There's a particular kind of film for a rainy night alone - absorbing enough to pull you fully in, good enough that you don't check your phone once.
Looking back, the 2000s were a golden era for this kind of filmmaking - studios still willing to fund serious work, directors still pushing at the edges of what was expected.
Great fantasy films don't ask you to suspend disbelief - they build worlds so vivid that disbelief simply evaporates.
Light Yagami finds the "Death Note," a notebook with the power to kill, and decides to create a Utopia by killing the world's criminals, and soon the world's greatest detective, "L," is hired to find the mysterious murderer. An all out battle between the two greatest minds on earth begins and the winner will control the world.
A young boy wins a tour through the most magnificent chocolate factory in the world, led by the world's most unusual candy maker.
When architect Alex Wyler moves into an unusual glass house on stilts over a lake, he discovers a note from the previous tenant in the mailbox--but no one's lived in the house for years. He replies and soon discovers that he's corresponding with a doctor named Kate Forster. Their correspondence, only through the 'magical' mailbox, turns romantic and their paths cross in unexpected ways, but when they try to truly connect, danger looms. They must try to unravel the mystery behind their extraordinary romance before it's too late.
After his impetuous musician girlfriend, Samantha, dies in an accident shortly after they had a fight (and nearly broke up), Ian Wyndham, a grief-stricken British businessman living in London gets a chance to relive the day all over again, in the hope of changing the events that led up to her getting killed.
When actress Nikki Grace gets the lead role in a cursed film, her world becomes more and more surreal, blending realities and ideas of infidelity, reincarnation, and supernatural forces.
These films use impossible settings to tell completely real stories. The dragons and doorways are just the medium.
The sailor of legend is framed by the goddess Eris for the theft of the Book of Peace, and must travel to her realm at the end of the world to retrieve it and save the life of his childhood friend Prince Proteus.
Four interwoven stories that occur on Halloween: an everyday high school principal has a secret life as a serial killer; a college virgin might have just met the one guy for her; a group of teenagers pull a mean prank, and a bitter old recluse receives an uninvited guest.
A man entranced by his dreams and imagination is lovestruck with a French woman and feels he can show her his world.
Zia, distraught over breaking up with his girlfriend, decides to end it all. Unfortunately, he discovers that there is no real ending, only a run-down afterlife that is strikingly similar to his old one, just a bit worse. Discovering that his ex-girlfriend has also "offed" herself, he sets out on a road trip to find her.
A beautiful and mysterious woman helps an inept scam artist get his game together... but is their meeting purely coincidence?
The films that give you a good cry do so because they've earned it. Not through sadness alone - through care. These films care.
Fantasy at its best doesn't make you wish you were somewhere else. It makes you see where you already are differently.