Hellboy II: The Golden Army

After the dizzying high art of the Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth, del Toro downshifts a little to deliver high entertainment with this sequel. Meshing the supernatural with the super-heroic, Mignola's comic-book creation is a wise-cracking, gruff-yet-good tough guy played with pitch-perfect swagger and comedy timing by Perlman. Hellboy's intrinsic goodness shines out through his bizarre appearance -- and Perlman's talent shines out through bizarre, brilliant makeup and special effects. The movie takes place in a world of gods and monsters, and some of its creations are startling, inventive, and as scary as they are fascinating.

Loaded with action (some of which is intense, if otherworldly), Hellboy II: The Golden Army also takes the time to give us full-drawn characters. Hellboy sincerely cares for Liz, is a good friend to the team's psychic -- a genteel man-fish named Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), and even comes to terms with his higher-ups at the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, including the all-too-human Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor) and the disembodied spirit Johann Kraus (voiced by Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane). For every eye-popping effects sequence or line of hokey comic-book dialog, there's also a brief moment of human warmth or goofy comedy, and if the film's a little loose and slapdash, that hyper-inventive spirit surprisingly enhances its charm instead of undercutting it. Hellboy is hardly the best-known big-screen superhero, but Hellboy II: The Golden Army is the most brilliantly bizarre, visually vibrant, slyly self-aware and freakishly funny example of the genre you could hope for.