KINDS OF KINDNESS — CANNES 2024

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Theater of Cruelty

Yorgos Lanthamos Regresses

By Cole Smithey

Since going mainstream with the shockingly delightful "Poor Things," the heir-apparent to such Cinema heavyweights as Michael Haneke, Peter Greenaway, David Cronenberg, and David Lynch, serves up a half-baked mess.

Unintelligible.

Greek avant-garde filmmaker Yorgos Lanthamos re-teams with regular co-writer Efthimis Filippou to create a triptych of stories, each one more morose than the last.

It's the same poorly articulated breed of satire that hobbled other Lanthamos/Filippou projects — see, or rather don't see: "Dogtooth," "Alps," "The Lobster," and "The Killing of a Sacred Deer."

Here is feel-bad Cinema for the masses.

Pointless misery.

Eat up babies.

In "Kinds of Kindness," the viewer is left to their own devices to extrapolate on narcissist bosses, trigger-happy cops, group sex with friends, health cults, and, well yes, cannibalism. Rape and incest also get the Lanthamos spotlight.

If you are going to punish your audience, there ought to be a good reason for it. You will find no such purpose in "Kinds of Kindness" unless you are willing to put yourself through days of mental gymnastics.

The concept for the movie seems to spring from the Annie Lennox/Dave Stewart song "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)," that introduces the movie.

BDS&M misery.

It is telling that Lanthamos's most successful film "Poor Things" was written by other writers, namely Tony McNamara and Alasdair Gray.

Telling too, is Filippou's explanation of "Kinds of Kindness."

"Our main concern is to observe people, behaviors, clothes, and reactions and create a story that relates to something almost real and relatively believable."

How vague can you get?

I dare say that this particular approach will never lead to the narrative heights that David Lynch reached with "Blue Velvet" or "Mulholland Drive," much less Lars von Trier's challenging high-wire act.

Lanthamos flagrantly disregards one of Cinema's strongest precepts, namely that the filmmaker is responsible for sustaining an audience's trust. One reason that Alfred Hitchcock's movies are so good is due to the way Hitch treats his audience. You know that you are in capable hands.

If he were a doctor, Yorgos Lanthamos might, for example, want to amputate your thumb just to see your reaction. Fun for him perhaps, but not for you.

Rated R. 164 mins.ZERO STARS

POOR THINGS

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When I met Yorgos Lanthimos at the Fox Searchlight party for his film "The Favourite," I told him that I thought that film fell short of being as bawdy as it should have been, that he needed to lean into being much bawdier with his movies. Yorgos seems to have followed my advice.

Working from a novel by Scottish novelist Alasdair Gray, and with artistic input from the film's lead actress Emma Stone, Yorgos Lanthimos presents a captivating journey of self-discovery that necessarily involves sex, lots and lots of sex.

Oh how refreshing to see characters fucking, rather than shooting each other.

"Poor Things" coincides with Emerld Fennell's "Saltburn" in confronting Hollywood's gun-happy format with something considerably more grounded, namely the sex urge that drives people, and the social curiosity that comes along with it.

Rapturous in its outrageous designs, "Poor Things" is a wonder to behold and a balm for the soul.

Emma Stone is fearless. Willem Dafoe is exquisite, as he always is. Mark Ruffalo provides the comic timing.

Brilliant social satire arrives in spades with a movie that you may want to watch a few times, for obvious reasons.

The not-so-obvious reasons are good too.

Rated R. 141 mins.

STATE OF SIEGE — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

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Costa-Gavras is an exquisite leftist filmmaker because he is too much of a pragmatist to fall into idealistic traps of the left or the right.

His unique upbringing, as the son of a Pro-Soviet (Communist) Greek Resistance fighter in the Greek Civil War, meant that attending university in Greece or in the United States was out of the question.

France offered the perpetual outlier an education in law in 1951, that paved the way for a switch to film school and apprenticeships with directors Jean Giono and Rene Clair.

Celebrated in critical circles for his groundbreaking film “Z” (1969), Costa-Gavras made fresh tracks across the backs of America’s power-grabbing military pawns of capitalist exploitation (think The United Fruit Company) with “State of Siege.”

The efforts of the radical left are just as dimwitted as the vastly more effective methods of rightwing corporate raiders; the difference is that one has all the money and guns. Living by the sword always means dying by the same blade regardless of who is doing the carrying and who is doing the cutting.

Not Rated. 120 mins.