Pan's Labyrinth Reviews
Modern Fabulousity
Too adult for children and too simplistic for most adults, it ultimately leaves us with some of the prettiest cinematic pictures of the year. And nothing more.
Full Review
| Original Score: D
Charlotte Weekly
Del Toro has realized a work of art that's too terrifying and politically motivated for young audience members who should be swept up in Ofelia's royal dreams.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Boulder Weekly
... a maze of naive politics and gruesome brutality. It's no more about Franco's Spain than a can of Franco-American spaghetti is about Italian food.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Atlantic City Weekly
It is not my cup of grim ...
Full Review | Original Score: 2/4
Uruguay Total
Un ambicioso y no del todo convincente cuento de hadas para adultos, que reivindica el poder de la imaginación como vía de escape ante la adversidad y como arma frente a la intolerancia.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
San Diego Metropolitan
There are lessons to be taken from Pan's Labyrinth -- the value of belief, hope and courage, for example -- but the whole is such a dingy downer that despite the fine performances on display, it is impossible to recommend it.
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
Internet Reviews
The sets, the sights and the sounds are original and imaginative, but the dirty little secret is that a little of it goes a long, long way.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
San Diego Union-Tribune
Pan's Labyrinth, like del Toro's previous and related The Devil's Backbone, is a saturated vision, an artist's work. What it lacks is successful unity.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Bullz-Eye.com
It's like watching Alice in Wonderland while tripping on LSD.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Top CriticA violent fantasy set during the Spanish Civil War, this magical film from Guillermo del Toro manages that intellectual high-mindedness, even as it resonates on a primal, mythic level.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
CHUD
A filmmaker blossoming into true greatness... Pan's Labyrinth is a film of breathtaking emotional, thematic and visual depth.
Full Review
| Original Score: 9.5/10
Zertinet Movies
It's both blissfully naïve and emotionally heartbreaking, a movie which calls on fantasy not to distort reality, but to enhance it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
...a powerful, haunting film replete with phantasmagorical visions and inexorable dread. Painted in shadows and lit by a moon the color of a frog's belly, Pan's Labyrinth is an emotional cousin to David Lynch's creepy puzzle films.
Full Review
| Original Score: 93/100
An achievement. Many films with 'split personalities' invest all their creative energy into one aspect of the story, causing the other one to founder and feel obligatory.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Ofelia, you break our hearts. But you also restore our confidence in human decency.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Maxim
A haunting, but beautifully conceived mix of fantasy and reality that is like no other film released in 2006 - or any other year.
| Original Score: 4/5
L.A. Weekly
Like his terrific 2001 The Devil's Backbone, Mexican horrormeister Guillermo del Toro's new movie offers us both real-life and fantastical monsters, and if you know his work, you won't waste time figuring out which to root for.
As each turn of events proves more menacing than the last to the young heroine of Pan's Labyrinth, her mother admonishes her: "Life isn't like your fairy tales." But it is. That's the secret at the center of Guillermo del Toro's magnificent film.
Three Movie Buffs
A fairy tale without the Disneyfication
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
