How to do justice to the memory of one of America’s greatest politician is a question that Emilio Estevez must have asked himself countless times while planning his movie Bobby. Unfortunately, it appears that he didn’t find a satisfactory answer.

Bobby is built on an interesting, albeit increasingly overused, premise: to capture the last 24 hours of Robert F. Kennedy’s life through the eyes of several people who have only one thing in common: they will be present during Kennedy’s last speech in a Los Angeles hotel during that ill-fated night of June 6th, 1968. Estevez mixes their lives, stories and beliefs with real footage of Kennedy on the campaign trail, as he spreads his message of hope across America.

One of the early problems with the film is that this dozen or so of lead characters are all played by more or less well-known stars, and one can’t help but to start wondering who else is going to pop up next. The viewer becomes trapped in this overabundance of celebrities and begins to watch the stars themselves rather than the characters they portray. In addition, some of these familiar and pretty faces (my god, they were all so pretty in 1968!) happen to be very average actors and actresses, resulting in characters that are simply tedious to watch and enjoy, and in scenes that simply feel too much like they were built for a celebrity to fly in for the day and recite a few lines and express their liberal penchant by simply being there and by appearing in a film about Robert F. Kennedy. Using so many stars effectively is a difficult undertaking and intertwining their stories in a way that is compelling is even more complex. One can’t blame Estevez for trying to be Robert Altman (or to a lesser extent, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu) but one can certainly fault him for failing and for only being able to come up with a result that is as mediocre as Paul Haggis’ Crash (2004).

But what comes out as the single biggest problem with Bobby is that it is an avalanche of cheap and democratic sentimentalism. Estevez tries so hard to capture the impact that Kennedy had on people in 1968 (which begs the question as to why Estevez decided to focus mainly on all these white pretty people, instead of attempting to show Kennedy’s impact on the poor and blacks – the couple of so-called Latinos and Blacks in the film do not feel believable at all. Their comportment and attitude feel to me much more late 20th century than late 1960s) that he can only use amateurish tricks such as showing us people who got into an argument reconciling to the words of Kennedy and to the required late 60’s soundtrack. Oh, you just had an affair? That’s ok, now that I hear Kennedy and how he will change America, I forgive you. Oh, you just got shot, you racist pig? Even though I fired you this morning for being a racist and even though I strongly dislike you, let me make sure that I am the first one in the room to help you as you lay on the floor. In summary, let us all suddenly become better people and embrace as we listen to the message of Robert F. Kennedy. Can someone please pass the soap?

The real footage of Kennedy is actually the most interesting and emotional part of the film. Kennedy was destined to be a greater man than he already was. His vision, his youth, his honesty, his idealism, all had the power to change America and to make a real transformation in issues such as civil rights and racism, the environment, and social justice. He truly believed in the possibility of a better world and seemed untouched by the usual constraints and pressures of the military and business establishments. How much he would have achieved is another question but there is little doubt that America would probably be a different place today had he not been assassinated and had he been elected, instead of Richard Nixon…

André Bazin once stated that various aspects of the Western allowed it to identify with the essence of cinema. Writing in the 40s and 50s, Bazin saw in the classic Western films of that period a simplicity in morality and a reformist style that resulted in a genre that had no reason to excuse itself for its black and white, good and evil, and more or less accurate portrayal of an important period in American history. He also noticed a progression within the genre but his death in 1958 did not allow him to witness an even further evolution throughout the 60s and 70s. How interesting it would have been to know his assessment of what the Leones, Peckinpahs and Altmans did to the Western genre.

Personally, I believe they did it a lot of good and infused it with a much-needed dose of realism and freshness. I recently surprised a Cinephile friend of mine for stating that Red River (48) had left me unimpressed (as do most films with John Wayne). And as I explained in this post, most traditional Westerns, while stimulating our imagination with their exploration of a mystical historicity, have a tendency to nonetheless deal with aspects of human nature that probably shouldn’t be so unabashedly revered.

