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"What magical spell does it cast on all who read it? What is the secret of The NeverEnding Story?" This unforgettably fantasy adventure movie originally opened in theaters in West German in April 1984 - a full 40 years ago this month. In celebration of its 40th anniversary, and for a look back at a classic trailer that has re-appeared online, enjoy these previews for Wolfgang Petersen's classic The NeverEnding Story. In this big screen adventure, a troubled boy dives into a wondrous fantasy world through the pages of a book. He ends up journeying through strange lands, encountering all kinds of creatures both kind & evil, making some friends & enemies along the way. Barret Oliver stars as Bastian, with Noah Hathaway as Atreyu, Tami Stronach as the "Moon Child", plus Patricia Hayes, Sydney Bromley, Gerald McRaney, and Moses Gunn. If you grew up in the 80s or 90s like me, you...

Can a war movie be reassuring in a time of crisis? Each of the films in this excellent collection stress people working together: to repel invaders, escape from or attack the enemy, and just to survive in sticky situations. All are inspirational in that they see cooperation, organization and leadership doing good work. See: the ‘other’ great escape picture, the original account of Dunkirk, and the aerial bombing movie that inspired the final battle in Star Wars. Plus a tense ‘what if?’ invasion tale, and a desert trek suspense ordeal that’s one of the best war films ever. The most relevant dialogue in the set? Seeing the total screw-up at Dunkirk, Bernard Lee determines that England will have to re-organize with new people in key leadership positions, people who know what they’re doing. I’m all for that Here and Now, fella.

Their Finest Hour 5 British WWII Classics

Went The Day Well,...

While there is an abundance of films out there that feature halflings forced into a fight against an all-consuming evil, about 95% of them were directed by Peter Jackson. But today, I want to pay homage to a film directed by Richie Cunningham (aka Ron Howard), produced by George Lucas, and predating The Lord of the Rings movies by over a decade. Call it sacrilege if you must, but Ron Howard’s Willow holds a place nearer and dearer to my heart than anything set in Middle-earth. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some hobbits, but I was introduced to the Nelwyn clan at five years old. And at that age, when you fall for a movie, you fall hard.

For those who aren’t familiar, Willow centers on farmer/would-be sorcerer Willow Ufgood (Warwick Davis). When he happens upon Elora Danan, an infant of the Daikini clan (aka...

Alex Westthorp Sep 14, 2016

Did fantasy dramas Chocky, The Box Of Delights and Dramarama leave an impression on you as a kid? Revisit those nightmares here...

Spooky, always magical and occasionally downright scary dramas are the bedrock of kids' television. For me, the pinnacle of this sort of programme was reached in the 1980s. The decade saw a new approach to both traditional and contemporary drama by both UK broadcasters: ITV committed itself to regular seasons of children's plays with Dramarama (1983-89), a kind of youth version of the venerable BBC Play For Today (1970-84), which saw the 1988 television debut of one David Tennant. The BBC, building upon an impressive body of work from the early 70s onwards, produced some of its very best family drama in this era, embracing cutting edge technology to bring treats like The Box Of Delights (1984) and The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe (1988) to the screen.

Prolific comedy actor who worked with Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan and Hattie Jacques

The stony-faced, beaky comedy actor Graham Stark, who has died aged 91, is best remembered for his appearances alongside Peter Sellers, notably in the Pink Panther movies. His familiar face and voice, on television and radio, were part of the essential furniture in the sitting room of our popular culture for more than half a century. A stalwart in the national postwar comedy boom led by Sellers, Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan, Dick Emery, Eric Sykes and Benny Hill, he worked with them all in a sort of unofficial supporting repertory company that also included Hattie Jacques, Deryck Guyler, Patricia Hayes and Arthur Mullard. He was also a man of surprising and various parts: child actor, trained dancer, film-maker, occasional writer, and dedicated and critically acclaimed photographer.

Like Gypsy Rose Lee, he had a resourceful and determined...

Reliving our childhoods is spectacular fun. Especially if you watched a lot of television as a child. Those of us of a certain age will have fond memories of lots of stop motion animated classics. They just don’t make them like they used to.

Mainstream television used to be very oriented to the child. BBC 1 played children’s shows in the afternoon. BBC 2, when it wasn’t bombarding us with Pages From Ceefax, broadcasted educational, but enjoyable children’s shows around lunchtime and then there was Citv on ITV regions all around the country.

Children’s television has been shunted off to satellite digital channels that specialise solely in kid’s programmes. With this article, I am taking you back to a more innocent age, a happier age of half remembered programmes from your youth. Lots of fun for viewers in their 30s in particular. If you remember any more shows from this period,...

Arrow Video are scraping the bottom of the Euro-sleaze barrel with their latest releases out on Monday – Super Bitch (aka Blue Movie Blackmail) and The Night Child (aka The Cursed Medallion). Directed by Massimo Dallamano (Venus in Furs, What Have You Done to Solange?) the films star two Us TV superstars: Stephanie Beachman (Dynasty), Joanna Cassidy (Falcon Crest) and two Italian horror stalwarts: Richard Johnson (Zombie Flesh Eaters) and Ivan Rassimov (Eaten Alive).

Super Bitch

Stars: Ivan Rassimov, Stephanie Beacham, Patricia Hayes | Written by Massimo Dallamano, Sandy MacRae | Directed by Massimo Dallamano

Blue movie blackmail and sexual depravity are at the heart of a wicked scam to manipulate rich, perverted men in this softcore pasta crime classic from Massimo Dallamano, cinematographer on A Fistful of Dollars and director of Giallo favourite What Have You Done To Solange? Italian trash cinema icon Ivan Rassimov is a police inspector working undercover to...

