Pan's Labyrinth - Reception

Reception

Pan's Labyrinth received virtually universal critical acclaim. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 96% based on 200 reviews. Based on reviews from 37 critics, it received a 98% rating at Metacritic, making it Metacritic's fifteenth highest-rated movie of all time, the highest-rated film of the 2000s decade, and the highest of all films reviewed upon their original release. At its Cannes Film Festival release, it received a 22 minute standing ovation. It also received a standing ovation at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, its first release in the Americas.

Mark Kermode, in The Observer, labeled Pan's Labyrinth as the best film of 2006, describing it as "an epic, poetic vision in which the grim realities of war are matched and mirrored by a descent into an underworld populated by fearsomely beautiful monsters". Stephanie Zacharek wrote that the film "works on so many levels that it seems to change shape even as you watch it", and Jim Emerson called the film "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". Roger Ebert reviewed the film after his surgery and it was put on his Great Movies series on August 27, 2007 and when he did his belated top ten films of 2006 Pan's Labyrinth was #1 with him stating "But even in a good year I'm unable to see everything. And I'm still not finished with my 2006 discoveries. I'm still looking at more 2007 movies, too, and that list will run as usual in late December. Nothing I am likely to see, however, is likely to change my conviction that the year's best film was Pan's Labyrinth". The New Yorker's Anthony Lane took special note of the film's sound design, saying it "discards any hint of the ethereal by turning up the volume on small, supercharged noises: the creak of the Captain's leather gloves... the nighttime complaints of floorboard and rafter...."

Some reviewers had criticisms. For The San Diego Union-Tribune, David Elliott said "the excitement is tangible", but added that "what it lacks is successful unity... Del Toro has the art of many parts, but only makes them cohere as a sort of fevered extravaganza". New York Press critic Armond White criticized the film saying that the "superfluous addition of del Toro's fairy-tale sensibility to real human misery made that story insufferable only critics and fanboys (not the general public) fell for its titular allusion to Borges".

During its limited first three weeks at the United States box office, the film made $5.4 million. As of March 1, 2007, it has grossed over $37 million in North America, and grossed $80 million worldwide. In Spain, it grossed almost $12 million, and it is the fourth highest domestically grossing foreign film in the United States. In the United States, it has generated $55 million from its DVD sales and rentals.