Enter The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a brilliant take on the Western genre by Andrew Dominik, who previously directed the very entertaining Chopper (2000). Bashed by many for being overly self-conscious, this film defies many of the criteria that Bazin identified 60 years ago regarding the Western. It contains little action, blurs the line between good and evil and asks us to connect for two and half hours to bandits with sometimes little to offer in terms of principles and decency. Like McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Assassination of Jesse James depicts a gray, cold and unforgiving West (or more accurately in this case, Mid-West) where life does not revolve mainly around patting the wife on the behind, eating beef stew with the mates around the campfire and shooting Indians in the back. Andrew Dominik’s film is a slow, atmospheric, beautifully shot, exploration of a death dance between two men. Jesse James, played remarkably well by Brad Pitt (who always seems to do much better when he can play unusual or slightly offbeat characters, as in 12 Monkeys, Fight Club, Kalifornia, Snatch….) is the very intelligent, crazy, menacing and tired killer hero who has fabricated an elaborate plan to ensure that his name will live on forever. Robert Ford, played by Casey Affleck in a performance that earned him a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, is the young neglected man who idealizes Jesse James and who wants to be one day as or more famous than his idol. The dissolution of the James gang serves as a background for a ballet between the two men’s fears, delusions and objectives. The Assassination of Jesse James is not an action film and probably not even a Western. It is a well acted and well scripted period drama wrapped in a heavy stylistic blanket that can either warm one’s sensibilities or that can turn one off in the same way that the films of Terrence Malick or Wong Kar Wai can exasperate some people. But if one were to insist on calling The Assassination of Jesse James a Western, then I would say that it is one of the best Westerns ever made.

‘I drink your milkshake…I drink it up!’
This innocuous line spoken towards the end of There Will be Blood by Daniel Plainview, the character played by Daniel Day Lewis, captures in the way it is delivered, the strange, powerful, sometimes magnificent but most often disturbing tone and atmosphere that permeates Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film.

An epic about oil, greed, good and evil, and, really, about nihilism, There Will be Blood is a troubling piece that resembles Requiem for A Dream (2000) in its desire, to quote more or less accurately something that Aronofsky once said about his film, ‘to throw you from a window and then once you are dying on the pavement, to throw a piano on top of you’.
The first 20 minutes of the film, which contain no dialogue, set the tone for what is a deeply unusual and remarkable film that makes a few statements with the power to draw contemporary comparisons, but that decides to keep them somewhat obscured in favour of an explosion of hatred, loneliness and ugliness. Surely, one can’t watch this film and be satisfied that it is simply about greed, capitalism and a loss of certain values that are pertinent to 21st century society (as they were already 100 years ago).

This lack of a clear message, as well as a haunting score and a very unlikeable protagonist (albeit so charismatic that we can’t take our eyes off him – enough has been said about Day-Lewis’s astonishing performance) who is the sole focus and the only fully developed character in the entire film, has disturbed many viewers and critics, depriving them of a traditional frame through which to appraise the film.

There is little doubt that There Will be Blood is not a standard film. Paul Thomas Anderson has delivered a work that is ambitious, different, and that pushes the envelop of traditional filmmaking. In the process, it asks the viewer to allow for a different type of experience to come through, one that is not always ‘pleasant’ but that certainly shows a high level of creativity and craftsmanship.

I love cinema because good movies take me to places in my self that I don’t always visit in real life. A good film for me is a film that knows how to tickle a part of my brain and arouse all sorts of emotions. These don’t have to be as simple as happiness or sadness or fright or laughter. It can be something else, something gray, something in between, something uncomfortable. In There Will be Blood, Anderson and Day-Lewis succeed magnificently in taking us to a place where cinema rarely goes, and they do so through a mastery of all the filmmaking ingredients, although in degrees and combinations that stand outside of usual conventions.

An ode to the beauty of the natural world, with particular emphasis on the sumptuous North American West, a condemnation of a race driven by personal gratification and material satisfaction, an homage to the power of love and of human connections, a portrayal of a remarkable, idealistic, selfish and naïve young man in his quest for a simpler life away from civilisation, Into the Wild is a riveting film whose cinematography and message linger in the mind long after the initial viewing.

Sean Penn’s fourth picture clearly shows that he is an accomplished director with a strong understanding of human tragedy and, in the case of Into the Wild and of The Pledge (2001), for placing it in the midst of humbling and majestic landscapes.

Based on the book by Jon Krakauer (the journalist and mountaineer who also wrote the tragic and fascinating Into Thin Air (1997), about a 1996 ill-fated ascent of Mount Everest), Into the Wild tells the story of Christopher McCandless, a bright young man from an affluent family in Atlanta, Georgia, who after graduation decided to leave everything behind, including his family, for a bohemian and penniless lifestyle across the American West. A modern Jeremiah Johnson, McCandless’s spiritual quest led him, after almost 2 years of nomadic wandering, to Alaska where he attempted to live alone in the wild.

