6 Best Fantasy Movies Released Between 2010 and Now
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Fantasy's had a strange decade and a half, big studios kept chasing the next Tolkien-sized franchise while some of the genre's best work came from directors doing something much stranger and more personal instead. These six span everything from a post-apocalyptic chase movie to a fairy tale about a wooden puppet, and none of them settle for the usual castles-and-prophecies formula.
The thing that ties them together is that each one of these films uses fantasy as a way to talk about something it couldn't say straight, like grief, mortality, immigrant anxiety, and the whole absurd chaos of being alive. These are some of the best fantasy films. So here they are, ranked from best to genuinely great.
6 'The Green Knight' (2021)
Gawain (Dev Patel), King Arthur's nephew, takes on a strange challenge from a towering, bark-skinned Green Knight. He gets to strike the creature once now, but has to agree to take the same blow back exactly a year later. David Lowery directs this loose, dreamlike take on the old English poem, and he lets Gawain's journey drag out slow and hypnotic instead of racing through it. Essel (Alicia Vikander), Gawain's lover back home, shows up again in a second, ghostlier role deep in the forest, and it keeps you a little off balance the whole time.
This plays more like a meditation on cowardice and honor than an actual adventure story, and Gawain fails almost every test chivalry throws at him. Near the end, there's a sequence where his whole future life plays out in fast-forward, a crown, kids, old age, decline, and it's some of the saddest filmmaking you'll find in a fantasy movie this decade. When he finally kneels down for that axe, you've forgotten this was ever supposed to be about bravery.
5 'Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio' (2022)
Geppetto (voiced by David Bradley), grieving his young son, carves a wooden boy in a drunken, heartbroken fit, and a forest spirit brings the boy to life, a second chance Geppetto never actually asked for. Guillermo del Toro sets this one in fascist Italy under Mussolini, and Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann) gets pulled into a youth military camp, which turns a kids' fairy tale into a real argument about obedience versus thinking for yourself. Every frame was shot in stop-motion, a slow, painstaking process that took years, and it gives the whole film a handmade texture no CGI version could pull off.
Death shows up as an actual character here, a sphinx-like figure running an afterlife Pinocchio keeps visiting, since being wood means he can't stay dead. Dying over and over becomes the whole point of the film, because real love means eventually accepting that things end, not finding a way around it. It's a much darker, sadder movie than the Disney version ever tried to be, and that's why it works.
4 'The Shape of Water' (2017)
Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute cleaner at a secret government lab in Cold War Baltimore, falls for an amphibious creature (Doug Jones) being held and studied there. Guillermo del Toro flips the classic monster movie on its head here, the creature isn't the threat, the sadistic agent Strickland (Michael Shannon) hunting him is. Elisa's muteness never gets played as a limitation either, she and the creature talk through sign language and silence.
Everything about this film, the sickly green lighting, the water showing up in nearly every scene, builds a fairy tale world around people everyone else has stopped noticing, a disabled woman, a gay neighbor, a Black coworker. Del Toro reportedly had the creature suit built with articulated gills and LED lighting so it could actually show real emotion on camera. It won Best Picture, which almost never happens for a monster romance, and that tells you the tenderness about it.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Fantasy World Do You Belong To? Middle-earth · Grand Line · The Continent · Camp Half-Blood
Pick your magic, your crew, where you want to wake up and who you would rather be fighting, and we will tell you which world you actually belong in. Four are open to you: an ancient kingdom living through its last good age, an endless sea full of pirates, a continent that pays people to kill monsters, and a summer camp where the Greek gods are extremely real and mostly a nuisance.
💍Middle-earth(Rings of Power)
👒Grand Line(One Piece)
🐺The Continent(The Witcher)
🔱Camp Half-Blood(Percy Jackson)
01
What kind of power do you want? Every one of these worlds runs on a completely different sort of magic.
02
Who is travelling with you? Nobody gets through any of these stories entirely on their own.
03
Where do you want to wake up tomorrow? The best fantasy is usually just somewhere you would genuinely like to live.
04
How are you making a living out there? Even in fantasy somebody has to pay for the horse.
05
There is something in the woods. What do you do about it? All four of these worlds keep something unpleasant out there in the dark.
06
Who is the villain of your story? The enemy tells you far more about a world than the hero ever does.
07
What do you actually believe in out there? Every world hands its heroes one rule and asks them to hold onto it.
08
A thousand years from now, how are you remembered? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your world.
The Map Is Drawn Your World Is…
Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in return.
Middle-earth
You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.
- This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat, fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
- You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
- The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
- You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.
The Grand Line
You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is finding out what is over there.
- One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
- You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
- The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
- You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of it.
The Continent
You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the people are where it all gets complicated.
- Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
- You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
- The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
- You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story got told wrong.
Camp Half-Blood
You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as everybody kept telling you.
- Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners, which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
- You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for something nobody thought to test for.
- The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
- Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.
3 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' (2022)
Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a laundromat owner drowning in a tax audit and a rough relationship with her daughter, learns she can pull memories and skills from every other version of herself across the multiverse. Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, working together as the Daniels, use that setup to jump from hot dog fingers to a universe where people evolved as rocks, and somehow none of it plays as a throwaway gag. Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), Evelyn's quiet husband, shows that kindness is a strategy, not weakness, right in the middle of all that chaos.
Jobu Tupaki, the villain played by Stephanie Hsu, turns out to be a broken-down version of Evelyn's own daughter, so the whole nihilism-versus-meaning fight in this movie is really just a mother and daughter failing to talk to each other. Those googly eyes that keep popping up, on rocks, on foreheads, end up genuinely moving by the finish. It swept the Oscars the following year, a strange thing to happen to a movie this weird and this openly emotional.
2 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2' (2011)
Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint), and Hermione (Emma Watson) come back to Hogwarts for the last leg of a ten-year story, hunting down the remaining Horcruxes while Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) closes in on the castle. Director David Yates shoots the Battle of Hogwarts as a real, mournful siege, and the film doesn't flinch from killing off characters people had spent eight movies caring about. Snape's (Alan Rickman) memories, shown through the Pensieve in the middle of the fighting, change how you see basically everything he did across the whole series.
Harry's final fight with Voldemort happens right in the Great Hall, in daylight, with none of the usual magical fireworks, and that's exactly why it hits harder than a bigger ending would have. It closed out the highest-grossing franchise of its time, and the ending actually earned that scale, it didn't just coast on nostalgia.
1 'Mad Max: Fury Road' (2015)
Here is a film that's certainly more action and sci-fi, but its heightened elements make it easy to argue as a fantasy-leaning fable as well. Max (Tom Hardy) gets swept up in Imperator Furiosa's (Charlize Theron) escape from a tyrant, and the rest of the movie is basically one long chase across a cracked desert. George Miller, back at the wheel decades after the original trilogy, shot almost everything for real, real cars, real stunt drivers, real explosions, and only used CGI to clean things up. Furiosa's plan to free five enslaved women from the warlord Immortan Joe gives what could've been a straightforward chase movie real feminist teeth.
The film barely talks for long stretches, letting the production design, row after row of scavenged, spiked-out vehicles, do the storytelling instead. Editor Margaret Sixel, Miller's own wife, cut this with no action-movie experience, and that outsider's eye is reportedly why the chaos on screen reads as clear instead of overwhelming. It won six Oscars, mostly technical ones, a serious haul for a movie that's essentially one long car chase.
Mad Max: Fury Road
- Release Date
- May 15, 2015
- Runtime
- 121 minutes
- Director
- George Miller
- Writers
- Brendan McCarthy, George Miller, Nico Lathouris
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