Yorgos Lanthimos' “Kinds of Kindness” will arrive digitally on August 27, that’s a little over three months after its theatrical debut. Good job, Searchlight.
The film seemed to have been met with a shrug by critics and audiences — 64 on Metacritic. The Daily Beast actually had a headline that read “Is 'Kinds of Kindness' Too Weird for Audiences to Handle?” Yes, “Poor Things” this is not.
The film premiered at Cannes, where Jesse Plemons won Best Actor. I reviewed and gave it a “B+” grade. Lanthimos’s unnerving, amusing and non-conformist film harkened back to his more old-school surreal work of the 2010s.
Set in an alternate reality where ultra-realism and fantasy co-exist, it’s an anthology composed of three short stories with the same actors playing different roles in each story. It helps that Lanthimos’ longtime screenwriting collaborator, Efthimis Filippo, teamed up with the Greek auteur for this one.
Lanthimos and Fillipo actually wrote the script around 10 years ago and finally decided to shoot it during post-production VFX work on “Poor Things.” Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe are all great here. It’s nowhere near Lanthimos’ best film, but well worth a look.
Back in 2021, Noah Baumbach signed a multi-year deal with Netflix that committed him to writing and directing several films for the streamer over the following years. He made two, and now he's gone.