Set during last phase of the Spanish Civil War, with Franco's forces mobbing up the last rebels, Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is a wonderful, dark fairy tale that, in a metaphor for Spain itself, is full of nightmarish dreams of corruption, violence and the death of innocents.

Although the fantasy sequences are gorgeously realized, and are fairy tales in the truest sense (in that they are dark, dangerous and violent), most of the story exists outside of the dreamland, in the even more frightening, and sometimes shockingly violent, world of a real life struggle of ideas and ideology.

For me this movie felt like a modern day dark Alice in Wonderland and it left me in awe. Wonderful movie!