"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.

It could be the start of a Steven Spielberg sci-fi film: A boy walks into a shimmering, aluminum garden pavilion surrounded by lush palms and succulent-lined footpaths. There's a massive crater in the ceiling, open to the blue sky, and the boy cranes his neck backward to gaze at the heavens as puffy white clouds sail past. NASA's 19 earth science satellites, which are quietly circling the planet, seem to be communicating with visitors of the pavilion, their combined "voices" creating a cacophonous concert that now echoes inside the domed chamber. This is the West Coast debut of NASA Orbit Pavilion, on view at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino through Feb. 27. The structure, in the shape of a giant seashell, houses a sound installation that tracks the movement of the International Space Station and NASA's satellites as they make 90-minute trips around the Earth.

Leon Russell called his best-known composition "A Song for You," but a better title might've been "A Song for You -- and You and You and You and You." The heartfelt ballad, instantly recognizable from its opening cascade of delicate piano notes, first appeared on Russell's self-titled debut album in 1970. That's a decade after this singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist -- who died Sunday at age 74 -- moved to Los Angeles from his native Oklahoma and quickly established himself as a go-to session player. Since then, though, "A Song for You" has been recorded and performed hundreds of times by artists as diverse as Donny Hathaway, the Carpenters, Willie Nelson, Amy Winehouse and the rapper Bizzy Bone. In 1994, Ray Charles won a Grammy for his moving rendition of the tune.

The new science-fiction film, it says, has created word-of-mouth, wowed audiences and earned a 100% Fresh rating on the movie review website Rotten Tomatoes. Denis Villeneuve's latest work, starring Amy Adams as a linguist chosen to communicate with alien visitors, may well be that. But it isn't easy to market a masterpiece -- especially a sci-fi masterpiece with spaceships that don't engage in dogfights, aliens who don't fire lasers and protagonists who don't throw punches. When "Arrival" touches down at 2,200 theaters this weekend, it will do so not only as one of the most well-regarded science-fiction movies in some time but as one of the greatest marketing puzzles in recent memory. The Paramount release is quiet, subtle and patient -- an artisanal offering in a time of studio fast food.