Master storyteller and Miami favorite Guillermo del Toro (his first film, Cronos, played MFF in 1994) won the Golden Lion for Best Film at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Variety critic Guy Lodge writes: “For those few cinema scholars who speak of some motion pictures as ‘films’ and others as ‘movies,’ del Toro’s glorious The Shape of Water refuses to go tidily into either box. A ravishing, eccentric auteur’s imagining, spilling artistry, empathy and sensuality from every open pore, it also offers more straight-up movie for your money than just about any Hollywood studio offering this year. This decidedly adult fairytale about a forlorn, mute cleaning lady and the uncanny merman who save each other’s lives in very different ways, careers wildly from mad-scientist B-movie to heart-thumping Cold War noir to ecstatic wings-on-heels musical, keeping an unexpectedly classical love story afloat with every dizzy genre turn. Lit from within by a heart-clutching silent star turn from Sally Hawkins, this is incontestably del Toro’s most rewarding, richly realized film - or movie, for that matter - since 2006’s Pan Labyrinth.”