Tag: Yorgos Lanthimos

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Now Playing July 12-18: Nic Cage Kills

Maika Monroe wonders what it all means in Longlegs. (Courtesy Neon)

Looks like a busy weekend at the movies — which is good, because it’s gonna be a hot one.

Longlegs

The great Nicholas Cage stars as a serial killer motivated by his devotion to Satan. Maika Monroe (of It Follows fame) is Lee Harker, an FBI agent assigned to catch him. Blair Underwood (of Krush Groove fame) is her partner, and Alicia Witt (of Dune and Twin Peaks fame) is her mom. Writer/director Osgood Perkins is not super famous yet, but his dad is Anthony Perkins of Psycho fame. 

Fly Me To The Moon 

Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum star as NASA’s PR director and launch director for the Apollo 11 mission. His job is to get the astronauts to the moon. Her job is to fake the moon landing if the astronauts fail. This film probably sounded like a good idea at the time. 

MaXXXine

Ti West and Mia Goth’s trilogy of twentieth century terror concludes with a slam-bang finale. Read my full review.

A Quiet Place: Day One

Lupita Nyong’o leads this hit prequel to 2018’s alien invasion movie. She plays Sam, a terminally ill cancer patient who witnesses the silent alien invasion in New York City. Can Sam and her cat Frodo survive the mass slaughter? Djimon Housou reprises his role as Henri from A Quiet Place Part II. 

Despicable Me 4

You know those oval yellow Minons your batty aunty and drunk uncle are always sharing memes about? They’re from the Despicable Me franchise. And guess what? They made another one!

Kinds of Kindness

Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone follow the Academy Award-winning Poor Things with a triptych of stories about debasing yourself for the benefit of others. Read my full review.

Inside Out 2

The movie of the summer is all about anxiety, and it couldn’t be more timely. Amy Poehler reprises her voice role as Joy, whose hold on the mind of her 13-year-old charge Riley (Kensington Tallman) is jarred loose by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), just a a pivotal hockey game threatens her self image.  

The Bikeriders

Director Jeff Nichols’ gritty portrait of Midwestern biker gangs stars Austin Butler and Tom Hardy looking mighty manly. Read my full review.

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Kinds of Kindness

More than 20 years into his filmmaking career, we know what to expect from a Yorgos Lanthimos movie. There will probably be a cultish organization, with strange practices and unclear motives. The dialogue will sound simplistic on the surface, but conceal deeper meaning. The sex will be weird. There will be mutilation, often self-inflicted. Someone will get licked. Emma Stone will do a little dance. 

And yet, Lanthimos’ films are always surprising. Even if you’ve seen everything he’s done, from his 2001 Greek debut My Best Friend to his 2009 breakthrough Dogtooth to last year’s masterpiece Poor Things, you’ll probably have no idea what will happen next when you watch Kinds of Kindness. 

Lanthimos’ latest reunites key members of the Poor Things cast: Emma Stone, who won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Bella Baxter, the dead woman brought back to life after having the brain of her unborn child implanted in her skull, and Willem Dafoe, the mad scientist who did the deed. Joining them is Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, and Mamoudou Athie. Kinds of Kindness is divided into three parts: Each segment is its own isolated story, with the actors playing completely different characters. In “The Death of R.M.F.,” Plemons plays Robert, a corporate executive whose boss Raymond (Dafoe) issues daily memos which control every aspect of his life. When Robert is ordered to deliberately crash his car, he balks, and Raymond cuts him off. Unsure of what to do with his sudden freedom, Robert flails wildly. 

In “R.M.F. Is Flying,” Plemons plays Daniel, a police officer whose wife Liz (Stone) is missing at sea. His partner Neil (Athie) tries to keep Daniel on track, but when Liz is rescued, his insanity only deepens. 

In “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” Stone and Plemons play Emily
and Andrew, a pair of cultists whose leaders Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau) have issued a prophecy about a woman with the ability to bring people back from the dead. It’s Emily and Andrew’s job to find her. 

