Guillermo del Toro's THE SHAPE OF WATER proves his richest, most successful film to date

Taking you places that movies seldom manage while creating a tightly-focused universe of dark enchantment based clearly on the kind of world in which we're forever stuck, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (shown below) has, with THE SHAPE OF WATER, graced us with his (so far) masterpiece.

Ever more so than Pan's Labyrynth, which demanded at least some knowledge of Spain's history and the Spanish Civil War to bring its several strands together, del Toro's newest work asks that you remember or maybe just have a nodding acquaintance with The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Even if you don't recall that "landmark" monster movie, you still should not have any real trouble understanding the theme, plot and raison d'être of this exceptional love story/fantasy that is filled to its brim with "outsiders" of every sort.

In the film's most striking and yet most subtle note, even the movie's premiere villain -- played to the hilt by Michael Shannon (above), the only actor we have today who could easily replace the late, great Boris Karloff -- is himself one of these outsiders, incapable of experiencing or feeling emotions like love and caring, yet unable to even understand what this lack means to his own place in the world. (The other outsiders here all very well know their lack and their place.)

Señor del Toro addresses the place and plight of our GLBT community, our people of color and our handicapped simply and gracefully via his movie's main characters. The gracious and comforting Octavia Spencer (above) plays one of the two janitorial staff with whom we bond at the government-sponsored "research" facility to which our creature, found in the Amazon, has been brought for "study."

The other worker is played by our main character, Elisa, a young woman who has had her vocal chords cut as a child and is now mute, played by the great Sally Hawkins (above). As with Rachel Brosnahan in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, I can't think of another actress who could bring all that Ms Hawkins does to this role: an inner beauty that simply glows, steely strength when required, and an openness that captivates and charms.

Another wonderful actor who possesses extraordinary subtlety and empathy, Richard Jenkins (above), plays Elisa's friend and neighbor, Giles, a gay illustrator/artist in a time in America -- the 1960s -- when the closet was still the best option. These three unite to save our creature, who is in peril of its life, and the movie's wonderful message of tolerance and love for and by not just humans but any living species is brought home as seamlessly, beautifully and cinematically as just about any in movie history.

In addition to Shannon's villainous character, we meet another scientist, played by ubiquitous and always wonderful Michael Stuhlbarg (above and also currently to be seen in Call Me By Your Name and The Post). TrustMovies would say the the film's ace-in-the-hole, performance- and character-wise would be the depiction of its creature, brought to life by actor Doug Jones (below, and oft-used by del Toro) and his incredible make-up or maybe CGI-effects, This is indeed a stunning achievement, but then all the characters and characterizations here are so good that literally no one stands out above any other.

While the plot of The Shape of Water is pretty simple -- rather typical, really -- the film is brought to fierce and gorgeous life by del Toro's wondrous imagination.

That imagination has been hugely abetted by that fine cinematographer Dan Laustsen (Crimson Peak, Brotherhood of the Wolf, and the gorgeous and engrossing Danish TV series 1864), production designer (Paul D. Austerberry), art director (Nigel Churcher) and set decorators Jeffrey A. Melvin and Shane Vieau, all of whom, save Vieau, have worked with del Toro previously.

There are only around a half dozen locations used repeatedly in the film, but all of these -- from Elisa and Giles' facing apartments (hers is shown above) to the science laboratory (two photos up) to the giant old-fashioned movie theater (below) located just below the apartments -- are brought to such amazing, beautiful, darkly noir-ish life that they will probably remain in your mind and imagination for good.

In all, The Shape of Water comes together to form something we almost never see: a kind of mainstream blockbuster, a moving work of art, and a film that manages to show us just about everything that a single motion picture can achieve.

From Fox Searchlight and running 123 minutes, the film is playing all over the country at this point. Click here to find the theater(s) nearest you.

With A QUIET PASSION, Terence Davies has given us his masterpiece (so far, at least)...

... as well as gifting that fine actress Cynthia Nixon with the opportunity to shine brightly in the best role she's had thus far. So very good is Ms Nixon that her work bears comparison with that of last year's best actress, Rebecca Hall. In A QUIET PASSION -- which tells the story of one of America's greatest poets, Emily Dickinson -- writer/director Terence Davies has found the subject and the means to express it that puts into play all of what is best about his work (his great feeling for period style, speech and behavior) and none of what sometimes mars his efforts (extremely slow pacing in which meaning can disappear into the too lengthy moment). Here, everything works together to form what seems to me very close to film perfection. 

Most surprising of all is how wonderfully funny, genuinely witty and humorous so much of his movie turns out to be. (The filmmaker is shown at right.) Could Emily Dickinson have been this charming and delightful? I hope so, for together Ms Nixon and her director certainly make the poet seem so. And very believably, too. Granted, hers is very dry wit, but that would seem to befit the time and place --Massachusetts in the mid 1800s -- and Davies' dialog is endlessly enriching. Really, we hang on every word as we savor the humor, anger and, just as often, the surprise.

Dickinson was an original, a quiet rebel who simply stood her ground, as we note from the film's first scene, in which the head mistress of a girls' school gives the younger version of Emily (played by Emma Bell, above) a good dressing down -- at which our young poet stands her ground and gives us an appropriate taste of what is to come.  Mr. Davies has always preferred quiet, smooth elisions to any flashy effects in his films. Here his flashiest and most remarkably effective is a family photo session in which the younger Emily morphs subtly into the older Ms Nixon, below. This is brilliantly, beautifully handled, and I'd watch the entire film again just to see it once more.

