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91del Toro builds excitement, dread, and melodrama in equal layers.
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91What gives the story resonance is the tenderness and sacrifice and even innocence del Toro reveals amid the savagery.
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90Here is a ghost story so dynamic you could call it a ghost poem.
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90With the ambitious and ominous The Devil's Backbone, Del Toro rises to a new level of accomplishment, adding history and politics to his distinctive blend.
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80Brooding ghost story is rich with psychological and political implications that never obscure its fundamental creepiness.
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80The movie is an expert, sunlit chiller audaciously predicated on an unquiet historical memory: "What is a ghost?"
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80Mr. del Toro provokes your screams and shudders, but he also earns your tears.
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80It's a horror flick, and a creepily good one, that also functions as an allegory of the war that still haunts Spain seven decades later.
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80Del Toro has made a ghost story that's not only evocative and original, it's a pleasure to watch.
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80This film is much more atmospheric; it builds, not so much logically as viscerally, until you feel you can't escape. Lurid and overdone as it is, it's still a real disturber of the peace.
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80The sensitive art-house viewer should be warned: Though slow-moving at first, the film ends in explosions and violent death, with a level of sadism that will undoubtedly prove too intense for some viewers.
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An entertaining and atmospheric revenge tale.
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78Is nothing if not exquisitely detailed: It's like a blood orange that del Toro spends the film seductively unpeeling, revealing layer upon layer of meaning and pathos.
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75The Devil's Backbone has been compared to "The Others," and has the same ambition and intelligence, but is more compelling and even convincing.
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75It's imaginatively filmed and builds a sense of brooding emotional power.
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75After a leisurely first half, The Devil's Backbone becomes utterly spellbinding, its tension mounting in steady increments, its story taking one dark turn after another, and its bittersweet resolution destined to haunt you long after you've left the theater.
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75Along with "The Others," -- represents a welcome diversion from loud, senseless Hollywood extravaganzas.
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75Genuinely scary, exquisitely shot -- and very well-acted.
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75Creepy and compelling and beautifully shot, The Devil's Backbone is a tale of the supernatural that feels completely natural. Its realness is what makes it so scary.
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75The film doesn't explore the nature of ghosts, as it promises to initially, but it's fun to watch Del Toro confront death and fear with such energy and humor.
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75A seductively corrosive horror story that also potently suggests the ways war can shatter childhood.
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75May be thin, but it's also sharp, like a stiletto.
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70del Toro blends agit-prop politics and ghoulishness without making the entire enterprise seem silly.
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70Though it fails in its final reels to capitalize on its early promise, picture is still stylish, accomplished and tremendously enjoyable fare.
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60That The Devil's Backbone makes any sense at all -- with its many, swirling plotlines -- seems like a little wonder.
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