Poor Things

Rather, it’s an attempt to wake us up, to clue us into the behaviors and violences we replicate over and over again, even when we think we aren’t. And on that front alone, Poor Things is a success.

The score is brilliant. It absolutely captures the kind of semi-steam punk, fantastical, mythological, Frankestinian... all that stuff. And yet at the heart of it, there is an emotional story...

Bella’s appetite for novelty is reflected in film-making that evokes a similar sense of wonder and discovery in the audience.

Though it flags towards the end, the film is marvellously entertaining. And ultimately, while it is weird, it is the sort of weird we can do.

Like The Favourite, his new film comes to feel like a costume drama for an age that thinks itself above costume dramas. And actually, deep down, for all the scalpels and self-pleasure, a rather standard dose of Hollywood feelgood.

It’s a bravura piece of physical theatre by Stone, totally committed, without a trace of vanity, progressing a little every time we see her, until finally she is fully self-possessed, lithe and articulate.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s films are always strange, and this is perhaps the most peculiar but also the most relatable of them all.

The story and Bella herself are at times, too hard to swallow and the choices made to depict a woman’s liberation feels too one note and are rather basic ideas

Destined to go down as one of 2023’s best and most memorable films, Poor Things is Yorgos Lanthimos at the height of his peculiar power.

Poor Things is a wildly entertaining quest for liberation and a true cinematic tour de force that wears its technicolor heart on its sleeve.