Kinds of Kindness delves into three isolated stories, with Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and more playing different characters throughout.

Kinds of Kindness’ three segments may not have common characters, but they do have common themes. In each story, someone is rejected, either from a group or by an individual, and takes drastic action to try to get back into the fold. An obsession with control — who wields it, who is subject to it, who needs it — winds its way through the three stories. Stone, who has emerged as one of the best actresses of her generation, remains Lanthimos’ muse. Her three characters couldn’t be more different, and she is brilliant in all three roles. In the third segment, she even tries her hand at stunt driving. 

Plemons’ talent shines throughout the film. In the first segment, his disorientation at having to make his own decisions after a decade of Dafoe dictating his every move is at first hilarious, then poignant, then horrifying. In “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” his vulnerability as a grieving husband gives way to a steely, destructive determination. 

Dafoe, the consummate pro, works wonders with Lanthimos and co-writer Efthimis Filippou’s often difficult material. In the hands of lesser actors, these stories might come off as silly. Filippou also co-wrote The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which means Kinds of Kindness is a different flavor from the visual extravagance of Poor Things. Instead of the fantastical steampunk cities of an alternate Europe, Kinds of Kindness was filmed on location in New Orleans. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan brings out the Crescent City’s threatening, surreal side. 

As with all of Lanthimos’ films, this isn’t for everyone. But if you’re already on board with his unique, often disturbing world view, you will find Kinds of Kindness ranks with the director’s best work. 

Kinds of Kindness is now playing at Studio on the Square and Collierville Cinema Grill & MXT.

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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing June 28-July 4: Kindness, Quiet, and Hindu Gods

Best Actress winner Emma Stone stars in Yorgos Lanthimos' Kinds of Kindness. (Courtesy Searchlight Pictures)

There’s plenty of great stuff on the big screen in Memphis, so quit doomscrolling and go see a movie this weekend.

Kinds of Kindness

Best Actress winner Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and director Yorgos Lanthimos reunite for another absurdist comedy after the triumph of 2023’s Poor Things. They are joined by Jesse Plemons (whose performance earned him a Best Actor nod at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival), Margaret Qualley, and Hong Chau for a triptych of intertwined stories about love, death, and healing. 

A Quiet Place: Day One

The third film in the series goes back to the beginning, which is the end of civilization. Blind space monsters with extremely sensitive hearing land on Earth and start eating up all the tasty people. That’s not so yummy for Lupita Nyong’o, a New Yorker who witnesses the invasion, and must escape very quietly. But don’t worry, she’s got a plan.

Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1

Kevin Costner directs Kevin Costner in this epic tale — a saga if you will — of American expansion in the West during the pre- and post-Civil War period. Expect horses, hats, and guns from this highly punctuated title. 

Inside Out 2

This brilliant sequel is the biggest box office hit of the year. Head emotion Joy (Amy Poehler) must keep her human Riley (Kensington Tallman) on track as the ravages of puberty take hold, and a new emotion named Anxiety (Maya Hawke) arrives at headquarters. Beautifully animated with stealthily profound screenplay, Inside Out 2 is a must-see. (Read my full review, which, spoiler alert, borders on the rapturous.)

Kalki 2898 AD

Malco has been getting a lot of Indian movies over the last couple of years. This one promises to be different. It’s not a Bollywood song-and-dance film, as much as we love them. Kalki 2898 is the most expensive film ever made in India, weighing in at an impressive $6 billion rupees (approximately $72 million). It’s a sci fi epic inspired by Hindu mythology which is intended to kick off a Marvel-style cinematic universe. And it looks pretty cool.

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Poor Things

Emma Stone turns in a career performance as Bella in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things.

