One Paragraph Movie Review: Pan’s Labyrinth/El Laberinto del Fauno

One hundred and twenty-eighth film: Pan’s Labyrinth, or to place it more Spanishly in this alphabetical odyssey, El Laberinto del Fauno. Well, now. THAT’S a movie, and one that would be difficult, even if threatened with a small concealed knife or a Franco-era fascist torture hammer, to describe effectively to others. A grown-up movie about a violent bastard of a military captain trying to smoke out the hiding-in-the-mountains resistance mashes itself against a child’s imagined fairy tale that is less cute than abjectly terrifying, with utterly incredible results and more than a little bit of bleeding. The best-known and most talked about imaginary monster in the film, the Pale Man, has the uncanny knack of being plucked directly from that 10% of nightmares that everybody shares, yet still manages to be less upsetting than the main human villain, presumably because of the Pale Man’s impressive banquet skills. I loved every second of it, have never seen anything like it, and will be far more cautious eating grapes from now on. Five advanced special effects gaping mouth wounds out of five.