'The Shape Of Water': An Elegant Fable Of Starfish-Crossed Lubbers

The year before he won an Academy Award for designing and building the puppet star of E.T., Italian special effects artist Carlo Rimbaldi created a much more frightening creature — minus the light-up heart, plus tentacles — to have simulated sex with Isabelle Adjani in the psychological horror film Possession, a movie that probably sold fewer lunchboxes and plush toys.

, the latest R-rated fairy tale from Mexican auteur Guillermo del Toro, offers a sense of what might spawn if those two Rimbaldi feature-creatures were to mate. The Spielbergian or del Toro's twin masterpieces. I wish his new film had spent at least a little time being frightening before it phased into aching and swooning; with its lush evocation of longing amid gleaming midcentury diners and cinemas and Cadillacs, sometimes feels like Carol . But it's a transporting, lovingly made specimen of escapism — if it's possible for a movie that depicts a powerful creep blithely abusing women in the workplace to count as escapism — and easily the strongest of del Toro's seven English-language features, though it spin-kicks less vampire butt than did. To place yourself in GDT's hands, as he tells the type of story he tells better than anyone else, is a rich pleasure.