KINDS OF KINDNESS - Movie Review 

As much as I have been loving Yorgos getting such mainstream success I've been waiting for him to get back into something like Killing of a Sacred Deer.

It was for me lanthimos version of “French dispatch”. Where it’s lanthimos world and we’re all living in it. It’s so great to see a director who’s gone a “little mainstream” and all of us a little worried he was gonna go more mainstream but NOOOO kinds of kindness just takes that and ruins it in best of ways. Now even tho I love poor things…. The story is pretty straight forward (coming of age/ Frankenstein). But kinds of kindness …. OH MY GOD I LOVED THIS SO MUCH MORE. It’s a lanthimos cornucopia of his themes of control like in dogtooth, sex and love like in lobster and poor things, themes of supernatural (sacred deer). Sweet dreams are made of these

RIP Donald Sutherland -- a great, distinctive actor for every generation.

I love both "flavors" of Lanthimos, but I definitely have a soft spot for his more banal, absurd, subtly horrifying works. Killing of a Sacred Deer is my favorite. Looking forward to seeing what this ensemble brings to his strange cinematic landscape

Dogtooth is one of the movies that really stuck with me. A long term review of it would be fun... and taping a VHS cassette to your hand and beating someone is an algorithm approved thumbnail.

I LOVE your reviews! I saw this film last night and I am still processing everything I've seen. I wasn't expecting the episodic storytelling which was a pleasant surprise. I don't want to spoil anything but there was something that kept happening that made my audience laugh each time it did. I'm going to have to see this again to perhaps catch things I didn't on the first viewing. Kudos to the marketing (there was one poster I saw in particular) that gave subtle hints at what you're about to experience. I enjoyed the film and it somewhat reminded me of The Twilight Zone or some other beloved anthology series that are favorites of mine. I'm not sure I'd go to the theater to see it again though. I'd almost rather watch at home so I can rewind and hear certain parts of dialogue or see something shown again.

Hi. I just found this channel. You’re very thorough in your breakdown of films. Very informative. Great job. 👍

I love Plemmons look in the third part. that scene where he's sort of laughing at Emma Stone while he's eating cereal. lol

Appreciate the quick review on this one, looking forward to it!

In the second story flight, of RNF, plemons felt less like a Seymour Hoffman and more like a Matt Damon lol

I've found Lanthimos more abstract films (Killing of a Sacred Deer) difficult to warm up to. However, I really enjoyed The Favorite. I decided to give Kinds of Kindness a try at least partially because of your appreciation for his work. I went into the theater with a different attitude, basically accepting that I was entering an altered reality, that somehow relates to the everyday in a weirdly circuitous manner. It made a big difference! I enjoyed the film and found it provocative, evocative and subversive in small and large ways. I will be thinking about it for quite some time to come.

For me the film just flew by. I was really drawn into it. It surprises me that people who love it might also find it dragged a bit…

Saw it the other day I loved it !He's back with the screenwriter from B4 the Favourite and it shows.

Thank you for sharing again. I'm looking forward to this one. I particularly enjoyed The Lobster.

The new deepfocuslens pfp is great!

Hi lovely!! Anticipating this film and your review has made me feel that it will be well worth my time!!

Who needs to get up early for work when they can hear Maggie’s review! Just saw it tonight and I really liked it but I agree with you, he’s done this before and has done it better. It honestly just seems like he was trying to have fun with the actors

I love the Kemper analogy. You can always trust Lanthimos to examine the absurd with a touch of humor.

It felt like Yorgos hesitated between 3 different scripts & at the end he decided to toss them all together! Each story could make a great movie on its own. There's definitely many elements I greatly enjoyed, but somehow it felt this movie was made solely for the sake of being weird above anything else! I don't feel seeing this movie again, not any soon at least. Glad I could watch "Inside out" right after ..

I loved this movie sm!! Jesse Plemons is a treasure

This was just the kind of movie review I was looking for.

For me, it just came down to the characters. I couldn’t stand them! Every decision they made I kept screaming in my head “BUT WHY!!” It’s just not my cup of tea. I do agree that on a technical level this movie is extremely well made and put together. The use of color in the cinematography and each act having a different story is unique and different. And I can respect Lanthimos for taking big swings, but I just didn’t care for any of the characters at all.

I felt like this is a “Invasion of the Body snatchers”, remake or a new take on the “invasion/alien” genre as a whole. I can’t shake my finger at it, yet this feeling sticks with me.

There’s something about Lanthimos’ films that always seem to resonate with where I am in life when I’m watching them. I can’t decide if this is a coincidence or if the films have some kind of basic thread of humanity that is general enough that one can associate with it on some level when in its presence. Either way, I love both the polished and unpolished Yorgos styles. And I especially loved Plemons in this one, hoping that collaboration continues

Saw it at a screening last night i found it interesting. It didnt quite come together at times but i did enjoy this. Yorgos is quickly becoming one of my favourite directors right now.

I just saw this and I loved it. I'm still processing its themes but there are an interesting number of throughlines between the three stories. The aspect of eating, especially eating fish is a subtle but interesting detail I picked up on.

