With his latest masterpiece now streaming, Guillermo Del Toro’s back catalogue gets handpicked by Rory Doherty for the very best highlights.
Name a filmmaker whose love of film gives them more effervescent joy than Guillermo Del Toro. And it’s not just prestigious movies that make him giddy—pulp novels, horror, and every Japanese gundam and kaiju ever created all have a similar effect.
The Mexican filmmaker has enjoyed a good few years since his 2018 Oscar success; Nightmare Alley (on Disney+) was a stylish and entrancing noir, his Netflix horror anthology series Cabinet of Curiosities pulled together a terrific team of modern horror storytellers, and now he’s enjoying some of the best critical acclaim he’s ever received for his stop-motion version of Pinocchio.
Not already on the Del Toro hype train? With his latest now on Netflix, here’s where you can catch his other highlights.
Pacific Rim (2013)
What happens when you give a nerdy craftsman a ridiculous sci-fi spectacle budget to bring to life his biggest and heaviest gundam anime dreams? If Pacific Rim is the result, it should be happening more often. As waves of mechanised robot warriors are produced to go hand-to-hand with giant Godzilla-esque monsters invading Planet Earth, our broadly sketched characters need to overcome their clashing, brash personalities and listen to more cheesy motivational speeches to save the day.
There’s no faulting Del Toro’s visual rendition of a world teeming with craft and detail, and the CG action is pulled off with a well-observed sense of heft and scale so every oversized punch hits home.
The Shape of Water (2018)
Del Toro finally got his due at the Oscars with this romantic, finely detailed fairytale that felt like the synthesis of every film he made before. Doug Jones again inhabits full-body prosthetics; it features a beautiful, sweeping score; there’s an urgent, ugly human monstrosity in its period setting; it’s the marginalised outsiders who show the greatest capacity for warmth and kindness—even if they’re fantastical creatures.
The first science-fiction film to win Best Picture, The Shape of Water stands out in how unrestricted it is by genre definitions. It’s not just sci-fi or fantasy, drama or romance—it’s first and foremost a richly human story.
Pan’s Labyrinth (2007)
A generational gateway into international cinema and a masterful thesis on what fantasy as escapism means in an increasingly tortuous world, Del Toro’s achingly sad and completely beautiful Spanish Civil War fairytale is without flaw. Doug Jones appears as two of the film’s now iconic fantasy creatures, as a young girl descends from the traumatic reality of her barbaric new father, not realising how much she’s risking complete alienation by doing so.
Concluding Del Toro’s fantasy trilogy made up of Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone (which frustratingly are difficult to stream), this is the rare trilogy that gets better as it goes along. It’s impossible to resist the spell Pan’s Labyrinth casts over you.
Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (2008)
Del Toro is no stranger to the comic-book movie, but none of the three he’s directed should be placed in the same category as the superhero fare we’ve all gotten tired of nowadays. With Hellboy 2, he perfected how to bridge deeply idiosyncratic and stylised graphic novels with his warm, enthusiastic filmmaking voice.
Despite excelling on his previous two efforts (Blade II and Hellboy are also available to stream), The Golden Army wins out, teeming with bold, affecting characters and perfectly pitched humour. Both fans and people who worked on the films are deeply loyal to Del Toro’s work, and rightly so—they’re an oddity in an increasingly uninspired genre.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)
Pinocchio is one of those movies that feels like it should have been made by Del Toro years ago; it so authentically belongs to his style and voice, while also completely rooted in folklore, fairytale and ancient narratives. Del Toro has played around with practical effects and animation throughout his career, even producing a Netflix computer animated fantasy series, but this brings his devotion to craft to a next level—co-directing with Mark Gustafson a luxuriously detailed version of a well-known story that takes it back to its dark, tragic roots while finding room for imaginative, contemporary perspectives.
Animation is not just for children, and Pinocchio is not merely a kids film that adults can enjoy—but a story of an unlikely family that will make parents feel closer to their children.
