Review: The Shape of Water (2017)

* * * *
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, Michael Stuhlbarg

Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme, beauty and the beast. There's nothing new about stories of women seeing past the beastly exterior of a monster and falling in love with the soul that exists beneath the surface - movies called "Beauty and the Beast" are, at this point, a subgenre in and of themselves - but a filmmaker as creative as Guillermo del Toro, who is dedicated to mixing the sinister with the beautiful, leaving you at once enchanted and unsettled, is able to make an old formula feel fresh. The Shape of Water is a wonderful fairy tale for adults, impeccably put together on a visual level, masterfully unfolded on a narrative level, and built around one great leading performance and four great supporting performances. If you only see one movie this year about a woman falling in love with a fish man, make it The Shape of Water.

Review: Crimson Peak (2015)

* * 1/2
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain

Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak is a triumph of crafts over storytelling. Its production design and costumes are some of the most glorious of any film I've seen this year, but though del Toro is able to build a creepy, effective atmosphere in the film's middle section, he's not quite able to sustain it for the remainder of the story. The story itself is a classic ghost/haunted house tale, though again, while the film nails the look of it, the actually telling of it unfolds in a largely predictable fashion. But, man, is it ever grotesquely beautiful to watch.