Pick of the Week* How can it be that a film ostensibly about fairy tales is also an ambitious and powerful drama about the things people do to survive during wartime? And yet that is exactly what Pan's Labyrinth achieves. This is a beautiful, astonishing, brilliant film. Its creativity is staggering, its insights into human nature truthful, its originality rare. Even to try to describe its plot is to do it an injustice.

And because everything is political, I should mention that it is the work of a Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro, and therefore is one more way in which many non-Latino citizens of the United States will be exposed to a Mexican imagination, and perhaps change their impression of a nation and a neighbor many of us do not know as well as we should....

See Pan's Labyrinth. And after that, if you're really interested, take a look at Del Toro's previous film, "The Devil's Backbone," to see an earlier exploration of children, war, and monsters.....

_________________________________________________________________

* A new blog feature....  ¶ 8:53 AM