Cinema: Magic and mayhem

Pan's Labyrinth explores the inherent darkness that lies behind every fairytale, while Jackass Number Two is... well, the answer is in the title. By Declan Burke

A fascinating blend of horrific war story and gothic fairytale, Pan's Labyrinth (El Labertino del Fauno) (16s) is Guillermo del Toro's finest film to date. Set during the aftermath of the Spanish civil war, the story centres on young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a sensitive child obsessed with books, particularly tales of escapist fantasy. She and her heavily-pregnant mother travel to a mountainous area of northern Spain to join her adoptive father, Capitan Vidal (Sergi Lopez), who has been charged with winkling out the last vestiges of the republican forces clinging to the nooks and crannies of the dense forests. There Ofelia makes a new friend, a fairy who entices her into a nearby labyrinth where she meets a faun who sets her three tasks in order that she might achieve her true destiny, that of becoming the Princess of the Moon.

The Freudian subtext is perhaps a little too obvious, but it is a beautifully measured story exploring the darkness that lies behind the sanitised folktales of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm. The effects deployed to conjure up fairies, fauns, giant toads and grotesque cannibalistic monsters are superbly achieved, and they segue into the main frame of the story seamlessly. That's no mean feat, as Ofelia's alternative reality involves coldblooded murder, callous torture and a palpable atmosphere of dread as the fascist and republican forces engage in tit-for-tat reprisals.

Central to the success of the film is young Baquero's performance. Despite being surrounded by actors of fine pedigree (Lopez is joined by Ariadna Gil as her mother, Maribel Verdú as a Republican sympathiser working as the Captain's housekeeper and Alex Angulo as the local doctor), Baquero's presence appears wholly natural, precocious without being in any way contrived. Her ability to sustain a childlike infatuation with the supernatural world, even as she struggles to cope with the mud, pain and ruthless killing of her day-to-day existence, is vital in carrying the audience along in her wake.

A thoroughly absorbing experience, Pan's Labyrinth is a thrilling advertisement for the potential of the medium of film.

Jackass Number Two (16s) belongs on the other end of the spectrum. Coarse, boorish and wilfully one-dimensional, it features Johnny Knoxville and his band of amateur stuntmen as they engage in a series of pranks designed to explore the boundaries of bad taste.

Some of the stunts, it has to be said, are very funny and there's no doubting the courage of the contributors – the see-saw toreador scene, for example, is a breathtaking display of bravado. For the most part, though, the humour is simply puerile and most of the sketches are the predictable result of giving scatalogically-obsessed juvenile delinquents a free rein to indulge their arrested development.

Those who champion the Jackass cause will probably consider the eating of horse manure and the drinking of horse semen as some kind of dadaistic subversion of mainstream art. The truth is that Knoxville and Co have a camera and an audience and no idea of what to with either.

Pan's Labyrinth *****

Jackass Number Two *