Guillermo del Toro’s heavenly Hellboy: “The highest praise I can bestow on Guillermo del Toro, the 39-year-old Mexican-born director and writer, is that he’s in a class with Peter Jackson as a fan-boy who gets it—a brilliant filmmaker who has a kind of metabolic connection to horror and sci-fi that helps him transform secondhand genre material into something deep and nourishing. Del Toro reaches into himself and finds the Wagnerian grandeur in schlock.

Which brings us to the delightful Hellboy, which is based on a clever comic-book series of the same name by Mike Mignola that fuses superheroics with the sort of mythic religious demonology of H.P. Lovecraft, plus a bit of Men in Black macho cheekiness. ” —David Edelstein, Slate