Guillermo del Toro's 'The Shape of Water' is the true wonder of awards season

"The Shape of Water" is a wonder to behold. Magical, thrilling and romantic to the core, a sensual and fantastical fairy tale with moral overtones, it's a film that plays by all the rules and none of them, going its own way with fierce abandon. More than that, "Shape of Water" is both grounded in the fertile soil of genre filmmaking and elevated to unexpected heights by the transcendent imagination of director and co-writer Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro works well in many genres, from horror to science fiction to gothic melodrama, but as 2006's brilliant "Pan's Labyrinth" made clear, his facility as modern cinema's most accomplished fantasy filmmaker trumps everything else. "Shape of Water," which took home the Golden Lion at Venice, is more than that film's equal, it echoes its legendary predecessor, Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast," in its ability to simultaneously call forth a spectacular imaginary world and make it heartbreakingly believable.