This week in film review it's Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro's stunningly bleak fairy tale set in post-Civil War Spain. The costumes and special effects are extraordinary, as is the rich, multi-layered plotline. El Laberinto del Fauno weaves together the horrors of life under a totalitarian regime combined with the darkest elements of children's fable to create a fantasy classic. Set in 1944, the film tells the story of a young girl called Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), who is

The 1950s. Kilian (Mario Casas) leaves the snowy mountains of Huesca for the Spanish-African island colony of Fernando Poo, where he's to work on a cacao plantation with his father and brother Jacobo (Alain Hernández). On the plantation, where he works as a guard, he finds a decadent white hierarchy and local workforce dangerously close to snapping. At night he is introduced by his bonvivant brother to a wild party scene centred on the prostitution of native women. Seduced at

A police thriller which drips with sweat in the humid wetlands of the Doñana Natural Park, Alberto Rodriguez’s film follows the investigations of an ill-paired cop duo on the hunt for the murderer of two young girls. The Visigoth's Film of the Week is La Isla Minima... The steamy, impenetrable landscape of desolate lagoons and rivers, and remote villages, serves as a potent metaphor for a past most of Spain is trying desperately to forget and cover up. It’s 1980. The first te

‘Ey, chiquillo! When you ever seen an officer of the law in this country pay for anything?’ TimeOut slated the first flick in this slacker detective series, Dumb Arm of the Law as ‘broad, obvious, crude and visually ugly.’ Somehow they put their finger on just what people like about it. Santiago Segura’s farting, burping, grunting, swearing, shoplifting, racist, chauvinistic detective can be an eyebrow-raiser for Anglophone audiences unfamiliar with irreverent Spanish barstoo

Jamon, Jamon, ‘a tale of ham and passion’, with a script by Catalan writer Quim Monzón and shot by Bigas Luna in the Aragonese desert, begins with a shot of Javier Bardem’s local stud character Raul playing torero with a friend on a horned bike on a patch of Aragonese wasteland. In the next scene we see Raul modelling a new line of pants in a photo shoot in an underwear factory. Later on we learn he sells jamon for a living. And so begins a film so Spanish, it drinks Marie Br

One of cinema’s most controversial directors, Luis Buñuel was constantly at loggerheads with censors and, at times, even the Vatican. Viridiana, viewed as highly blasphemous and inflammatory by both, was initially banned by the Spanish Falangist regime, but managed to escape destruction via its principal actress, the Mexican Silvia Pinal, who smuggled a copy to Mexico where it was shown and reproduced. It tells the story of a novice nun, Viridiana (Pinal), who is convinced by

Mar Adentro (2004) ‘When you spend so long in people’s care, you learn to cry with a smile.’ In Alejandro Amenábar’s moving film, Javier Bardem gives the performance of a lifetime as Ramon Sampedro, the Galician sailor and poet who, paralyzed from the neck down following a diving accident, fights the Spanish law courts and church in his struggle to end his life by euthanasia. Thirty years have gone by since the accident which has made him a prisoner in his own bed. Everyone h