Metacritic reviews

The Favourite has ribaldry and intelligence to burn, a deliciously entertaining period piece that feels liberated by its period, rather than restrained and invigorates like a glass of wine thrown violently in your face.

[Yorgos Lanthimos'] fabulously entertaining tragicomedy, The Favourite, is a juicy power tangle connecting three women in the royal court of early 18th-century England, played by a divine trio who bounce off one another with obvious relish.

The Favourite is one of those rare films where the energy generated by three talents at the top of their game and the energy generated by their characters swirl and merge in a perfect storm.

Endlessly quotable and serendipitously timely — all the more so considering the whole project was conceived nine years ago — The Favourite is a zany, piercing close-up on three women so replete with swagger as to reduce their male counterparts to disposable extras.

Lanthimos wants us to examine the different reasons we grasp at power — avarice, self-preservation, even fear — and better understand its corrosive effects.

It’s a perfectly cut diamond of a movie — a finely executed, coldly entertaining entry in the genre of savage misanthropic baroque costume drama.

The Favourite is a wicked delight, a fantastic little cupcake of a movie laced with thistle frosting.

Watching these three fiercely intelligent women, played by a trio of powerhouse actresses, is endlessly fascinating, as the goalposts constantly shift and their true selves become more apparent.

The Favourite may have corrected Lanthimos’s tendency towards arthouse torpor. It is a scabrous and often hilarious film, made loopier by the nightmarish visions and wide-angle distortions contrived by the cinematographer Robbie Ryan.

This is a skewer-sharp and scabrously funny film, stuffed with quotable deadpan exchanges, often punctuated by that now-trademark Lanthimos camera manoeuvre, the wide-angle whip pan that seems to ask “now what?”