Venice 2025: “Bugonia”

A banal chamber-piece whose broad critiques of corporate greed, tech-based paranoia, ecological disaster, and humanity’s overall uselessness as a species feel tired and dated on arrival, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia sits in some gray middle zone of his filmography, merging the uncomfortable humor, off-kilter realities, and distressing violence of his early films (Dogtooth, The Lobster) with […]

Review: “Kinds of Kindness”

How far would you go to prove your love to another person? Acts of devotion— heightened to their most extreme, absurdist peaks— are in a way what just about all of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ films are about, harkening back to his breakout third feature, 2009’s Dogtooth (in which parents protect their children from the […]

Review: “Civil War”

I can’t help but admire Alex Garland for the feature of his fourth film, Civil War, that bugs me the most. Set in a near but indeterminate future, the British writer and director turns his gaze on America, examining a horrific yet (post-January 6, 2021) not implausible consequence of partisan politics driving civilians to the […]