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.
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.
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| Original Score: 4/4
So breathtaking in its artistic ambition, so technically accomplished, so morally expansive, so fully realized that it defies the usual critical blather. See it, and celebrate that rare occasion when a director has the audacity to commit cinema.
Del Toro specializes in taking horror and superhero films to bold, baroque places, yet Pan's Labyrinth is a step above his usual forays into the fantastic.
A 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.
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| Original Score: 5/5
It explores the connection between fantasy and reality, with eyes wide open to the dangers of giving either too much credence. That it works on both levels is impressive; that it makes them so clearly one is the stuff of art.
It is an adult fairy tale that will lead grown-ups to eagerly await the day that their own children will be old enough to understand.
This backdrop of intrigue creates violent scenes that may have you turning away from the screen. Beautifully designed and full of its own strange poetry, Pan's Labyrinth is nonetheless not a children's movie. Take its 'R' rating seriously.
| Original Score: A
Ofelia, you break our hearts. But you also restore our confidence in human decency.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Pan's Labyrinth resembles a cross between Alice in Wonderland and H.P. Lovecraft, with some Buñuel thrown in for good measure. It's a tribute to -- as well as a prime example of -- the disturbing power of imagination.
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| Original Score: A
In coming up with one of the finest modern fantasies to date, del Toro seamlessly blends two stories, one set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and the other in a parallel realm of fairies and fauns.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
Pan's Labyrinth is del Toro's home run. He's delivered a film full of power, beauty, horror and, ultimately, sadness.
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| Original Score: A-
Pan's Labyrinth is beautifully shot and designed, but it's the acting that makes it a remarkable emotional journey.
| Original Score: 4/4
The movie is that original, and that attuned to the power of myth. I don't see why it shouldn't sit on the same altar of High Fantasy as the Lord of the Rings trilogy -- it's that worthy.
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| Original Score: A
Del Toro's gratifying surreal and fantastical instincts now have an unstinting moral eye on the world. Saying a filmmaker has matured suggests that he's forgone what made him so entertaining in the first place.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Pan's Labyrinth works on several levels. It boldly captures the horror of war, the bloody violence as well as the emotional stifling of the soul, and juxtaposes it with the enchantment of a nether land bathed in hope and eternity.
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| Original Score: B+
Pan's Labyrinth plays with dark magic, a hideous enchantment spun with grief and torment. It is emotionally devastating and sensuously rich: Details are as sharp as the ching of a straight-edge razor, as strange as the squeal of a magic root.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's pitch-perfect, impeccably conceived and replete with subtext and meaning. It is, in other words, a masterpiece.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The dark violence of the film (parents, note: Pan's Labyrinth is not for children) is leavened by its invention -- by the way it pushes the limits of reality and fantasy, each world overlapping with the other.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The creator of such pulp prodigies as Hellboy and Blade II, del Toro mingles myth and history in Pan's Labyrinth, and produces a masterpiece of magical realism.
| Original Score: 4/4
Del Toro's made a lot imaginative films. I think this is his masterpiece to date.
His palette here is deep-toned, with bottomless blacks and supersaturated oranges and blues -- as if the Walt Disney of Pinocchio had collaborated with Goya.
I've seen this film three times and cannot claim to know whether its fantasy characters and events are meant to exist solely in the imagination of the 12-year-old girl at the center of the story, or if she is the only human aware of them.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Pan's Labyrinth artfully fuses a war film with a family melodrama and a fairy tale. The result is visually stunning and emotionally shattering. Though graphically violent in parts, it still manages to be enchanting.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The horrors of both the realistic and surrealistic worlds are woven into the beautifully aligned narrative structure of del Toro's story. This is fabulous filmmaking in every sense of the word.
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| Original Score: 4/4
[Th film is] distinguished by another in a long line of recent child performances that are nothing short of astonishing in their accomplished matter-of-factness.
It is, I suspect, a film to return to, like a country waiting to be explored: a maze of dead ends and new life.
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.
It's not every day that you see a movie that not only references both Victor Erice's creepy modernist classic Spirit of the Beehive and Ray Harryhausen's Seventh Voyage of Sinbad with equal reverence.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Although Pan's Labyrinth relies heavily on special effects, including the computer-generated kind, you're never aware of them. Del Toro, who wrote the story, has created a special universe. The spell it casts lingers long after the final reel.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Pan's Labyrinth, horrific and heartfelt in the way it sees the trauma of war through the eyes of a little girl, is some kind of great movie.
| Original Score: 4/4
Childlike but never childish, fabulist but never fantastical, it's a triumph.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Pan's Labyrinth represents a quantum leap in del Toro's storytelling, drawing on Alice in Wonderland, Pinocchio and many other inspirations to create something quite new and wonderful.
| Original Score: 4/4
Because the violence is used not for titillation but to create a world we can be fearful about, because the film lives up to its tagline that "Innocence has a power evil cannot resist," we see it all without wishing we were somewhere else.
Unlike most horror movies, this chiller gives equal prominence to reality and fantasy, though the reality is far more frightening.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Pan's Labyrinth is a political fable in the guise of a fairy tale. Or maybe it's the other way around.
| Original Score: 5/5
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.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Literally and figuratively marvelous, a rich, daring mix of fantasy and politics.
Pan succeeds both as a spectacular special-effects fantasy and as a psychological drama, with superb actors.
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| Original Score: 4/4
..."Pan's Labyrinth" unfolds with the confidence of a classical fable, one that paradoxically feels both timeless and startlingly new.
It's not only one of the great fantasy pictures but one of the great end-of-childhood elegies.
Del Toro's latest is a darkly enchanting adult fairy tale, flecked with gore and terrifying creatures, both human and fantastical.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A disjunction remains between the story's childlike form and its gruesome execution, but few directors are so adept at conveying both the uncanny in the real and the recognisable in the fantastic.
Engrossing mix of horror, fantasy and stark drama.
A richly imagined and exquisitely violent fantasy from writer-director Guillermo del Toro.
