When Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water came out to rave reviews in 2017, I was so completely transfixed with the simple language of lush storytelling and dramatic fantasy about a mute, lovelorn woman who impossibly falls in love with a semi-magical gill-man.
 
Sadly, most of my then-colleagues called it — and, frankly, still call it — “the fish-fucking movie.” From that moment on, I realized my tastes probably will differ from others’. But The Criterion Collection ’s new disc willfully transcends all the insults and barbs the film was given; The Shape of Water goes beyond monster-movie milieu, invigorating and reenergizing the creature feature for the new-ish millennium.
 
And, of course, it’s just a damn good movie.
 
With the sheer eroticism of the Creature from the Black Lagoon grasping at Julie Adams’ legs, The Shape of Water distills the essence with the voiceless Elisa (the lithe Sally Hawkins) in Cold War-era 1962. Trudging through life as a janitor in a secret government laboratory, she comes upon the lab’s new capture: a South American amphibian man (the emotive Doug Jones).

Trapped in the lab, the gill-man is put through tests and brutal exercises to determine his usefulness as a weapon, mostly administered by the sadistic Strickland (a wholly affecting performance from Michael Shannon). During this horrific tribulation, Elisa falls in love with the Gill-man — it’s a fish out of water story, literally.
 
With help from her working-class friends, Elisa breaks him out and tries to hide him until the tide comes in. As their passion intensifies, the gill-man gets sicker without the ocean to revive him, only to learn their love is more than natural and, in the end, supernatural.
 
Without a doubt, this movie took del Toro from the horror-film loving character behind Hellboy and Pacific Rim, as well as the Mexican-lensed The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, into the realm of fantastic world cinema. The success of The Shape of Water led to four Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture Oscars. For once, I was right!
 
The film captures not only the weighty, yet weightless feeling of dangerously falling in love, but how to deal with the mindless automatons who automatically try to dissuade you. From the homophobic clerk at lunch to the buttoned-down brownshirt who craves cruelty, the problem is them, not you.
 
As The Shape of Water literally and metaphorically challenges conventions, it creates a beautiful world where love always wins out — even in the deep dark sea. At least that’s what I believe. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Questionably competent kickboxing attorney Darby (Brey Noelle, Nightmare Neighborhood Moms) has a new roomie. It’s her shitty dad (Jim Azelvandre, The Exorcism of Saint Patrick), an aggressively repugnant human being who looks like a Factory 2-U version of J.K. Simmons.

One morning, instead of bragging to his daughter about the scent on his hand after a sexual encounter, he’s uncharacteristically sharing positive words and breakfast burritos. As Darby confides to her bartending best friend (KateLynn E. Newberry, Juror #2), it’s as if her father’s been pod-peopled. 

Because, duh, he has; the title out front shoulda told ya. 

I watched Replicator by virtue of I See You appearing among writer/director Mark Andrew Hamer’s IMDb credits. That 2019 sleeper is gripping, thrilling, chilling and, sad to say, other things this chunk of weird science is not. The two films exist on different planes of skill and execution … which made sense once I read more carefully: Hamer served as an executive producer of that film versus the pure creative force here.

Still, Replicator deserves to be judged on its own, not how it stands against something else. Awash in visually pleasant purples and pinks, it strives for a pulp greasiness that Hamer’s dialogue is too jokey to meet. Even if it were, Newberry would be the only cast member I’d trust to do it justice because as is, her fellow actors don’t perform as much as recite — and stiffly at that.

Aside from the impressive oozing, gooey effects — most notably the wall of throbbing scabs, veins, tumors, whatever — the movie falls short of its elements’ collective ambition. Not just by a mile, but the next town over. One character says it best with a rhetorical “Are we really doing this right now?”

They are, but you can skip it, unless bellybutton tentacle protrusions are your thing. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

And now for the movie in which Gillian Anderson helps investigate a government cover-up of flying saucers … yet doesn’t play an FBI agent!

Rumors of a UFO sighting at a nearby airport fire up Derek (Alex Sharp, How to Talk to Girls at Parties), a brilliant University of Cincinnati student who witnessed such a close encounter as a wee lad. What the feds deny, the socially awkward genius obsesses over trying to prove … using math! Naturally, he thinks exposing the truth is more important than paying attention to the one female who shows interest in him — despite her being Ella Purnell (TV’s Fallout), out of his league by a good 20,000 of them. 

Imagine Roy Neary crunching numbers instead of mashing taters, and you’re vibing with the sober tone of Ryan Eslinger’s procedural. Despite math running front and center throughout UFO’s plotting, knowing it as a viewer matters not an iota, so you can enjoy the conspiracy thriller aspect of it all, no matter your GPA. (That said, if you’ve waited decades for the fine-structure constant to get its due onscreen, holy crap, are you in for a treat!)