Sadie Frost, Gary Kemp, Phil Collins – they all started out in movies from the Children's Film Foundation

A forgotten catalogue of hundreds of British children's films, all shot in the school holidays from the 1950s to 1980s, is to be re-released after lying dormant while many of their young stars rose to fame.

Performers such as Phil Collins, Michael Crawford, Leslie Ash, Susan George, Sadie Frost and Gary Kemp all got their first screen work in Children's Film Foundation features, which entertained the nation's youth at Saturday morning cinema screenings. The British Film Institute has announced that it will be releasing the entire catalogue and screening many of the best features at special events which are sure to attract nostalgic fans and social historians.

"The early black-and-white films from the 1950s were rather middle-class and wholesome, so you can imagine the children throwing their ice cream tubs at the screen back then,...

Not every movie can be a hit, and some blockbusters offer far more than their big budget and failure to dominate the box office might suggest. Here's our look at ten fascinating failures...

There are blockbuster movies that fail for good reason. Jonah Hex, Town & Country, Catwoman - they deserved their fate, really. In fact, there are films that made bucketloads of cash that didn't deserve their success, too. You can probably name a few of them quite easily.

But what we're interested in here are the blockbuster movies that struggled to make an impact, yet have something about them that makes them worthy of discussion many, many years later. Some of the films we're about to discuss are outright box office flops. Some simply didn't meet commercial expectations. All of them, to some degree, disappointed the studios that backed them.

Some of these aren't, all in honesty, particularly good.

Yoda may be pushing up the galactic daisies these days. So which movie characters do you go to now for sage advice? Glad you asked...

Yoda, friends, is long gone from cinemas. No longer can we rely on his sage advice to keep us on the straight and narrow. No longer can we expect the small green one to appear on the big screen (although you can in Clone Wars, to be fair), dishing out critical, incisive advice for us to live our lives by.

And thus, to fill the gap, we’ve been hunting for the people we can look up to, the more modern day screen Yodas. Or, at the very least, the people who can calm us through the trials of life, just by us reaching for a DVD off the shelf.

Without further ado...

Chief (Roger Moore)

Spice World

Truthfully, much like Richard E Grant’s...

Computer-generated imagery (CGI) has been playing a role in films for over 30 years. It began merely as the ability to draw lines on TV screens but has evolved into nothing short of the power to create worlds.

Beginning with 1981′s “Looker,” in which a naked image of Susan Dey was generated on a computer, and continuing on through “Avatar” (2009) in which a blue, naked, CGI lady flies around on a dragon, determined computer nerds FX pioneers have tirelessly pushed the boundaries of this technology.

With the much anticipated “Tron: Legacy” landing in theaters, we thought it would be a good time to look back on the history of the digital revolution that the original “Tron” helped launch.

‘Tron’ (1982)

Disney’s “Tron” put CGI in the public eye. In 1976, after encountering the old, old, old-school video game “Pong,” director/animator Steven Lisberger became obsessed with incorporating CGI into films. The graphics...

It's a fading memory for the middle-aged, but gave a start to Phil Collins, Susan George, Michael Crawford and many future stars. And Keith Chegwin. It gave parents a kid-free break, too

The year is 1967. The place is your local ABC cinema. The event – the ABC Minors Children's Matinee, to which thousands of grateful parents have dispatched their offspring. First off is the ABC Minors song, the lyrics of which flash up on screen:

"We are the boys and girls all known as

Minors of the ABC

And every Saturday all line up

To see the films we like and shout aloud with glee

We like to laugh and have our sing-song

Such a happy crowd are we

We're all pals together

We're Minors of the ABC."

After this rousing number, the cinema's manager hosts some obligatory birthday singing and talent shows. Finally comes the moment the budding juvenile delinquents...

Really, what's not to like about reissued rustic village shoot-'em-up, Went The Day Well?

Playing like some stiff-upper-lip, second world war, homefront version of John Milius's Red Dawn, it should delight us that Alberto Cavalcanti's Went The Day Well? is back in circulation once again. In its casting and its subversive storytelling, its 1942 setting offers a parallel universe wherein not only are the Nazis invading Britain and coldly massacring the Home Guard, but postwar TV battleaxes such as Thora Hird and Patricia Hayes are caught in cinematic amber as plucky young Land Girls vigorously sticking it to the filthy Boche (with axes, bayonets, rifles and household pepper). And the goose-stepping enemy are played by quintessentially English postwar actors, including Powell and Pressburger's phallocratic fave David Farrar and perpetual Pow Co James Donald, plus Alexander Korda's very own imperialist hero, Leslie Banks, as the head Nazi collaborator and local squire.

Chicago – I think it’s funny that so many parents commented on “Where the Wild Things Are” being too dark and scary. Clearly, they didn’t grow up in the same era of ’70s and ’80s fantasy films as I did when kid’s movies could be honestly terrifying. “The Dark Crystal,” “Labyrinth,” and, of course, “The Neverending Story” recognized that kids need a good cry and a true scare as much as they need to be entertained. Wolfgang Petersen’s excellent adaptation of the beloved book by Michael Ende was dark, complex, and riveting. It’s nice to own it on Blu-ray but it deserved a better release.

Blu-Ray Rating: 3.0/5.0

It seems likely that the HD version of “The Neverending Story” is timed by Warner Brothers to release on the same day as Spike Jonze’s masterful “Where the Wild Things Are” because they are both dark fantasy films...