New This Week
Published: May 25, 2011
THE HANGOVER PART 2 They’re tanned. They’re rested. They’re . . . in Bangkok? Director Todd Phillips and co-stars Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Justin Bartha, and Zach Galifianakis return for this attempt to see just how much box-office comedy money can be squeezed out of grown men behaving like spoiled brats. Hell, it’s worked pretty well for Wall Street so far, no? Opens May 26.
PAN’S LABYRINTH Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a young girl, and her mother (Ariadna Gil), pregnant and gravely ill, arrive in a small village/military base in Spain, 1944, lorded over by the casually murderous Capitán Vidal (Sergi López), who is also Ofelia’s stepfather. Vidal’s physician (Álex Angulo) supplies medicine to the insurgent rebels on the sly, aided by housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdú). Mercedes befriends Ofelia, who reacts to the agonies around her by locating a—imaginary?—forest gateway to a magical underground world. And as Vidal becomes more cutthroat in his dealings with the citizenry and Ofelia’s mother worsens, the girl’s delusions gain detail and depth with the appearance of an ancient walleyed faun (Doug Jones). He gives her three missions to carry out, the completion of which will return her as the reincarnated princess of a wondrous golden kingdom. Director Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth recalibrates your sense of wonder from the dead aesthetic of mindless American fantasies to far more intimate magic, and everything you might say about it is a reiteration of, “There is no bad here,” from the performances to the lushly melancholic score. (Ian Grey) At the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Wheeler Auditorium May 28 at 1 p.m.
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