There seem to be different opinions about McCandless’s personality and relationship to the world and whether he deserves the positive depiction that he received in Krakauer’s book and now in Sean Penn’s film. But regardless of whether McCandless truly was such a likeable person, Into the Wild is a breathtaking film that should make anyone long for the serenity and splendour of a world that we are sadly in the process of destroying.

How many times have we seen this story brought to the screen before? Man comes across a deal gone wrong, takes the money and tries to get away with it. If it is true that all film scenarios pretty much revolve around 32 plots (which it probably isn’t), then only real talent can make such a cliché story interesting again.

Enter the Cohen Brothers, the entity that might be known one day as one of the best director in the history of cinema. Forget Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and forget The Ladykillers (2004), two mediocre films that do little to tarnish an otherwise spectacular filmography. The Cohen brothers are back on top and while it is difficult, and probably inappropriate, to compare such a hard and dark film with some of their previous work, this latest effort is nonetheless as good a film as they have ever made.
No Country for Old Men has an intensity and rhythm that reminded me of the recent Scorcese, The Departed (2006). No fluff, no silly and excessive music, no unnecessary dialog, no gratuitous scenes, no let down in the strength of the performances, only tight and solid directing, scripting, and acting (and beautiful cinematography as well).
Many have spoken about the performance of Josh Brolin as a career defining role (good enough apparently to convince Oliver Stone to want to cast him as George W. Bush in Stone’s next biopic), or about Tommy Lee Jones’ convincing turn as a laconic and delusioned Sheriff (one can’t help but to try to create a connection between this character and the one he played a couple of years ago in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)) but I personally would like to single out Javier Bardem in what i consider to be one of the best villain performance of all time. I can’t remember the last time the character of a madman was so brilliantly and realistically depicted on screen (perhaps Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, or Ralf Fiennes in Schindler’s List). I still get chills down my spine thinking about some of the killings in the film and about the character’s methods, which involve a mix of principles, sadism and intelligence.

Overall, an intense, dark and disturbing film that ranks as one of the best thrillers ever made.

Was Robert Redford ever a good director? That is the question i asked myself as i sat and watched, barely able to restrain myself from throwing a brick at my TV after only 25 minutes, his latest film about US foreign policy.

Yes, i remember fondly Ordinary People (80), The Milagro Beanfield War (88) and Quiz Show (94), but upon closer inspection, his directing career has been on the whole fairly average. I think Redford’s acting career in the 60s and 70s is what established him in my and in many others’ psyche as an institution, somewhat of a Hollywood legend who could do no wrong. But his directing efforts and choices of roles for the past 15 years, along with some interesting insights into his personality as revealed in Down and Dirty Pictures, insights which by the way make complete sense when compared to his consistently controlling and unemotional acting style, would indicate that, perhaps, Redford should be demoted to average status as both a director and as an actor.

Lions for Lambs profoundly lacks any subtlety and feels that it could have been written and directed by any C level film student. The film has some of the most tedious, arrogant, boring and embarassing scenes in recent memory, and 90% of them include Redford himself as some kind of Ueber-cool teacher trying to preach some mechanical, sanctimonious nonsense to an irritating student. I have no idea how Redford possibly saw any flow and sense of realism in these scenes. They are so badly written that i was gasping in exasperation. And there are the scenes between Cruise and Streep, which are barely more intelligent in terms of conveying a message. Cruise actually provides the only interesting performance in the entire film. Even Streep seems to be drowning, managing to come up for air only once or twice. Finally, a third story about 2 GIs in Afghanistan gives us the required dose of action, as if Redford was concerned that we would be bored by all the talking and that we would misinterpret his intentions and assume that he hates the US armed forces.

I won’t even go into the details of his liberal, anti-Bush message, as this film doesn’t deserve it. Which is a shame because i agree with what Redford has to say. It’s just too bad he doesn’t know how to say it.

If I found The Manchurian Candidate (62) unwilling to go far enough in the treatment of its brilliant and daring concept, I certainly did not hold such opinion after watching Seconds. Despite a couple of moments when John Frankenheimer loses control of its material and over-indulges in wobbly camera movements (the wine orgy scene and, to a lesser extent, the party at home scene), Seconds is an amazingly dark and bold film for 1960s Hollywood (after all, Bonnie and Clyde (67), which represents a milestone in American cinema, was also considered dark and bold, but feels, at least to me, much tamer than Seconds), about a man who is given a chance at a new identity and a new life but slowly realizes that the change only makes him more miserable.

