Grade: A

After expending entirely too much effort on big-budget nonsense like “Blade,” “Hellboy,” “Pacific Rim” and “Crimson Peak” (not to mention the TV series “The Strain” and the flop thriller “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”), Guillermo del Toro has returned to his roots in offbeat, highly personal cinema with his best film in a decade—ever since “Pan’s Labyrinth.” While still feeding into del Toro’s love of the genre movies he adored while growing up, “The Shape of Water” proves a nostalgia trip with real emotional resonance, a fantastic fable of outsiders pitted against a cruel world that makes its viewers think as well as feel.

The film can be briefly described as a romance between the Creature from the Black Lagoon and a mute maintenance worker, but that would sell it short. In 1962, as the Cold War rages, an amphibian man (limned, in a remarkable “creature” suit, by Doug Jones) has been captured by the U.S. government and brought to a facility in Baltimore, where he is guarded—and mistreated—by a brutal federal agent named Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon) while being examined by the far more sympathetic Dr. Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg). The goal is to determine how the creature’s anatomy might provide clues that might facilitate human abilities in space travel.

It’s top secret, hush-hush stuff, of course, but when Strickland suffers an injury that requires aid (as well as a cleaning job), two of the maintenance staff are allowed into the inner sanctum—mute, mousy Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) and her sassy buddy Zelda (Octavia Spencer). Elisa catches a glimpse of the melancholy creature, and feels it a kindred spirit of sorts. Using food and music, she secretly coaxes it into a relationship that blossoms into an interspecies friendship, and then something more. And when Strickland and his super-hawkish military superior General Hoyt (Nick Searcy) decide that the experiment should be terminated with extreme prejudice despite Hoffstetler’s objections, Elisa decides to intervene, enlisting her reluctant neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins) to assist her in pulling off a great escape. (Others will eventually take roles in the mission as well.)

Given that this is a del Toro film, there are some elements—Strickland’s early accident and its aftermath, an impromptu lunch the creature grabs in Giles’s apartment, a last-act confrontation that takes a violent turn—that are somewhat gruesome. But they’re embedded in a rich, mesmerizing romantic fantasy with a heartfelt streak that extends to all of society’s outcasts. Visually it’s as gorgeous as “Crimson Peak” was, though the perfectly detailed color palette this time emphasizes blues and greens as opposed to the reds of the earlier picture (it’s impossible to overpraise the work of production designer Paul Denham Austerberry and cinematographer Dan Lausten), and aurally it’s equally magical, thanks not only to the period pop songs used as plot pegs but to the lovely, amazingly varied music by Alexandre Desplat, which stands out even among his long train of outstanding scores.

The centerpiece of “Water” is, of course, the relationship between Elisa, played by Hawkins with ineffable charm) and the amphibian man (with Jones bringing poetic grace to his every move). They are the ultimate unlikely couple, both of them isolated from society in distinct ways but drawn together by a bond of differentness. But the other characters are outsiders, too. Giles, beautifully played by Jenkins, is a gay man fired from his job at an ad agency that he’s desperately trying to win back; and when he attempts to make contact with the counterman at a pie shop (Morgan Kelly), he’s cruelly rebuffed. The same clerk refuses to serve African-American customers, which throws into relief the position of Zelda (played with typical energy by Spencer) at a time when casual racism, in contrast to today’s hidden variety, was rife. (Prejudice of any sort, in fact, is equated with some degree of dehumanization, which reaches its ultimate point in, for example, Strickland’s attitude toward the amphibian.) But even Hoffstetler, whom Stuhlbarg endows with a weary dignity, turns out to stand apart while Strickland himself, to whom Shannon brings a demonic degree of malevolent intensity, finds himself alone in the end.

As so often in del Toro’s films, one can’t help but note the director’s own cinematic obsessions at work. Elisa and Giles not only share a love of old Hollywood musicals, which they watch together on television—a plot thread that leads to a rhapsodically outrageous dance sequence that trumps even those in Herbert Ross’s sumptuous remake of Dennis Potter’s “Pennies from Heaven”—but just happen to live above a creaky old theatre where CinemaScope biblical epics play to near-empty houses.

