Pan's Labyrinth Reviews
Top CriticGuillermo del Toro has crafted a masterpiece, a terrifying, visually wondrous fairy tale for adults that blends fantasy and gloomy drama into one of the most magical films to come along in years.
This is a fantasy realm so fully and elegantly realized, it might be the adaptation of a classic novel. Yet the source is Del Toro's own capacious imagination.
Empire Magazine Australasia
Both magical and brutal, del Toro's film is a memorable exploration of the enduring power of fairytales.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
sbs.com.au
The close-out of Pan's Labyrinth not only underlines its status as one of the great fantasy films of all time, but also its importance as a work of refined social and historical commentary.
Cinema Writer
a captivating, albeit unstable, blend of anti-Fascist social commentary and a visually sumptuous childhood fable
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
CinePassion
Fully deserving of its place in a distinguished political-fabulist lineage
I.E. Weekly
Ofelia's smock is swiped from Alice, her faun from Narnia, and her magic book from Harry Potter, Del Toro sets her fairytale apart with its unrelenting gore and misery.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Cinema Crazed
It's complex, it's masterful, and it's a pastiche of priceless talent that sums up to form one of the best films made in the last ten years...
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Boston Phoenix
Arresting though they may be, these mind-boggling effects, shot with limpid mystery by Guillermo Navarro and accompanied by chitinous whirs and crackles on the uncanny soundtrack, don't disrupt the double narrative but intensify it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Fayetteville Free Weekly
Pan's Labyrinth is a punishing, evocative poem. It is part ferocious reality and part fearful fantasy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Cinefantastique
Pan's Labyrinth us that such fantasy offers no real escape from dreadful reality.
BrandonFibbs.com
...a dark and wonderful fairy tale for grown-ups...
Full Review
| Original Score: 9/10
Pan's Labyrinth suggests that fairy-tale violence helps the vulnerable process and overcome real-life conflicts and that real-life violence permanently smashes the soul and the heart.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Big Picture Big Sound
[A] beautiful but relentlessly bleak fairytale.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Film4
in Pan's Labyrinth, the world of Ofelia's imagination and the realities of Falangist Spain are two different, ideologically opposed ways of telling the same story - a story of tyranny, resistance and the timeless struggle between good and evil.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Movie Metropolis
We feel pity, terror, disgust, wonder, astonishment, shock, and, ultimately, hope. It does everything we could ask ....
Full Review
| Original Score: 9/10
Tyler Morning Telegraph (Texas)
I saw better films in 2006 -- but none more imaginative than Guillermo del Toro's communal masterpiece. Bring a friend, and you'll have plenty to talk about.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
culturevulture.net
"Pan's Labyrinth" is impeccable filmmaking; it alone might be enough to seal del Toro's reputation as a master of cinema.
