone’s sake, especially his, Harry must prevail — and it’s no secret that he does.