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del Toro nears perfection with 'Shape of Water'

By Nicholas Ottone · Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2018

Magic. Guillermo del Toro’s genre-confounding film “The Shape of Water” is a wonderfully transporting adult fairy-tale that luxuriates in the intersections of sexuality, love and humanity. It is a movie enamored with movies, yet it retains an inextricable and unpretentious purity of self, an emotional core undiluted by any cheap homage. Part creature feature, spy thriller and romance, “The Shape of Water” largely avoids empty stylization, investing its heartfelt story with substance and painting it with all the shades of blue and green del Toro could muster.

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