Brilliant, multilayered, beautiful.
This is right up there with Volver amongst my favourite films of this year, though I recon it'll age better. Anything that's wrong with it, and there are things wrong with it, pales into insignificance. It's a film that takes risks, when they don't pay off it's still interesting but when they do it shows how far you can take genre cinema. This is coming from the same place as Nightmare on Elm Street and Nightbreed and so on (the other thing that sprung to mind while watching the film was the Zelda games, child like exploration discovery aspects I guess) and the director knows exactly what conventions to keep and which to ditch to tell his story to maximum effect.
Did I mention how gorgeous the whole thing looks? How the villain is one of cinemas most villaenous? About a million other things? No? Well you'll just have to go and see it then.
The film I'm most looking forward to is whatever Del Toro does next.
IMDB
A Mark Kermode article about the film In Sight And Sound
3 comments:
We finally went to see this last night, catching it on seemingly the final day of showings in London after reading good things about it for almost the whole of last year.
It's the best film I've seen for a long time. Did you see his previous Civil War-related film 'The Devil's Backbone'? If not, I'll lend it to you. Similarly beautiful, in a less fairytale sort of way.
Yeah, I loved the Devils Backbone too. Also Chronos is great. I'm tempted to give hellboy another shot, last time I tried to watch it I'd just done a night shift and I fell asleep after about 20 mins.
I've been meaning to pick up 'Cronos' for a while (I think I saw it when I was 19 or something, and loved it)...
I quite enjoyed 'Hellboy' in the same way that I liked 'Mimic'. Stupid but fun, and looks good.
I think Blade 2 was probably the only film of his that I've not really thought much to. But hard to make a film like that your own in the same way as his more personal projects...
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