Emma Stone

Bugonia

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Emma Stone with shaved head

A remake of Save the Green Planet!, a South Korean movie from 2003, Bugonia fiddles with details and genders but tells essentially the same story – conspiratorially minded eco-warriors kidnap a chemical industry boss convinced that there’s an alien invasion imminent and use torture to extract the vital details that will save planet Earth. Jang Joon-hwan made the original and was all lined up to direct this English-language remake but in the end Yorgos Lanthimos stepped in, bringing in his favourite actress, Emma Stone, to play one of the leads. Now the chemicals boss man is a biopharma boss lady, and the kidnappers are a boggle-eyed dude (Jesse Plemons) and his autistic cousin … Read more

Poor Things

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Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to The Favourite, is an act of restitution to Emma Stone, who was the best thing in that movie and yet lost out at awards’ time to Olivia Colman. Queens (as Colman was) trump upstarts. Stone does not lose out this time (in between writing and posting this, she has won the Best Actress Oscar). She is not just the focus of the movie but increasingly its purpose, once Lanthimos’s huge arm-sweep of influences and genres have bedded down. It’s Frankenstein meets Alice in Wonderland in a world styled by Jan Svankmajer and Jonathan Miller (both did Alice movies), Bertrand Bonello at his most decadantly fin-de-siecle (see House … Read more

Cruella

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Emma Stone as Cruella

Cruella, like Maleficent, gives a female baddie an origin story, and ends up in the same cul-de-sac, insisting that here is one of the female baddies for the ages, while at the same time asking us to sympathise with a poor Disney dear who’s been badly treated. 101 dogs’ breakfasts is the result. Since Emma Stone is one of the film’s producers (as is former Cruella De Vil Glenn Close, interestingly), she is partly to blame for this boring, messy film. Which is a pity because that wonky smile and arched eyebrow suit her magnificently for the role of Cruella, the girl born Estella who, after her mother is killed by Dalmatians, grows … Read more