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, is regarded as the first true science-fiction novel. Shelley’s themes and tropes have echoed for more than two centuries: The brilliant scientist is so consumed by the intellectual challenge of discovery that he doesn’t consider the costs; the question of what, exactly, it means to be “human”; and even Stan Lee’s mantra, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Recent readings have emphasized Shelley’s personal life to explain its unsettling tone. The story’s mixture of horror and fascination with the creation of new life came from an author whose mother had died in childbirth and who personally had multiple miscarriages, and buried two babies before their third birthday.

In Shelley’s original novel, the Creature is not the hulking figure with an abnormal brain and limited vocabulary, familiar from the Universal horror films. He is intelligent enough to recognize his own monstrosity, and cunning enough to plot complex revenge on his creator. The novel’s middle passage, told from the Creature’s POV, presents a critique of humanity’s hypocrisies from an outsider’s perspective.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things remixes the Frankenstein elements to foreground the outsider perspective, with spectacular results. Emma Stone stars as Bella, whom we meet as she is throwing herself off a bridge. Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is a Frankenstein-esque surgeon who carries the scars of his own father’s brutal experiments on his face. He finds Bella’s body in the river while it’s still warm — and discovers the fetus she is carrying in her womb is still viable. He repairs her lightly damaged body and implants the baby’s brain in her skull. When he reanimates her with “galvanic energy,” she awakens an infant’s mind in an adult’s body.

Dr. Baxter locks his subject in his stately mansion, both to keep her secret from the torch-and-pitchfork crowd who can’t understand his genius and to control this grand experiment into the nature of humanity. He hires one of his most gifted medical students Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to record Bella’s every move and chart her development. But Baxter (or “God” as Bella calls him) can’t keep her a secret forever, and she attracts the attention of his attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) right around the time she discovers sex — or as she calls it, “furious jumping.”

Baxter knows he can no longer stop her from experiencing the world, so he grudgingly consents to Bella running off with the worldly attorney. They embark on a comedically debauched tour of a steampunk version of Victorian Europe, where dirigibles roam the skies and architecture runs amok. Bella continues the pattern of outgrowing one mentor after another as she tries to forge her own identity and correct the wrongs of the world.

Stone’s always been a trouper, but she is absolutely fearless as Bella. In a career-high performance, she finesses Bella’s growth from peeing on the floor to debating philosophy, progressing ever so slightly from one scene to the next until she’s the one performing experimental surgery. It’s an extreme performance, but Lanthimos directs everyone around her so big, Bella seems like the most grounded person on screen. Ruffalo looks like he’s having the time of his life as the rakish Wedderburn, who awakens something in Bella no one can control. Dafoe is so matter-of-fact in his deranged sociopathy that you find yourself instinctively nodding along to even his most outrageous pronouncements. Kathryn Hunter, who stole the show as the witches in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, slithers and shines as a brothel madam who takes Bella under her tattooed wing.

With a visual palette wild enough to match the story’s shenanigans, Lanthimos has created a fresh and daring film about what it means to be both a human and a woman. As Bella searches for answers about existence, her crazy world starts to feel awfully familiar.

Poor Things
Playing at Malco Theatre locations beginning December 22nd

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Film Features Film/TV

2018: The Year In Film

If there is a common theme among the best films of 2018, it’s wrenching order from chaos. From Regina Hall trying to hold both a restaurant and a marriage together to Lakeith Stanfield navigating the surreal moral minefields of late-stage capitalism, the best heroes positioned themselves as the last sane people in a world gone mad.

Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades Freed

Worst Picture: Fifty Shades Freed

In her epic deconstruction of the final installment of everyone’s least favorite BDSM erotica trilogy, Eileen Townsend called Fifty Shades Freed a “sequence of intentionally crafted visual stimuli” that “bears coincidental aesthetic similarity to a movie … But I believe Fifty Shades Freed is nonetheless not a movie at all, but something far more pure — a pristine document of the market economy, a kind of visual after-image created as an incidental side effect of the exchange of large sums of capital…We literally cannot perceive the truest form of Fifty Shades Freed, because to do so, we would have to be money ourselves.”

