Pan's Labyrinth

Guillermo del Toro made Pan's Labyrinth in Spanish, in Spain, in 2006, after a decade in Hollywood (Mimic, Blade II, Hellboy). It won three Academy Awards (Best Cinematography (Guillermo Navarro), Best Art Direction, Best Makeup) and was nominated for three more including Best Foreign Language Film. Del Toro has called it the project of his life; he turned down a major Hollywood franchise to make it on a $19 million budget, and reportedly invested his director's fee in the production.

1944, post-Civil War Spain. Eleven-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero, in a remarkable debut) travels with her pregnant mother to live in a rural mill commanded by her stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi López, terrifying), a fascist officer hunting Republican guerrillas in the surrounding forests. Ofelia retreats into a dark fairy-tale world presided over by the Faun (Doug Jones, in performance and prosthetics) and the Pale Man, a child-eating monster with eyes in his palms whose dinner-table sequence has become an iconic horror set-piece.

The film's structural achievement is to keep both the fascist-period historical drama and the underworld fantasy fully alive at once, neither subordinate. Del Toro's commitment to mixing political realism with fairy-tale mode (without privileging either as the truth) is the film's most-discussed formal decision and a touchstone of 21st-century fantasy cinema. Del Toro's later The Shape of Water took home Best Picture; Pan's Labyrinth remains his masterpiece.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most successful adult fairy tale ever filmed, and one of the few films in which historical horror and supernatural horror enrich each other rather than dilute. Indispensable.