From the disturbing opening titles by Saul Bass to the unrepentant nerve-racking ending, Seconds takes you to some very unpleasant places, while managing to make several interesting points about midlife crises, beauty, identity, happiness and success. Some of these points resonate even more strongly today when beauty and material ‘satisfaction’ seem to be more readily accessible than ever, and increasingly at the cost of a traditional (and possibly archaic) definition of happiness. This quest for beauty is made possible by scientific advancement and Seconds reminds us of Les Yeux Sans Visage (60) and of the more recent Extreme Measures (98) in its portayal of the brilliant scientist or doctor who too easily crosses ethical boundaries in a blind belief in the righteousness of their action.

Rock Hudson is particularly enjoyable to watch and effectively manages to make us forget a hollow reputation acquired by playing mainly in melodramatic roles. The cinematography, aside from suffering on two occasions from the already mentioned overbearing desire to create confusion, does manage nonetheless to craft a very claustrophobic and disturbing environment.

Seconds is not a perfect film, but it certainly is one that has been undeservedly forgotten and should have a place along such classics as The Manchurian Candidate, The Wicker Man (73) or even Don’t Look Now (73).

Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck, Anthony Perkins and Fred Astair, in one of the bleakest films produced by Hollywood during that period.

With the exception of Australia, the entire planet has been decimated by nuclear war, the origin and details of which are adroitly never explained, and simply blamed on the absurdity and stupidity of humankind. A US submarine escaped the devastation and makes its way towards Melbourne where the locals have only a few months to live until the radiation reaches their country.

Tightly directed by Stanley Kramer, the director of Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), On the Beach maintains its serious and dark premise until the end, never letting cheap and easy sentimentalism take over and never trying to provide a false sense of hope or of a greater moral truth. In addition, and that is commendable for a film from that period, it does not choose sides and refuses to engage in ‘we are better than them’ or ‘it’s all their fault’ type messages.

Instead, the film focuses on a handful of people and how they choose to spend their last months of life and the decisions they face during that time. While the overall emotional intensity feels a bit subdued at times, a feeling reinforced by the decision to avoid showing scenes of madness, folly or desperation (unlike, for example, in The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), another serious film from that period that deals with somewhat similar themes, where various scenes of chaos and rioting are shown, or in The Day After (1983), the made for TV film that shocked America with its realistic and disturbing scenes of apocalypse, or even in Peter Watkins’s groundbreaking docu-drama The War Game (1965)), the narrative nonetheless works effectively by keeping it all fairly understated, and, well, bleak.

Gardner and Peck are quite a charismatic couple to watch and I can only admire their liberal willingness to play in such a film.

Las Vegas has to rank as one of the most fascinating and intriguing places on earth, and I am not just saying this because I met my wife there. Any opinion that you might harbor about America, you are likely to find the affirmation of this belief in the characterization of life that permeates this city that never sleeps. And if we have now ‘officially’ entered the age of simulation, where reality has become a malleable commodity that each one of us can shape to his liking, then Bugsy Siegel, who, probably mainly motivated by financial gain, opened his Flamingo Hotel in 1946, should nonetheless be regarded as a pioneer and visionary for understanding the need that human beings have to escape and to exist in alternate realities.
Yet, behind this façade of glass and metal Egyptian Pyramids and Arthurian castles, which provides the ideal larger-than-life environment against which to contrast the ordinary problems of its inhabitants, unfold the old-fashioned lives of what we traditional refer to as real people. And there is probably no one better in Hollywood than William H. Macy to play the ordinary man caught in life’s strange unfoldings.

In The Cooler, Macy plays a gentle, disillusioned and unlucky man whose job as a Cooler involves working the Casino floors and ‘helping’ clients loose money by spreading some of his own bad luck upon them. But when his old-fashioned mobster of a boss, played brilliantly by Alec Baldwin (Baldwin truly excels in tough guy roles as demonstrated recently in The Aviator and The Departed), inadvertently changes his Cooler’s luck, their relationship quickly deteriorates and leads to a series of more or less plausible incidents.

While The Cooler suffers from several inconsistencies, there is a freshness and simplicity about the script and the acting that makes watching this film a very pleasurable experience. It is clearly much smarter than most Hollywood productions and much less arrogant and overbearing that many so-called ‘indie’ productions.

