Three Cheers!!!!

Rating: 10/10 (1 February 2007)

Truthfully, I'm no cinephile, and I don't quite understand the laundry lists people are making of technical reasons why this film is objectively the best movie of the year. If you're looking for those sorts of qualifications, read another review.
With that said, I thoroughly enjoyed Pan's Labyrinth. It's the story of a young girl confronted with the ideologically-driven bloodbath of guerrilla warfare in fascist Spain, and her retreat from its chaos into a personal fantasy world. Over the course of the movie, all the adults (her mother most explicitly) tell her that the real world is a place of arbitrary and merciless brutality, and that it has no place for fantasy or imagination. Ultimately, they turn out to be right!! The truth is that I've got a soft spot for art that expresses the impotence of man in the face of an uncaring universe. It's great! This was a fantastic movie about, as Philip Ridley so eloquently put it, The nightmare of childhood. Bravo, del Toro!