The lates from Lanthimos imagines a CEO as a threat to humanity, but what’s the the weird part?
If you like your Yorgos Lanthimos films outré and boundary-pushing like “Poor Things” (2023) as opposed to something more rooted in the simmering edginess of the day-to-day – say, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017) or last year’s underappreciated “Kinds of Kindness” – “Bugonia” is your cup of crazy chai.
Lanthimos’ muse for his past four features, Emma Stone (she won gold for her portrait of a female Frankenstein’s monster discovering the power and pleasure of sex in “Poor Things”) stars as Michelle, the chief executive of Auxolith, a boffo biotech company outside Atlanta. We first meet Michelle making corporate messaging videos about diversity and workers’ rights. After one fumbled miscue and a retake, it’s abundantly clear that Michelle’s not a woke woman trying to raise others up, but doing a performative ass-covering for lawsuit prevention – “you can go home at 5:30 if you want,” she tells one employee, and then another, “but if you still have work to do …”
It was a strange year in cinema, a year where blockbuster success at the box office was rare (“Inside Out 2” was the top grab, followed by the overdone “Deadpool & Wolverine” superfrenemy romp) and outshone by adult-themed animation, non-English-language and documentary offerings. Also strong were films featuring women’s voices and indie creep-outs – a combination best embodied and exemplified by TJ Mollner’s “Strange Darling,” Anna Kendrick making her directorial debut with “Woman of the Hour” and the gonzo body-horror spectacle “The Substance.” None of which made mt top 10, but were squarely in the hunt.
A sardonically black political comedy that’s right out of left field, powered by witty takes on hot topics (Andrew Tate, Putin and Pornhub, to name a few) and a killer performance by Ilinca Manolache, without whom the movie could not be. Manolache plays Angela, a feisty Romanian woman looking to make it in the gig economy as a filmmaker and TikTok sensation. Her main hustle is as a production assistant for a company that makes safety videos, kind of – on many shoots, Angela coaches accident victims, often in wheelchairs, to talk about the safety measures they should have taken to have avoided injury despite the clear negligence of the employer to provide a safe workplace. They’re more CYAs than PSAs, and that’s the degree of biting humor imbued by writer-director Radu Jude (“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”)
2. “Flow”
The official Oscar nominee from Latavia, is a mesmerizing, dialogue-free animated adventure about a cat and all the other birds, dogs and capybara that out feline encounters. Themes of climate change—flash floods and tsunamis are the reason the cat and fellow animals find themselves adrift on a sailboat—and a peaceful world sans the presence of man and mankind’s destructive ways pervade Gints Zilbalodis’s gorgeously stylized of an Eden like end to the world. Visually “Flow” has all the beauty and poetry of a Hayao Miyazaki masterpiece and the way it navigates mature matters makes it multi-tiered and applicable for all members of the family regardless of age.
Not a claymation romp for the whole family – not even close. No, this very dark and very adult animated tale has twins (voiced by “Succession” and “Power of the Dog” stars Sarah Snook and Kodi Smit-McPhee) separated after the death of their father and placed in foster homes on opposite coasts of Australia, as well as edgy, plot-driving incursions into swinging, fat feeding, pyromania and religious zealotry. Wickedly funny yet tenderly bittersweet, “Memoir of a Snail” has the dark, loving embrace of Tim Burton done with the edgy verve of Trey Parker and Matt Stone of “South Park.”
For What it's Worth 