For films by Del Toro, Pan's Labyrinth and Devil's Backbone, plus Cronos and The Orphanage, are his four most nearly perfect works, for me anyway. I love the way his films usually pair very old people with the very young, with a lot of strange machinery and startling - even alarming - mythological images along the way.

It's nice that he got such recognition for Shape Of Water, his most famous film, since that seems to have given him the freedom to pursue his own visions. However, I only watched Shape once, and found it to be kind of "Del Toro For Dummies." Just the most simplistic, almost silly reduction of a story to a few base elements. I would have liked it better if he'd gone all the way and really made a 21st century Creature From The Black Lagoon. Instead, it was just Beauty and the Beast, in drag and underwater ----