Paddington 2 (2017)

This time the Peruvian marmalade-loving bear gets himself in a tangle trying to make enough money to buy his aunt a book for her birthday, even ending up in prison charged with Hugh Grant's memorable villain's theft of said book, but because Paddington looks for the good in everyone, by the end of the movie he has enchanted the whole of Windsor Gardens, Notting Hill, a veritable Who's Who of the British screen playing among others Knuckles the prison cook and Dr Jafri and prison guards and inmates and newspaper stallholders and shut-ins - and of course the Brown family - who rally behind Paddington and help him with spectacularly animated, frequently hilarious, slightly overlong but ultimately extremely touching adventures.

★★★★☆

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The Shape of Water (2017)

Director Guillermo del Toro works hard to defy genre conventions in his The Shape Of Water, a thirteen-times Oscar-nominated movie that the world went crazy for and, seriously, you are all bats**t crazy because the movie's moments of Quentin Tarantino-esque violence, Spielberg (E.T.) fantasy, cloying Amelie romance, Hidden Figures social commentary, and bad taste Peeping Tom voyeurism involving nudity, masturbation and interspecies sex are meaningless flourishes in what is, most consistently, a stultifying ham-fisted fairytale pantomime like a 'Walt Disney's Splash On Ice' that dramatically flatlines after ten minutes.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Paddington (2014)

The accident-prone marmalade-loving bear from darkest Peru is rendered in 3D in this big budget, entertaining and frequently very funny film adaptation of the beloved English children's books by Michael Bond.  

★★★★☆

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