The entire Dickinson family, in-laws included, is brought to wonderful life by the ace cast Mr. Davies has assembled. Keith Carradine (below) seems to grow into a better and stronger actor as he ages. This may be his finest hour playing Emily's stern but loving father who, as much as he is troubled by her behavior appears to somehow secretly treasure it. How Carradine exhibits this is one of the film's wonderful and most subtle accomplishments and also provides the chance for the actor to show a delightfully stern comedic sense. (His "I am smiling" is perhaps the movie's most hilarious line.)

The lovely Jennifer Ehle (below, right) plays Emily sister, Vinnie, with such graciousness and joy that you'll want a sister so tender but honest, while Duncan Duff handles the brotherly duties with typically patriarchal entitlement -- a state against which Emily smartly and rightly railed for most of her life.

Even the sad sister-in-law Susan (a fine turn by the splendid Jodhi May, shown below right) is given her due, in one scene in particular, in which sapphic love is alluded to but not directly addressed.

This seems wise, as -- from what we can tell by Davies' interpretation of Dickinson's life -- the poet would have wanted a heterosexual love but due to a combination of her moral stringency, fear of intimacy and health problems both physical and mental (very possibly a kind of agoraphobia or even something a bit bi-polar), any love relationship beyond that of her immediate family was not to be.

Throughout his movie, Davies intersperses Dickinson's poetry, as appropriate to the theme of the moment. This should send both newcomers and lovers of her work back to the source. The cinematography, too (by Florian Hoffmeister), as per usual for a Davies film, is first-rate.

But family -- ah, what that appears to have meant to Emily! The movie captures this as well as any film I've seen, yet without the usual attached sentimentality (think Little Women in any of its incarnations). There is a stringency here that befits Dickinson so very well, and there is marvelous good humor, too. There is also a coming-to-terms with sickness and death that's appropriate to a tale like this and characters such as these.

I would say that A Quiet Passion is a masterpiece of biographical film-making. But that is too puny. Let's just call it a masterpiece, period. From Music Box Films and running two hours and five minutes, the movie opens this Friday, April 14, in New York City (at the newly re-opened Quad Cinema and the Lincoln Plaza Cinema) and at three venues in Emily's home state of Massachusetts. On April 21 the film hits Ann Arbor and Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Royal), and from there it will soon open across the entire country. Here in South Florida, it opens on May 12 at the AMC Sunset Place, South Miami; the Living Room Theaters, Boca Raton; and the Bill Cosford Cinema in Coral Gables. To view all currently scheduled playdates, cities and venues.click here, then scroll down and click on THEATERS. 

Auraeus Solito's Philippines-set BUSONG provides glorious vistas, legend, poetry-- and maybe a few unintentional chuckles

As a fan of Philippines filmmaker Auraeus Solito, ever since his bizarrely affecting narrative debut The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (from 2005), and his interesting follow-up, Boy (2009), I was primed for the beauty of this filmmaker's lovingly shot male bodies and his effectively simple story-telling technique. His new movie BUSONG (aka Palawan Fate) is something different, both more and less: a sumptuous mix of gorgeous sea- land- and sky-scapes, Philippines legend, mysticism, modern-day intrusions and, as ever, rather simple storytelling.

Via his mother, Mr. Solito, shown at right, comes from the Philippines' Palawan tribe, located in the South-westernmost point of the islands. Not until after the filmmaker graduated from university and returned home did he begin to learn the many stories of Palawan culture, religion, magic and the Shaman-Kings -- from whom, mother informed son, their family had descended. Eventu-ally, Solito decided that he must make a film about all this, of which Busong -- the Palawan version of "fate" -- is the first in a trilogy that the filmmaker has promised to continue.

From the outset, as a pair of scantily-clad young men carry a hammock-like receptacle along an uninhabited shoreline, the movie offers up the timeless look, sound and feel of legend. The crisp, bright, utterly pollution-free landscape makes for the kind of color cinematography that you can only achieve in the non-industrial areas of the world, and many of the shots here will take your breath away with their beauty.

What the young men are carrying turns out to be a very ill young woman (above), the sister of one of the men. Another young woman offers to help carry the load and to take the girl to a "healer," so off they go. We learn of this new young woman's problems (missing husband, chainsaws and felled trees), and then another bearer takes over the carrying duties (a hunky fisherman who once had a son and a boat), and finally another young man returning from the city to his ancestral place among the Shamans.

We learn of each of these bearers' life via memory, dream and narration, as one story flows into another like the constant ocean waves or the waterfall (three photos above) that feeds the little lake below it. If we're not always sure where we are or of whose story we're currently part, we're soon back again with the sick girl, as she is carried further toward either healing or death.

Though we see little of "modern civilization" -- a scene in a hospital-like office, an encounter with a nasty white man -- we're made aware of how the Palawan people have been and still are ill-used by their oppressors and by western religion. One character remarks of wanting to be "where the sound of church bells is not heard and government does not exist."

Along the way there is a scene of a breath-taking giant plant (no special effects, just nature, I suspect); another demonstrates the healing effects of Palawan urine; and the finale offers up our young woman's wounds actually breeding butterflies out of her sores (nice make-up job here).

What holds this very slow-paced film together are its staggeringly lovely visuals, as well as as the beautiful young men and women the director has chosen for his leading roles. His camera caresses them all, particularly the men, with appreciation and barely-concealed longing. While the simplicity of the stories and their telling makes for charm, however, it can also lead to some longueurs, during which you may find yourself wondering what Mystery Science Theater's man and his robots might make of all this. Their occasional commentary, no doubt, would be choice.

The above might sound unfairly harsh, for there is much to appreciate about the filmmaker's endeavor. But sometimes Solito's simple and beautiful leans a little too much toward the former. Busong opens this Friday, June 29, in New York City at the Quad Cinema. No other U.S. playdates are to be immediately found, but you can click here to see its many past playdates, at festivals internationally.