POOR THINGS
Wryly entertaining black humorish comic fantasy horror romp (but yet another bladder-buster, darn it. Two and a half hours long from stem to stern, so you've been warned). Based on a novel by Scottish modernist Alisdair Gray (I read his Lanark years ago, but this one not) -- dominated in every sense of the word by Emma Stone, who, umm, lets it all hang out here and is just superb. You can't imagine any other contemporary actress putting this sexy beastess of a character, Bella Baxter, a Thing of shreds and patches, across. My pal Willem Dafoe is also terrific as mad scientist God Baxter (a nod to Timothy Carey's The World's Greatest Sinner?). Kind of a super Wes Anderson film in its highly elaborated gigantism and miniature set artifice / overall scenic design and dead-pan sensayuma minus all traces of twee. A truly Frankensteinian assemblage seamlessly stitched together -- bits and pieces of Mary Shelley, Todd Browning, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Gustav Flaubert, Czech animation genius Karel Zeman, Orson Welles, "and a whole lot more" as they say might have easily pancaked out into an unholy mess, but director Yorgos Lanthimos keeps things rising and rising und making de butter fluffier und fluffier…must-see it again! Emma Stone is the anti-Barbie.