Vidal is a murderer and torturer who is all the scarier for seeming so reasonable, even offhanded, about the violence he causes. He has totally cowed his wife Carmen, who in his mind is little more than a disposable life support system for his son and heir. Fortunately Ofelia, with her connections to the natural/magical forest around the old mill, finds the strength to resist Vidal’s monstrousness without herself becoming a monster.

Del Toro shows the same filmmaking skills that have defined both his most personal work (The Devil’s Backbone) and his more Hollywood efforts (Mimic and Hellboy, among others). His command of color, bathing the “real” world in cool blues and greens but making parts of the fairy-tale world rich with reds and purples, is impressive (credit also cinematographer Guillermo Navarro).  

The music, by Javier Navarrete, also does a lot to make the two worlds separate yet equal. Del Toro has done wonders with his actors, particularly Baquero and Verdu, two brave women who look fear in the face while letting us know how difficult it is to do so.

The film’s messages — that fighting evil often demands sacrifice, and that we subvert the natural world at our own peril — are worthy, but in some ways beside the point. The strength of Pan’s Labyrinth is that its imagery has the capacity to get behind your eyeballs and into your head. We may not care about 60-year-old battles between Franco and his enemies, but we care that this princess is willing to give up her kingdom for the sake of an innocent child.

Idiocracy looks forward instead of back, deep-freezing two average humans (army private Luke Wilson and hooker Maya Rudolph) for 500 years. They awake into a world where natural selection has been swamped by a reproductive tidal wave of mouth-breathers and crotch-grabbers, addicted to ever-more-violent television and “educated” by corporate slogans and mindless consumerism.  

This is either a Blue State liberal’s nightmare vision of flyover country, or a parody of same. With director/co-writer Mike Judge (Office Space, “Beavis and Butthead,” “King of the Hill,”), you’re never quite sure (Judge collaborated on the screenplay with Etan Cohen).

In any case, Wilson and Rudolph, simply smart enough to tie their shoes in 2005, are Wile E. Coyote Super Geniuses in the 26th century. However, like the cartoon predator, they are more likely to fall into canyons and get blown up by Acme Products than their unthinking tormentors. Intelligence, even average intelligence, is no match for stupidity, especially when it has become so rampant that it’s celebrated rather than shunned. Anyone who talks in actual English sentences, as Wilson and Rudolph do, is automatically assumed to be a pretentious “fag.” The soft bigotry of low expectations indeed!