Commercially and greatly critically successful on release, it won three Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction and Best Make-Up, three BAFTA awards including Best Film Not in the English Language, many other prestigious awards and two notable standing ovations at film festivals, with its standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival lasting 22 minutes – the longest in the film festival’s history.

Critical reviews for the film were incredibly positive with major praise for its story, direction, cinematography, visual effects and performances with Mark Kermode and Roger Ebert both claiming it to be the “Best Film” of 2006, with Kermode describing it as “an epic, poetic vision in which the grim realities of war are matched and mirrored by a descent into an underworld populated by fearsomely beautiful monsters” while other critics such as Jim Emerson called the film “a fairy tale of such potency to the primal thrill and horror of the stories that held us spellbound as children”.

Metacritic named it “the best reviewed film of the decade” in 2010, with it landing at #5 in Empire magazine’s “The 100 Best Films of World Cinema” in 2010, at #17 on the BBC’s list of The Best 100 Films of the 21st Century and with it making many critics’ top ten lists of best films of 2006.

Today, it stands on Rotten Tomatoes at 95% with its critical consensus stating that “Pan’s Labyrinth is Alice in Wonderland for grown-ups, with the horrors of both reality and fantasy blended together into an extraordinary, spellbinding fable.”