Watching a Frank Capra film is a bit like drinking a light beer. It is not an unpleasant experience and it can be rather refreshing but it clearly does not have the finesse, subtlety and richness of the real thing.
So if you feel like sipping on patriotic, feel-good, we-are-all-wonderful-people-if-we-pull-together type messaging, Meet John Doe should about do it. Barbara Stanwyck pulls a fairly entertaining performance and Gary Cooper, who was nominated for an Oscar for this film (????) and ended up winning the Oscar that same year for Sergeant York, does what Gary Cooper usually does: be his stoic self and let his good looks and imposing stature do the rest.
Not for the cynics.

This adaptation of the 1925 novel of the same name by Somerset Maugham tells the story of a young doctor who punishes his adulterous wife by accepting a position in a remote cholera-stricken village in China. The rest is extremely predictable and filled with so many clichés that the film, which is nonetheless beautifully shot, becomes a one-dimensional and shallow affair with a narrative built on one stereotypical situation after the next. The film is a painting whose exquisite flatness the actors are unable to extract themselves from. Instead, they do their best to move quickly from one scene to the next, never surprising us in their decisions, never straying aside from what one would expect them to do.
The Painted Veil has a simplicity to it that is honourable but certainly not worthy of anything more than that.

The critics (at least the ones I usually read) seem unanimous in their loathing of Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, the Fountain.

I usually disagree with one, two or three of them, but when every single one of them writes that the film is a fountain of narcissistic and conceited rubbish, it makes you think that there must be at least some truth to it.

But here lies the beauty of cinema, and of art in general. It does not matter whether one has diplomas, or has worked on sets or has directed, written, shot or edited films themselves, when you speak to someone who loves or hates a film, no amount of discussion and debate will make that person change their mind. There is a visceral element to cinema, one that allows most people to say ‘I liked it’ without really being able or needing to explain why.

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I am trying hard to imagine what my reaction to this film might have been, had i not read half of the book upon which it is based, or had i not watched the film with someone who has read the book in its entirety. Perhaps i would have liked The Good German a great deal more as i certainly wouldn’t have been asking myself the question that haunted me throughout the entire viewing: why on earth did they need to change so many things from the book?

I am not suggesting that books should necessarily be adapted blindly and faithfully to the screen. In most cases, the demands of the medium and of visual storytelling often require changes, adaptations, and enhancements. But when these changes seem to provide only additional complexity, less character development and absurd ‘action’ scenes (as in Clooney getting beat up every 10 minutes), it is difficult not to wonder about the quality of this adapted screenplay.
You say homage, I say fromage.

As has been the pattern in the last few years, Eastwood delivers a film that is very much issued from the Hollywood mould, and that has enough democratic appeal to please a wide audience and enough ‘key people’ to garner various nominations. I know very little about what goes on in LA, but I suspect that Eastwood and Haggis must have quite a few friends in Tinseltown.

The problem I have with Letters from Iwo Jima is the same I had with Million Dollar Baby or Mystic River and with Haggis’s Crash. These films are only a semblance of what they claim to be. They pretend to depict a reality that in fact can only exist in a romanticized view of life. They pretend to deal with a certain harshness of life but can’t help burying this harshness under a pile of motivational speaker-type messages. They want to talk about the evil in the world but spend more time talking about the good. They are afraid to contemplate imperfection and only imperfection. They want to depict the average person’s suffering but only succeed in describing stereotypes and people whose personalities and actions make them stand outside of the norm.

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Christopher Nolan’s latest film, while intriguing, falls short of the brilliance he previously demonstrated with Memento, and to a lesser extent, with Insomnia.

This tale of two rival magicians in 19th century London, released curiously almost at the same time as The Illusionist (one of these Hollywood ‘coincidences’), suffers from an unnecessarily complicated narrative structure that offers too little reward for the effort, and from a large number of overly convenient and unrealistic scenes. Many of these scenes do not always flow smoothly into one another but rather seem to jump, skipping over essential material that probably couldn’t be handled meaningfully, or highlighting a characteristic of faulty scripts: the inability to make all the different parts function together. Or perhaps, it is simply the result of the narrative structure that Nolan chose, proving in this case that, sometimes, plain old linear might be better.

The outcome is uneven, fascinating and beautiful to look at on the one hand, dull and somewhat amateurish on the other (especially the scenes with Scarlett Johansson, in what is regrettably a very boring role).