But while such references could seem merely precious or cute, in this case they bring an added layer of feeling to a wondrous adult fairy-tale played out with impeccable cinematic control. “The Shape of Water” is a magical and moving experience.

Grade: A

Few films are going to divide viewers into hostile camps as much as Gus Van Sant’s “Gerry.” For some–probably the majority–the deceptively simple, almost preternaturally slow tale of two young men who get lost in the desert after straying from a wilderness trail will be as laborious to sit through as the journey appears to be for the characters. But for more adventurous filmgoers, those willing to surrender themselves to its lulling pace and visual poetry, it may well be an almost transcendent experience. I fall decisively into the latter category.

You should be able to tell where you’ll wind up from the opening sequence alone. To the spare, hypnotically beautiful chamber music of Arvo Part, the camera lingers on a beat-up car traveling along an otherwise deserted highway, cutting periodically to a two-shot of Gerry I and Gerry II (Casey Affleck and Matt Damon) as they’re carried along, their bodies swaying in unison to the rhythm of the road. If you find this sequence impossibly long and tedious, the whole film will probably strike you the same way. If, on the other hand, it mesmerizes you with its stark beauty and effortless grace, the remainder of the picture is likely to entrance you as well. Before too long, the two dudes leave the car behind and begin following the well-trod trail on foot, but shortly they decide to take an unmarked route and become hopelessly lost–a circumstance for which, without provisions, warm clothing or a compass, they’re completely unprepared. From here on the film consists mostly of a series of extended shots of the duo trudging ever more wearily across the forbidding landscape, desperately trying to locate a highway and help. Some of these scenes are visually amazing: one close-up of the pair marching side by side, their heads bobbing in synchronized motion for a time but then diverging, is a quiet commentary on how the guys are separating emotionally as their trek continues. The long, repetitive walking sequences are punctuated by occasional bursts of delicious, clearly improvised dialogue, in which the two Gerrys are revealed as fellows with adolescent mentalities absorbed in the ephemera of popular culture; a couple of these conversations are extremely funny–for example, a surrealistic near- monologue that Affleck delivers about a video game he played recently. There are also wonderfully absurdist interludes in which the film’s kinship to Samuel Beckett’s plays about the existential dilemma of modern man becomes most clear; the most notable example is a marvelous episode in which Affleck finds himself improbably stranded atop an isolated rock and Damon agrees to prepare what the duo ludicrously refer to as a “dirt mattress”–a phrase typical of the nonsensical jargon they regularly use–for him to jump on. (It ends with a simple special effect that’s far more effective than the elaborate ones found in the biggest Hollywood blockbusters.)

As “Gerry” reaches its final act, however, it becomes clear that it’s not merely a cinematic homage to Beckett’s distinctive one-acters. As one of the guys begs for release and the other reaches a hard decision (and his destination), the picture can be read as a story of maturation, the tale of a young man’s leaving childishness behind, though not without great pain and loss, and finally growing up–a point made in a poignant moment in which a survivor looks at the young boy in the car that’s picked him up as though he were seeing his former self. In hindsight, then, “Gerry” could be interpreted as depicting a metaphorical vision quest, in which a boy overcomes not nature but his weaker half.

Of course, that’s only one possible reading; the real wonder of Van Sant’s extraordinarily assured and masterfully executed film is that it throws open the door to extended discussion and debate. Its success owes a good deal to the gorgeous locales and Harris Savides’ magnificent cinematography as well as Part’s ghostly, ruminative score. But the picture is also a triumph for Affleck and Damon, whose deadpan delivery of the lines they’ve helped to craft is perfect and who look to have actually suffered the kind of misery the two Gerrys do as their story unfolds.

So viewers searching for something conventional and safe would be best advised to look elsewhere. But those willing to venture off the beaten cinematic path may find this visually dazzling, intellectually stimulating film a rare and wondrous discovery.