It's been twenty years since Guillermo del Toro's debut feature Cronos was released, and in that time he has managed to build not one, but two careers as a director. In one, he makes small, intimate Spanish-language dramas which use the supernatural as allegories for Mexican-American relations and Spanish history. In the other, he is a director of big-budget, energetic action spectaculars like Blade II and the two Hellboy movies. (He even has two more sidelines if you count his extensive work as a producer of other peoples' films and his sideline as an author of pretty good vampire novels.) Despite the seemingly vast gulf between his careers, what makes his work interesting is that it all feels personal. All his films share his vivid love of colour, his sense of wonder at the power of storytelling, and his giddy, enthusiastic imagination. He invests himself and makes even his grandest epics feel human, even when his characters aren't.