Funny thing about things like calculating the Reynolds Number. You obtain the result from observation, calculation and iteration. The beauty of bibliography & filmography studies is analogous in that the canon becomes illuminating with each observation in successive iterations. Like the Area X Trilogy compared alongside A Peculiar Peril.

This movie had me laughing so much. There's this perverted humor meets violent unconscious thing this movie has goin on, I thought it was really imaginative and interesting, like it taps into something in us a viewer that I've never quite felt before (other than maybe some of his other movies, althought I've never seen Dogtooth). For some reason this movie works for me despite, like you said, feeling unconnected between the stories. Definitely interested in diving in again for more viewings

I recently discovered the movie "Rover", with Guy Pearce and Robert Patteson (sic?) and can't stop watching it. It's a masterpiece in my view, and I don't say that often. I have watched quite a few of your reviews and wondered if you'd done a review for this one or would perhaps like to if not. I'd value your take and feedback on the film. Cheers.

Happy Criterion sale day ya'll!

Oh Lord! Girlfriend is smirking in the thumbnail. This gonna be good.

You should review Heaven’s Gate. It’s way better than Once Upon A Time In America. Severely under rated.

Unrelated, but you should do a video on previously reviewed films your opinion has changed on, for better or worse (if you haven't already).

I greatly enjoyed this movie, it seems moreso than most. The ending of the final segment was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while

Hope you review Long Legs soon ❤

Maybe its the more comedic tone and saturated look but I enjoyed these more bite sized depictions of lack of control than sacred deer (which I loved). This had a very playful tone with so many great stand out moments. The first two stories I genuinely loved, and the third was starting to test my patience, but had a good payoff

I was surprised you didn’t mention that this film is Lanthimos returning to his writing partnership with Efthimis Filippou, who wrote Dogtooth, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Lanthimos gets all the attention but it’s clear that Filippou is the senior creative partner and the themes are incredibly close to those earlier films. Even the low-budget style is reminiscent of Dogtooth - here it looks like they shot on film with vintage anamorphic lenses, but the lighting looked minimal. It seemed like three Filippou stories strung together to me - not a major film, but definitely a singular voice.

Was able to see this today, absolutely loved it especially the second story I loved how weird the ending was

I just saw Poor Things. It was amazing. But still my favorite of his is the Lobster. I thought it was perfect.

While I didn't care for its third act, I thought The Lobster was a fantastic concept and although he may not have originated it, Lanthimos did a great interpretation of the story.

2:00 i wish they had mentioned this story in Mindhunter

it's very impressive how correctly you pronounce his name, like being Greek! 🙏 Probably his best movie but not for all.

Some die hard aficionados might be familiar with this situation. They slid the paper, at the end of totally stretched fingers, over the tabletop back to me, and uttered with visible shakes of the head, no, no, we've asked to write a list of your top five films, films in general. This, however, is only a list of Lanthimos films.

RIP Donald Sutherland -- WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!! (pointing finger at you)

you rock.

I have more interest in this than Poor Things (still haven’t seen that one) but WHY did Lanthimos have to make it so lengthy? Why can’t directors give us a concise story anymore, something light but hard-hitting w/o the uncomfortable feeling we’re wasting an entire afternoon watching?

NC I THOUGHT ITS GONNA BE FULL POSITIVE RAINBOW AND SUNSHINE MOVIE BASED ON NAME BEFORE WATCHING PART OF UR REVIEW (DONT WANNA WATCH TOO MUCH BEFORE WATCHING THE MOVIE) IM GLAD I WAS WRONG, GONNA WATCH IT AFTER I HEARD ITS ABOUT KILLER OR HAS KILLER IN IT XD GONNA BE FUNNY IG

finally, a lady review! so far listened to ten white middle aged guys talking about it, refreshing to have a different take.

i wanna go watch it but im hesitant lol

Saw it today, but I walked out in the second act. I knew nothing about it but I enjoyed Poor Things so was curious and excited by the cast. I thought I might be a fan of this filmmaker, but I fear I am mistaken. I might of enjoyed the third act but when things got gruesome I decided I had seen enough.

I’m going to get you a chair and a table for Christmas😉

It's called bodysnatching, or, be the people you want to be.

This goes into the group of movies with Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer that I just didn’t get. I need to watch all three of these again at some point. No pun intended but The Favourite is still my favorite!

The Lobster really stokes the fire of flying zombie sheep, and well yeah sacred deer fuzzy belly feeling......this new film, welfare driven boxed housing projects......please.... 🕊️

I'm scarred for the rest of my life.

Great review, as always, thanks Maggie. I can confidently say I will NEVER watch this film. Glad it exists for those who like this sort of thing, but it’s a hard pass for me.

Please review Ship of Theseus. It is a very philosophical movie about the meaning of life. It is available free on RU-vid.

I’m giving up on lathimos .. it’s like watching paint dry .. in all his films .. total self indulgence and definitely not art

The Lobster did nothing for me. 2-3 viewings.

