Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, and Willem Dafoe star in Yorgos Lanthimos’s film.
Should you arrive late for Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Kinds of Kindness,” you will miss its single most rousing moment: an opening blast of that delectably sour 1983 earworm “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” The song needs no justification; it could kick off every movie from now until kingdom come. Even so, you may wonder what put Lanthimos, the Greek-born director of such acrid downers as “The Lobster” (2015) and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017), in a specifically Eurythmics mood. Perhaps, after concocting the mad Victorian brew of “Poor Things” (2023), he wanted to signal a shift back to a more contemporary style of weird. Or perhaps he recognized, in the song’s coolly cynical lyrics, a corrosion of spirit to match his own. “Some of them want to abuse you/Some of them want to be abused”: there are worse ways to sum up the cruel spectacles of subjugation that Lanthimos has made such a perverse specialty of.
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ART OF STONE
\"The Brutalist.\"
MOMMA MIA
Audra McDonald triumphs in \"Gypsy\" on Broadway.
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
\"Black Doves,\" on Netflix.
NATURE STUDIES
Kyle Abraham's “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful.”
WHAT GOOD IS MORALITY?
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THE SPOTIFY SYNDROME
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THE LEPER - LEE CHANGDONG
. . . to survive, to hang on, waiting for the new world to dawn, what can you do but become a leper nobody in the world would deign to touch? - From \"Windy Evening,\" by Kim Seong-dong.
YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT
Alice Munro's partner sexually abused her daughter. The harm ran through the work and the family.
TALK SENSE
How much sway does our language have over our thinking?
TO THE DETECTIVE INVESTIGATING MY MURDER
Dear Detective, I'm not dead, but a lot of people can't stand me. What I mean is that breathing is not an activity they want me to keep doing. What I mean is, they want to knock me off. My days are numbered.