And the ending of the film, its Prestige, a slightly outlandish (in its realization, and not necessarily in its idea) and constant back and forth of revelations, a bit a la Mission Impossible when everybody takes turns removing their mask, felt somewhat anti-climatic as some these revelations could be guessed earlier in the film and seemed out of sync with the intensity with which Nolan propelled us towards them.

Spoiler ahead:
I must now go and look for my doubles as I think I went through that Tesla machine at Burning Man once…

This compilation of about 20 short films about different neighbourhoods in Paris is definitively less than the sum of its parts.

Most of the shorts are actually quite bland, and some of them border on the depressingly bad. Gus Van Saint pays no homage to one of my favourite neighbourhoods, Tom Tykwer does whatever it is that he usually does, but much worse, Nobuhiro Suwa uses Binoche in a stereotypical role that goes nowhere, Gurinder Chadha delivers a politically correct religious sermon whose obviousness and lecturing aspect is almost insulting… While it is clear that the idea was to not follow too easily the clichés path, in some cases, the result might have been better had the directors done so.

Still, there are some beautiful moments and plenty of originality as well. Sylvain Chomet, Walter Salles, Isabelle Coixet, Olivier Schmitz, Vincenzo Natali and the Cohen Brothers help provide freshness, creativity and a much needed injection of emotionality.

I hereby demand a cap on the length of experimental films. 30 minutes should about do it, 45 minutes at the most. But not 98 minutes. Not in 12 chapters. Guy Maddin’s latest, Brand Upon the Brain!, says it all in the first 3 or 4 chapters. It’s all déjà vu after that, even if the corny one-liners keep you smiling occasionally.

I must be of royal blood meself since I watched The Queen and felt, well, not very much at all in terms of stimulation or excitement. Yes, the film is well done, and Mirren is splendid in her portrayal of a person whose emotions and feelings are fighting to free themselves from the oppression of expectations and education. But we are talking about the Queen here and I still have no idea whether what I just saw is an accurate description of what goes on in her head or if it is just some Brits delivering a romantic and chauvinistic feel-good (Love Actually wrapped in a fluffy political blanket), and ultimately marketable movie, about a Royal establishment that has been under a lot of fire in the past 10 years.

With Children of Men, Alfonso Cuaron has reinvigorated the dystopic genre with a much-needed dose of seriousness and realism. Films such as 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Alphaville, and A Clockwork Orange inevitably come to mind, not only in their willingness to study the possible future consequences of current trends, but also in the gravity and sincerity with which they do so.

Children of Men potentially deserves to join this pantheon of dystopian classics. Brilliantly directed by the man who saved the Harry Potter franchise from a slow boring death, beautifully shot (side note: what is it with Mexican directors and beautiful cinematography? I have recently reviewed Babel, Pan’s Labyrinth and now Children of Men, and I find myself saying ‘beautiful cinematography’ in all 3 cases) by Emmanuel Lubezki, the DOP for Terrence Malick’s New World and for his upcoming film, Tree of Life, Children of Men explores with great care and details a near future where humanity has become sterile.

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Pan’s Labyrinth, recipient a week ago of the National Society of Film Critics Best Picture award, seems like the perfect follow-up to Hellboy. Del Toro goes further in his study and exploration of Magic Realism in film and delivers a work that, in spite of its brutality and a couple of disturbing scenes, has a broader appeal than some his previous efforts. His craft and technique is clearly improving and he is slowing starting to make his mark on the industry, alongside his Mexican compatriots Inaritu and Cuaron.

I initially felt slightly disappointed that Pan’s Labyrinth did not contain more scenes in the alternate world of the Labyrinth. I wanted Pan to spend more time escaping the cruel reality that she was facing. Yet, I realized afterwards that the magic of the film lies not in the depiction of the fantastical but rather, in the perfect mixing of fantasy and reality. I suppose that this is exactly what magic realism is all about and that straying too far in one direction tilts the equilibrium away from what actually creates the beauty of the work.

Thus, Del Toro mixes the ingredients adroitly and creates a work that is at the same time beautiful and disturbing, enchanting and unsettling, real and dreamlike, historical and authentic, gothic and believable…it is perhaps easier to understand how good of a film Pan is by thinking about how easily it could have been a bad film. I have an idea: let’s take the Spanish Civil War, throw in a young girl who likes to escape reality by reading fairy tales, and add an alternate world of fauns and fairies. In most cases, this would sound more like a recipe for disaster than one for a film that is actually on its way to winning dozens of awards throughout the world. Del Toro is a man with a vision and the skills to implement it.