A lonely, mute cleaning lady (Sally Hawkins) learns to communicate and eventually falls in love with the top secret Creature from the Black Lagoon currently being housed at the government aeronautics agency at which she works. Abused by the sadistic security man (Michael Shannon) and set for dismemberment, she resolves to free the creature with the help of a chatty coworker (Octavia Spencer) and her effete next door neighbor (Richard Jenkins). The Shape of Water seems like a retread of the overrated Pan's Labyrinth, and is another dark, dumbly written, strange for strange sake Guillermo del Toro reality set fairy tale that lacks the imagination that so many invest in his movies and the creativity the filmmaker so clearly believes is on display. Hawkins turns in a great silent, emotive performance and Jenkins and Shannon deliver their usual though still effective turns.

** out of ****

In the early days of Frano's Spain, an adolescent girl, lost in a fantasy world of books (and indeed seeming to be actually living out her own fable) relocates with her mother to a wooded compound where her new sadistic army captain step-father is rooting out the few bands of remaining rebels. Meanwhile, she is visited by a mysterious faun and given three tasks to complete, tasks which will have tragic and otherworldly repercussions. Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is dumbly written and realized, clumsily welding together fairy tale and violent realism elements, and not nearly as imaginative as many give it credit for.

** out of ****

So I walked into Pacific Rim during the previews, amid the next big budget debacles that Hollywood was promoting. Then one ran for this flashy, sophomoric, and ludicrously overblown blockbuster involving soldiers inhabiting gargantuan robot suits and fighting off Godzilla like invaders, the kind of film that I would have sopped up as a twelve year old and avoid like the plague now. After nearly five minutes went by, I realized it wasn't a trailer but the feature itself, with over two hours yet to come of that infernal inanity. Pacific Rim is an almost complete abomination, especially coming from someone held in such high regard as Guillermo del Toro, who shows no visual flair and presents a repugnant digitized film from a screenplay that seems like it was written by James Cameron's half-witted younger brother. The acting is atrocious (Sons of Anarchy costars Charlie Hunnam and Ron Perlman are the biggest culprits) and talented performers like Idris Elba and Rinko Kikuchi can do nothing to right this mess. Between the inept action sequences, artless set design, putrid dialogue, and abysmal acting,  I couldn't tell if this movie was to be taken seriously or if this was all one big 190 million dollar joke.