Poor Things director's new movie with an all-star cast earns a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, but not everyone agrees

The new movie from Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos, Kinds of Kindness, has debuted to a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score.

The film recently premiered at Cannes and has garnered an impressive 92% critics score from 25 reviews so far.

“This long, scaldingly original film enthralls even as it frustrates, defying conventional logic while presenting an absurdist riff on modern society. It’s never boring, and yet, Lanthimos’ outré sensibility demands a special brand of patience,” writes Variety, while Collider‘s take is: “Small gripes aside, the film is still a more unrestrained version of the filmmaker than we’ve seen of late, and all the better for it. It’s a reminder that he’s still got the heater to throw at us and knock us off our balance.”

“Here it is, the new Lanthimos: puzzling, brilliant and, in all honesty, not easy to like. What is this teasingly unfathomable filmmaker telling us? We may never know,” is Deadline‘s verdict.

But, not everyone is convinced. Our own Kinds of Kindness review is 2 stars: “All the set-ups are intriguing, and wouldn’t look out of place in the twist-driven series The Twilight Zone, which may or may not be an inspiration, along with the works of Franz Kafka. But the tone is so bleak, the dialogue so off-kilter (even for Lanthimos), that it’s hard to enjoy the film in between its comical moments. You might care to see this as an allegory about power, sex and control, but it doesn’t feel like it’s saying anything particularly profound.”

“But Kinds of Kindness, which Lanthimos wrote with his frequent collaborator Efthimis Filippou, is stiff, plodding, and soporific, even as it seeks to wow us with its deadpan shockeroos,” says TIME Magazine.

The film is an anthology of three tales, and it stars the likes of Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, and Hunter Schafer.

The film releases on June 21 in the US and June 28 in the UK. In the meantime, check out our guide to all the upcoming major movie release dates to get planning the rest of your theater trips.

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