Sortes de gentillesse

Weird, awkward, oldschool Lanthimos is back! His latest movies were extremely commercial, and now he's back to his roots with this low budget anthology of a movie. Three extremely crazy episodes that feel like Black Mirror episodes, "Kinds of Kindness" is a movie that explores human relationships with a significant other, with a boss and employer, different power dynamics of each relationship and the power that sex has in our lives and in the formation of our relationships. It's an absurd movie, very weird, and you vibe along with it realising that nothing is gonna ever make total sense and that's fine. I liked it a lot but it surely is not meant for a wide audience.

Kinds of Kindness is divided into three stories with the same cast. A high level of absurdity and unpredictability mixed with some mystery make for a funny quirky thriller at first. Jesse Plemons excels at making this quirkiness work to the benefit of the movie.

Then the first chapter ends and turns into the second, shuffling things around, which already begins to demand some tolerance and patience from the viewer. Random things are inserted for shock value that amuse at first but then become to seem pretentious.

By the third chapter, the movie has overindulged in random ideas that are appear intended to impress without clear direction. At this point it's just absurdity for the sake of absurdity, which comes across as an underestimation of the critical viewer.

All in all, I enjoyed the first part, and think Plemons did great, but ultimately believe we could've picked a better movie, and intend to stay away from films by this particular director in the future.

This feels like the summer movie for lanthimos' fans 😂

Good piece of art, not at the level of poor things IMHO, but still very interesting. Honestly I felt like with poor things some reviews were searching too much into a "positive ending" or a woman empowerment change... While poor things also had some very dark moments almost like a parody... Well, here we have the usual lanthimos... The one who tends to give us the worst of humanity 😂

I still need to reflect a bit, especially on the 2nd story, but yeah, definitely great dry humour movie. Oh and some scenes will make people talk ... :) This is a funny movie but it's also very harsh

Emma (or Emily 😄) and Jesse and Willem are brilliant as always.

It was 3 hours of nonsense that could've been cut down into a Netflix short, although it was more watchable when it didn't take itself so seriously and had more humour like in the first segment. Emma Stone sank the whole thing in the final 2 hours.

The movie works when it's approaching the surrealism of a Buñuel film, e.g. Exterminating Angel, but then in the final couple segments it devolved into long scenes of Emma Stone randomly talking to people about dogs on an island, or trying to raise the dead, with stiff line delivery.

The director punctuates the boredom with random acts of violence, orgies, nudity, and animal abuse.

It was at the 2 hour mark where I wondered if this is really what the Hollywood elite does on their off-time, and they made a home movie about their debauchery as a tax write-off for Fox Searchlight. We did get to see a very nice yacht and some houses that probably belonged to one of the producers.

The real Yorgos Lanthimos seen in films like The Lobster returns to leave us completely disheveled in a film disguised as a miniseries composed of three parts, which contain different stories, but are equally raw, dark, bizarre and confusing. Maybe too much. If you don't share the same sense of black humor as the Greek filmmaker, you'll have a hard time getting into these stories. Even more so now that Lanthimos fills us with sequences that may well be metaphors, crude satires and exhibitions of the weakest human being in the face of another full of power.

The script is risky, it's arrogant, petulant, narcissistic and dangerously funny. Now, if we abandon the truth of objectivity to go to the path of subjectivity, I didn't like the plots at all. It looks at you with unnecessary superiority over its shoulder, leaving you confused and disgusted.

It's undeniable that the film is well made, because the technical aspects are spectacular. It has wonderful photography despite how simplistic the film turns out to be. The soundtrack is disturbing and makes us undo the button on our shirt collar. The directing and editing are also wonderful. But the story itself leaves me with a taste in my mouth that is more bitter than sweet.

I will pay close attention to the rest of the reviews, because I'm very curious about the reaction of others to this strange work.