Tag: Yorgos Lanthimos

Film Review: “Poor Things”

Poor Things dives headfirst into a strange, beautiful, and horny world

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has divided audiences as long as he’s been making movies. To help you resurface some opinionated rage and confusion, or delight,  his films include Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and The Favourite. His films bend surrealism together with absurdism, glittered with idiosyncratic dialogue and characters. They also don’t shy away from weirdness and sex, or weird sex, even. Lanthimos implores you to face brutal honesty and vulnerability, and Poor Things is no different. Cradled within a vibrantly designed world in which to explore themes of sexual freedom and liberation, Poor Things is a masterpiece of creative ambitions.

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Film Feature: Carrie and Chris Pick the 2019 Oscars

Film critics Carrie and Chris on who will – and who should – win the 91st Academy Awards

The 91st Academy Awards air this Sunday, February 24th, on ABC at 5:00 pm PST (with the requisite pre-show fashion assessments starting hours before). As they did last year, Spinning Platters film critics Carrie Kahn and Chris Piper share their predictions – and hopes – for the major categories.  Guild awards – often harbingers of Oscars to come – have been all over the map this year, so there may actually be some genuine surprises. Tune in on Sunday to see how things play out, and to find out if we correctly read the minds of Academy voters.

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Film Review: The Lobster

An utterly unique (surrealist) romantic comedy that inadvertently subverts all other romantic comedies.

Name the defining characteristic of each of these three.
Name the defining characteristic of each of these three.

To all you single folks — do you feel the pressure of finding a partner? Well, imagine that you have 45 days to do so otherwise you’ll be turned into an animal. How’s that for pressure? That’s the boiled-down premise of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster, a fascinatingly bizarre and dark dramedy romance (you could say it transcends multiple genres). Of course, there’s a lot more to The Lobster than just the 45 day ultimatum tidbit. The film eschews most everything that remotely resembles normal storytelling yet manages to convey a uniquely human story within its dystopian setting. The Lobster is a sharp satirical look at the oppressive nature of our societal coupledom, maintaining a steady level of surrealist humor even as it descends into darker and darker territory and an appropriately uneven finish.

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