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
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.