Anderson, whose mere presence brings The X-Files to mind whether she likes it or not, fills the supporting role of Derek’s professor. Rather than the usual rah-rah feel-good mentor the movies usually turn educators into, she can barely tolerate Derek. He is less than appealing, which is perhaps part of Eslinger’s intent in not following usual sci-fi tropes. No little green men here — just lanky, pasty-white ones. You may even want the FBI, led by the always fine David Strathairn (L.A. Confidential), to catch the meddling kid. 

UFO is nothing to phone home about, but it’s a solid surprise, good for one watch. Eslinger — whose first film, Madness and Genius, also dealt in equations — does a more than credible job of making an unbelievable tale seem as though it’s based on true events. (Psst: It is!) —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Although he has certainly given us many reasons not to, don’t let Corey Feldman keep you from celebrating The Birthday. The running time, too long by a quarter, might take care of that. 

Resurrected from oblivion by Jordan Peele, this 20-year-old film went unreleased after earning good notices on the festival circuit. It’s positioned as “the most amazing 117 minutes in the life of Norman Forrester,” a New York pizzeria employee (Feldman) who resides on the social ladder’s lower rungs. Not so for his spoiled, snooty longtime girlfriend, Alison (Erica Prior, Second Name), who comes from money. 

At a lavish birthday for her father (Jack Taylor, Pieces) at the grand hotel he owns, Norman is to meet Alison’s parents for the first time. Needless to say, he’s a nervous wreck. We’ve all been there, feeling like the fate of the world rests on our shoulders. 

Except here, it does. 

We know instantly that something about the night feels “off” for Norman, but it takes an hour to get to the why. Ironically, this first, more enigmatic half is close to terrific — as cartoony as it is menacing, bristling with the enough quirky energy as if retroactively campaigning to be the fifth segment of Four Rooms.

As the bombastic secrets spilled forth with hour 2, so goes the wind from these sails. Until the abrupt end, Norman’s extended nightmare starts to resemble a run on a treadmill, forever heading toward a destination without achieving an inch forward; that may be why the movie feels an act short of the standard three. The Birthday bears that first-film lack of discipline in wanting to throw everything into the mix in case another chance never comes. As unrestrained as Eugenio Mira’s hand is here, he had it figured out by his junior effort, the short, taut, high-concept hitman thriller Grand Piano.

And as for Feldman, his voice for Norman is a real choice, but he commits and delivers. It’s unfortunate The Birthday didn’t see release before now, because he’s given something the tabloid fixture hasn’t had since the days of Stand by Me: an honest-to-God role. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

I never thought a second civil war on these American shores was possible. But with the demonic enabler Donald Trump and his masturbatory emissaries of evil leading the charge against everything that is good, moral and right in this country — and possibly this world — I no longer think that.

This wrong-headed and criminally active idea is caustically brought to life (death?) in the 2024 dystopian travelogue Civil War. As speculative fiction, it’s a brutally entertaining movie, but as far as a precursor of hellish things to come, it is frighteningly plausible.

So cast your votes and get your bulletproof vest on, too, I guess.

In the not-too-distant future (concurrently?), America has torn itself apart. A civil war rages with mutually panicked civilians with no sides, brutally gung-ho soldiers of misfortune and a third-term president (a shrewdly cast Nick Offerman) who grinds the gears of the manufacturing of war.

In between it all, a small group of Associated Press journalists try to be impartial of the battle surrounding them as they try to document it. Lee (a hardscrabble Kirsten Dunst) leads her team of photographers into the belly of the beast, all trying to reach the endgame destination of war-torn Washington, D.C.

Along the way, we meet disaffected “patriots” who string up tortured bodies in an overpass, innocent kids still playing on a football field, a small town trying to distance itself from the war, both sides of the skirmish playing dress-up with bullets, and members of the unregulated militias doling out the most brutal justice in the lawless world.

Fuck Mad Max — this is the true vision of the apocalyptic future.

Written and directed by Alex Garland, it patiently stokes the already fanned flames of a country teetering on the brink of real soldiers, real bodies and real war. It’s a vestigial trope that Garland more than explores and, even better, excels in, given its distinctly European veneer.

Hopefully, our country will place this movie in the scarred waste bin of alternating timelines that we will never have to truly deal with. But, in case Civil War is a razor-thin dividing line between freedom and slavery, voting your conscious is not part of this world, but the only part of this world. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.