Interview. Guillermo Del Toro.

"They're not ironic," Guillermo Del Toro says of his films. "Not even a thing like Blade II, not even a thing like Hellboy. I believe in these things. I love these things. I'm not being postmodern about it."

David D'Arcy's conversation with the director of Pan's Labyrinth touches on the Spanish Civil War, Mexican film today, the books Del Toro reads (and rereads), the art he collects and the filmmakers he admires.

Related: "If this is magic realism, it is also the work of a real magician," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Fairy tales (and scary movies) are designed to console as well as terrify. What distinguishes Pan's Labyrinth, what makes it art, is that it balances its own magical thinking with the knowledge that not everyone lives happily ever after."

Updated through 1/3.

Michael Koresky dumps on the film twice before he even gets to this: "Ensconced in reassuringly Hollywood-cribbed CGI and offering the kind of black-and-white moral dilemmas and historical simplifications that should rightly make any rabid anti-Spielberg polemicist bear his fangs, Pan's Labyrinth is this year's Am�lie, the prototypical Foreign Film for Dummies."

At RogerEbert.com, Jim Emerson calls it "one of the cinema's great fantasies, rich with darkness and wonder. It's a fairy tale of such potency and awesome beauty that it reconnects the adult imagination to the primal thrill and horror of the stories that held us spellbound as children."

"Guillermo del Toro's amazing gift for fantasy, as exhibited in his two previous films, Hellboy and The Devil's Backbone, reaches new heights in Pan's Labyrinth, a film in which this brilliant cinematic auteur catapults the horror genre into the realm of mythology," writes Jennifer Merin, introducing her talk with the director in the New York Press.

It's "a dark and disturbing fairy tale for adults that's been thought out to the nth degree and resonates with the irresistible inevitability of a timeless myth," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, where Susan King profiles Doug Jones, who's played more than a few creatures for Del Toro.

"If Pan's Labyrinth has some classic children's story trappings, don't be fooled into thinking it deserves anything milder than its R rating," warns Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "There are a few moments of sudden, wince-inducing violence; and the tone, on the whole, is very dark."

"What do you say about the best movie you saw all year?" wonders Jette Kernion at Cinematical. "It's happened to all of us: that rare movie that completely knocks you over and blows you away, that takes you somewhere else for two hours or so and returns you wide-eyed and slackjawed, leaving the theater quietly and slightly stunned at having to return to mundane life. How can you write clearly and critically when you just want to say, 'Damn, that was good.'" Also: Kim Voynar talks with Del Toro.

But Vadim Rizov, writing at the Reeler, finds "it doesn't hold a tapered candle to his terrific blockbuster work (Blade II, Hellboy)."

Online listening tip. Del Toro's been a recent guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Earlier waves of reviews: Cannes and NYFF (including David D'Arcy's).

Updates, 1/1: ST VanAirsdale asks Del Toro whether or not it really is a good idea to take the kids.

Marcy Dermansky: "Guillermo del Toro's vision has created a film that will last: an enduring fairytale that resonates and offers new interpretations with every viewing."

Sara Schieron interviews Del Toro for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

"Don't take your kids to this bloody, nightmarish tale," warns Jeffrey Overstreet in Christianity Today. "It's disturbing and often terrifying. But it's also heartfelt and deeply meaningful."

Updates, 1/3: Both New York's David Edelstein and the New Yorker's Anthony Lane start the year with reviews of Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth.

Another pairing from Matt Singer at IFC News: "The world of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is just as bleak as Perfume's and even more sumptuously adorned. Its frame is infused with equal parts beauty and death, and sometimes the two blend together in fantastic creatures that are amongst the most terrifying I've ever seen in a movie."

The AV Club's Noel Murray gives it an "A-".

C Jerry Kutner explains why he's underwhelmed at Bright Lights After Dark.

Owen Hatherley, on the other hand, explains why "a serious political fairytale wouldn't use the fantasy as myth, but would be totally faithful to the child's eye. This is part of what makes Pan's Labyrinth so intensely powerful, that there's never a moment where the fantasy is debunked."

Posted by dwhudson at December 31, 2006 6:18 AM