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.