Wahey!

Act 1: 🤔 Act 2: 🥱 Act 3: 😴

This movie describes the world we live in now pointless and dangerous doesn’t make sense but shit happens saw it in New York City

I saw the movie today. It's very weird - I liked it, sort of. Some of it was gross.

I'm passing on this one. I didn't love The Lobster and Poor Things I enjoyed as I was watching it, but it went bad in my guts afterward the longer I sat with it. It looked and sounded great and I liked a lot of the performances, but the lead was basically a Mary Sue, the woman finding her agency through whoredom was shopworn even before the 70s ended and the whiffs of queer theory grew to an unbearable stench the longer I sat with it. (QT is an ideology I despise, especially as a same sex attracted person - the QT version of liberation just looks like predation and exploitation to me, and it lends an unsavory overtone to what's otherwise a good scene, where the Madame sells her on the necessity of degradation as part of her experiential development.) There are also way better treatments of the Marxism/prostitution intersection (Seijun Suzuki's visually splashy, tone-shifting occupation drama Gate of Flesh, where the starving prostitutes go to work with The Internationale playing in Japanese on the soundtrack, running to stuff their faces at the nearest food stand as soon as they get paid - there's also a great scene where the democracy vs. feudalism debate is played out by hookers fighting over territory). My tolerance for presentations of Marxism as a benign ideology is pretty much dead. I realize it's little more than mentioned in the film, but it was way too cute. If you're going to raise the subject, TREAT it (honestly). I feel like we're in a place culturally where these things can't just be given a pass anymore. In the mid-2020s they demand to be addressed and challenged. Nagisa Oshima is one of the three filmmakers I rank as "saints" in terms of his artistic import next to Bunuel and Dreyer, and the older I get the more I struggle with his politics, though I can't deny his genius (miles above Goddard, imo, though he lived in his shadow critically), there is a powerful moral/critical sense and very emotional humanity to his work that I have to hang on to when I hear him lionizing a monster like Che Guevara, for instance. That murderous ideology should have been left in the 20th century with all the other murderous ideologies, and it's not the 60s anymore. I can't just look at it and think "Oh, Marxist prostitutes, how witty." I can't accept films that raise these awful ideas as a wink to the woke and refuse to grapple with them - leaving ME to do all the grappling on my own later. It's also not lost on me that Poor Things was a DL success for DISNEY in a year when their mouse-branded fare was failing left and right because of all the TQ+ tainted messaging aimed at children that's now driving their product. In light of that, Poor Things seems like a natural for a Disney green light. It made the idea of the adult woman made irresistibly sexy by giving her an infant's brain even LESS palatable. I'm not against treating that, but Poor Things DIDN'T actually treat it, and that has nagged at me since i left the theater. I have a nasty gut feeling Poor Things 2 would make her even MORE sexy by removing her arms and legs, and that kind of perversity would appeal to me in the hands of the right filmmaker, but I'm pretty sure that's not Lanthimos based on what I've seen. I might still give Killing of a Sacred Deer a chance (I'm on the fence), but I honestly probably won't. These are my kind of film on paper, but so far I'm having a lot of trouble with them because there are too many things that just get raised and not dealt with, and it's not like a filmmaker who reserves judgment on difficult ideas to challenge us, it feels more like stuff that just supposed to go by UNchallenged because I'm presumably on board with the assumptions of the age we live in. It makes me feel like an outsider, and not in a satisfying way. Maybe I haven't seen enough. Maybe I'm way off base. I don't know if I'm interested enough in this filmmaker to find out.

I agree with you that it was ultimately disappointing.

I thought Kinds of Kindness was a bit of a disappointment from a direction standpoint because it didn’t have much that was flashy. Then when I went straight into Quiet Place Day One, I realized just how much Lanthimos’s work with his actors did for the film. I like Margaret Qualley, but she should not be outperforming Lupita Nyong’o in the way she did comparing the two movies. Still not Lanthimos’s most exciting film, but average Lanthimos is still 8/10, likely top ten of the year for me.

Emma Stone is such a fantastic next level actress and so damn charismatic. You cannot go wrong with her!

Hated this movie not gonna lie

Nah this is just empty, pretentious garbage. Just cause Lanthimos is a talented guy and has made some good films, that doesn't mean he can throw any random thing up on screen and have it proclaimed genius.

This was the worst 2 hours and 45 minutes of my life. One of the happiest moments of my life was when it ended.

Le garçon et le héron ?

Are we forgetting that ba woman was shamed and ostracized for being date raped? .... And people are just ... Ah gosh.

.

Absolute waste of time

This might be one of the worst movies i have seen lol and i did like PT and the Favourite but this is just a collage of cruelty for the sake of cruelty and edgy for the sake of edgy.

Absolutely terrible. Loved the Lobster, but this is just so boring

A serial killer anecdote? Highly innapropriate. Also it would be "infamous" not famous.

Why exactly did Emma join the sex cult in the first place? Like this movie is so poorly written.

sorry, kinds of kindness sucks ass big time

It sucked