Sunrise over the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Best Moviegoing Experience: 2001: A Space Odyssey in IMAX

The Malco Paradiso’s IMAX screen, which opened last December, has quickly earned the reputation as the best theater in the city. During the late-summer lull, a new digital transfer of 2001: A Space Odyssey got a week’s run to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Even if you’ve watched Stanley Kubrick’s film a dozen times, seeing it the size it was intended to be seen is a revelation. Also, all lengthy blockbusters should come with an intermission.

Chuck, the canine star of Alpha

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Chuck, Alpha

Director Albert Hughes’ Alpha is a sleeper gem of 2018. The star of the story of how humans first domesticated dogs is a Czech Wolfhound named Chuck, who dominates the screen with a Lassie-level performance. Chuck and his co-star, Kodi Smit-McPhee, spend large parts of the movie silently navigating the hazards of Paleolithic Eurasia, and the dog nails both stunts and the occasional comedy bits. Chuck is a movie star.

KiKi Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk

Best Scene: The Family Meeting, If Beale Street Could Talk

Most of Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel is an intimate, tragic love story between Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne) and Fonny Hunt (Stephan James). But for about 10 minutes, it becomes an ensemble dramedy, when Tish has to tell, first, her parents that she’s pregnant out of wedlock with a man who has just been arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, then his parents. If you pulled this scene out of the film, it would be the best short of 2018.

Rukus

Best Memphis Movie: Rukus

Brett Hanover’s documentary hybrid had been in production for more than a decade by the time it made its Mid South debut at Indie Memphis 2018. What started as a tribute to a friend who had committed suicide slowly evolved into a mystery story, an exploration into a secretive subculture, and a diary of growing up and accepting yourself.

Ethan Hawk stars as a priest in existential crisis in First Reformed.

Best Screenplay: First Reformed

Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader penned and directed this piercing drama about a small town priest, played by Ethan Hawk, who undergoes a crisis of faith when a man he is counseling commits suicide. 72-year-old Schrader is unafraid to ask the big questions: Why are we here? Is it all worth it? His elegantly constructed story ultimately looks to love for the answers, but the journey there is harrowing.

Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger in Black Panther

MVP: Michael B. Jordan

Michael B. Jordan played a book-burning fireman with a conscience in HBO’s Fahrenheit 451 adaptation and the heavyweight champion of the world in Creed II. But it was his turn as Killmonger in Black Panther that elevated the year’s biggest hit film to the realm of greatness. Director Ryan Coogler knew what he was doing when he put his frequent collaborator in the the villain slot opposite Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa, making their personal rivalry into a battle for the soul of Wakanda.

Regina Hall in Support The Girls

Best Performance: (tie) Regina Hall, Support the Girls and Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade

In a year full of great performances, two really stood out. In Support the Girls, Regina Hall plays Lisa, a breastaurant manager having the worst day of her life, with a breathtaking combination of technique and empathy. We agonize with her over every difficult decision she has to make just to get through the day.

Elsie Fisher as Kayla in Eighth Grade

Elsie Fisher started work on Eighth Grade the week after the 13-year-old actually finished eighth grade. She carries the movie with one of the most raw, unaffected comic performances you will ever see.

Emma Stone takes aim in The Favourite.

Best Director: Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ previous efforts has been bracing, self-written satires, but he really came into his own with this kinda true story written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara. Everything clicks neatly into place in The Favourite. The central troika of Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz as backstabbing cousins vying for her favor are all stunning. The editing, sound mix, and costume design are superb, and I’ve been thinking about the meaning of a particular lens choice for weeks.

