Who Are We To Disagree? - - Kinds Of Kindness (2024, USA, Color, 164 min) - - 4 September 2024

Recommended. But barely, because Kinds Of Kindness is a strange and challenging movie, or actually, three short - - but subtly interconnected - - challenging movies. Yorgos Lanthimos’s (The Favourite) masterful Poor Things, set him up for an easy A, but Kinds Of Kindness is much harder to like.  The opening music sets up the theme: The Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams, which most reviewers assign to dominance and control. But it’s the dream - - specifically, the American one - - that Lanthimos and co-writer Efthimis Filippou (The Lobster) are playing with herein. It’s just that control is crucial to the dream. The cast is wonderful, with the Lanthimos regular Emma Stone (Poor Things) once again nailing down strangeness, backed up by the luminous Margaret Qualley (Once Upon A Time In Hollywood), Willam Defoe (Poor Things) and non-regular, but Cannes-be-knighted, Jessie Plemons (The Irishman), who adapts perfectly. It’s gruesome and bleak, so beware . . . Kinds Of Kindness is never kind.