Yorgos Lanthimos

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