Daniel Tiger (left) and Fred Rogers, star of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood

Best Documentary: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Once in a while, a movie comes along that fills a hole in your heart you didn’t know you had. Morgan Neville’s biography of Fred Rogers appears as effortlessly pure as the man himself. Mr. Rogers’ radical compassion is the exact opposite of Donald Trump’s performative cruelty, and Neville frames his subject as a kind of national surrogate father figure, urging us to remember the better angels of our nature.

Sorry To Bother You

Best Picture: Sorry to Bother You

Boots Riley’s debut film is something of a bookend to my best picture choice from last year, Jordan Peele’s Get Out. They’re both absurdist social satires aimed at American racism set in a slightly skewed version of the real word. But where Get Out is a finely tuned scare machine, Sorry to Bother You is a street riot of ideas and images. When his vision occasionally outruns his reach, Riley pulls it off through sheer audacity. No one better captured the Kafkaesque chaos, anger, and confusion of living in 2018.

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The Lobster

Tired of the superhero grind? Ready for something weird? Never fear, The Lobster is here!

No, The Lobster is not an obscure X-Man—although maybe Marvel should look into it. It’s Colin Farrell, and when this dark, surreal comedy begins, he’s not a lobster yet. He’s just a sad, recently single guy named David checking into a hotel. But it’s quickly apparent that this hotel has some special features. For one thing, there’s a rifle that shoots tranquilizer darts hung over the bed. For another, everyone in the hotel is single like David, and they’re all varying degrees of sad about it, because if they can’t find a mate in 45 days, a strange fate awaits. But, as the Hotel Manager (Olivia Colman) says, “The fact that you will be transformed into an animal should not alarm you.”

But at least they get to choose what kind of animal their undatable selves will be transformed into. Most people choose to become dogs, but David wants to be a lobster, because, he says, they can live for a hundred years. His choice earns him a compliment from the Hotel Manager, who like most of the cast assembled by director Yorgos Lanthimos, is an expert at the particularly British art of getting a laugh by saying emotionally charged things in a detached deadpan.

Rachel Weisz and Colin Farrell aren’t monkeying around with love in Lanthimos’ The Lobster.

As if being forced to look for a life partner in a room full of identically dressed, frumpy people dancing to the universe’s worst party band isn’t bad enough, there’s the matter of the tranq dart guns. It turns out, checking into the Hotel is not voluntary. All citizens of The City without a husband or wife are sent there to face the mating ultimatum. Naturally, some run, choosing life in the woods as radical singles. The Hotel’s denizens are led into the woods on periodic hunting parties to track down and tranquilize fugitive singles, who are then dragged back to the Hotel for animalization. Bag a single, and you get an extra day added onto your stay at the Hotel. Some people, like the Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia) have extended their lives indefinitely by becoming ruthless players of the Most Dangerous Game.

Lanthimos’ strange creation sets a similarly dark, humorous tone as Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece Brazil. But lacking Gilliam’s extravagant budget, his absurdities are more grounded in the familiar. There’s a lot going on underneath the surface of The Lobster. As it was unfolding, I began to take it as an allegory for the age of internet romance: Social norms that used to be enforced invisibly are now formalized when everyone is forced into the same online arenas to meet people they might be attracted to. Not that the old system of meeting random people in bars produced any better outcomes, but at least it was unmediated by invisible tech companies whose motives we are pretty sure don’t align with our own. David is constantly being pulled by opposing forces which cannot be reconciled, no matter how he tries to adapt. When he’s in the hotel, he tries to connect with the Heartless Woman, because he has to hook up with somebody. Later, when he’s fled to the woods, he meets his soul mate (Rachel Weisz), but they have to go to hilarious lengths to keep their love secret from the radical individualists of the forest.

To call Lanthimos’ film “quirky” is a dramatic understatement. The Lobster is that rare idiosyncratic film that remains emotionally accessible, largely thanks to a carefully honed lead performance by Farrell and some timely help from John C. Reilly as another hopeless schlub on the fast track to dog town. In a summer where theaters are plagued by Batman Poisoning, The Lobster is a suitable antidote.