sidmclean

As flawless a fusion of fantasy and reality as any in recent times, Guillermo del Toro's labour of love grabs the audience's attention from the start and doesn't release it until long after the film is over.

In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) comes with her pregnant mother to live with her new stepfather (Sergi Lopez), a sadistic captain in Franco's army, which scours the woods around her fresh home to kill and torture republican rebels.

Terrified and appalled by this new world around her, Ofelia retreats into her books and a fantasy world filled with mysterious insects, magic portals, terrifying apparitions and a gruff faun, who tells her she must complete three tasks if she is to reclaim her place as a princess in a faraway land.

Visually beguiling, entrancing in narrative and heartbreaking in its themes, this is very much a fairy tale of the old school, and is definitely not one for kids – although it certainly has powerful messages for audiences about the way children are affected by the adult world around them. As horrible though Ofelia's fantasy world sometimes is, it is dwarfed by the drab reality of the outside world, and it's perhaps that which lends to one to think of it as an Alcie in Wonderland for modern times.

Part fantasy, part history and part horror, the filmmakers have made this film with passion and it shows - from del Toro's rich visuals to the convincing and memorable performances.

The film has its perfect counterpart in the score, with haunting and memorable melodies, a breath of danger and a pervading sadness. Like Pan's Labyrinth, it will remain in your mind and heart when the theatre has long since faded into distant memory.

There's something a little strange about writing a review of a film that is based around a junket for press reviewers. If you like it, are you being sycophantic? If you don't, are you refusing to get the joke? America's Sweethearts - fairly relevant considering the recent legal actions in America - is based around one such press junket, for the latest film of the eponymous America's sweethearts, the adorable Eddie Thomas and Gwen Harrison, played by John Cusack and Catherine Zeta Jones. But there's a problem - Gwen has left Eddie, for a fling with a Spanish smoothie (Hank Azaria). So, the studio employs the services of media fixer-uppers Billy Crystal and Seth Green to get them back together for the junket weekend. They in turn enlist the help of Gwen's sister and assistant Kiki (Julia Roberts), who, it just so happens, is in love with Eddie herself. There's nothing really to dislike about America's Sweethearts. Just from the synopsis above, you don't need a degree in literature to work out how a fluffy romantic comedy such as this is going to turn out. Cusack puts in a reliable turn as the sensitive and dependable Eddie, while Zeta Jones is rather entertaining hamming it up as a self-obsessed drama queen. Other cast members also make the most of their roles, even if Azaria's funniest moment is pronouncing junket as 'honket'. Building on his Oscar presentation triumphs, Billy Crystal co-scripted the film, and coincidentally gets all the best lines. But there just aren't enough of them. While the first third is a rather good satire on Hollywood played by a good ensemble cast, Joe Roth's direction is pretty much by-the-numbers and by the end of the film there isn't nearly enough to distract from the standard trundling rom-com conclusion. A very hard film to dislike - but you can't help thinking that with a bit of work on the script, it could have been so much better.

Why any film company would choose to publicise the fact that their product is courtesy of the man whose most notable recent achievement was Escape From LA is a bit of a mystery Unlike that though, while a long way short of being a good film, Ghosts is surprisingly fun. Set in a future where Mars has been colonised, a team of police officers led by Pam Grier and Natasha Henstridge are sent to a mining post to escort public enemy James 'Desolation' Williams (Ice Cube) back for trial. On arrival however, they find the place deserted and a lot of dead bodies - and the remaining former inhabitants turned into mindless painted killers. To say this falls short of good is possibly a little misleading. To clarify, it's awful. It's not giving too much away to say that the cause of the human's strange behaviour is in fact an airborne virus which infects people, then leaves the host for another when that person dies. Realising this early on in the film, do our intrepid heroes come up with some cunning scheme to entrap them and the virus? Don't be silly - they grab the biggest, heaviest artillery in sight and blow every virus-carrier they come across into pulp. Both Grier and Clea Duvall are wasted in their parts, while Jason Statham's cop role is so hammed up it's embarrassing. The flashback structure means that you know exactly who survives at the end, so there's no suspense. Mr Cube, taking a step away from the acting of Three Kings, seems to have scripted a lot of his own dialogue in righteous gangsta speak, but his portrayal of a hardened criminal doesn't really work because, put simply, he looks like a big teddy bear. Nevertheless, the plentiful action sequences are well done, and it's this that lifts the whole thing into the 'so bad, it's good' bracket. So much so that the review audience laughed all the way through and applauded at the end. It's so entertainingly terrible, it's almost worth more praise.