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Director Yorgos Lanthimos and actress Emma Stone‘s latest collaboration, Kinds of Kindness, is currently playing in theaters. Like the duo’s previous two feature efforts, 2018’s The Favourite and 2023’s Poor Things, the film is darkly funny, violent, and sexually explicit. It feels, therefore, like a natural addition to Stone and Lanthimos’ growing collection of projects. There is, however, one thing that separates Kinds of Kindness, which also stars Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hunter Schafer, Joe Alwyn, and Margaret Qualley, from The Favourite and Poor Things. Unlike those films, Kinds of Kindness is an anthology piece.
The film is comprised of three loosely connected stories, which star the same actors, but in different roles. It’s unique in Lanthimos’ filmography for that very reason, but Kinds of Kindness is far from the first movie to tell multiple stories in an anthological format. It is, in fact, the latest addition to cinema’s long list of anthology movies, which includes some of the most experimental and artistically rendered films that you’ll likely ever watch.
Here are five, in particular, that everyone should see.
Creepshow (1982)
Featuring practical effects by legendary movie makeup artist Tom Savini, there’s a handmade quality to Creepshow that only makes its stories of ghostly revenge, alien invasion, intense pathological fears, monsters, and murder seem all the more theatrical and warped. There have been plenty of horror anthology films since Creepshow, but few hold as revered a spot in the history of cinema.
Creepshow can be rented or purchased on Amazon Prime Video.
Dreams (1990)
You’d be wise to do so. It’s a movie that becomes increasingly special the more you return to it, and its power only seems to sharpen over time. As a film that stands on its own, it’s a transportive, absorbing piece of work that, quite fittingly, feels like it was made not within the confines of our material world, but pulled from a separate, more spiritual place. As a look inside one of cinema’s greatest minds, it’s both inspiring and invaluable.
Dreams is streaming on Tubi.
Three Times (2005)
There’s a double meaning to the seemingly simple title of this mid-2000s masterpiece from Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien. On the one hand, it refers to the fact that the film follows the same two actors, Shu Qi and Chang Chen, as they play different sets of lovers who meet — you guessed it — three times. Its title is also fitting for a film that explores three different eras of Taiwanese history. The movie’s first story stars Chang as a soldier who falls in love with a pool hall hostess (Qi) in the 1960s; its second follows a 1911 courtesan (Qi, again) who tries to find liberation and security in her relationship with a oft-traveling freedom fighter (Chang); its third focuses on a popular singer who breaks up with her girlfriend in order to date the male photographer she’d already been having an affair with.
Three Times‘ triptych structure and recurring themes of love and connection allow it to achieve a lyrical quality that is only reinforced and heightened by Hsiao-Hsien’s signature, long camera shots, which repeatedly drift back and forth from Qi and Chang’s faces and bodies without ever cutting. The movie immediately strikes the right chord with its pitch-perfect, mid-60s first story, which would rank high as one of the world’s greatest short films had it been released on its own. It only grows more ethereal and haunting from there as its shifts in time to introduce questions about how the ways we connect and love inevitably change to suit the periods in which we live. Three Times was notably cited by Barry Jenkins as a major influence on his 2016 Best Picture-winning drama Moonlight, and while it may be the least known title on this list, it’s just as worthy of your time as all the rest.
Three Times can only be watched on DVD at press time.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
The one thing it never is, though, is predictable. Its stories are told with the same idiosyncratic, no-holds-barred sense of spontaneity that has long defined the Coens’ work. Together, the two brothers use their skills here to craft a film that manages to both parody and pay tribute to the violent absurdity, grim ruthlessness, and earnest optimism that defined the Old West. It’s worth seeking out, frankly, for its fifth story, The Gal Who Got Rattled, which may be the closest we ever get to seeing the Coens make a real, proper Western epic.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is streaming now on Netflix.
The French Dispatch (2021)
When it was released in 2021, The French Dispatch was met with lukewarm praise from critics, who were quick to deem it one of Anderson’s minor efforts. It admittedly might not rank as one of his greatest movies, but it’s also far from the slight miss that many called it. The film is another decidedly singular, endlessly rewatchable dramedy from the auteur, and it features a handful of unforgettable performances from some of Anderson’s less frequent collaborators — namely, Benicio del Toro, Frances McDormand, and Jeffrey Wright. The latter actor gives, perhaps, the most spellbinding performance of his storied career in a sequence that contains a scene between him and fellow Asteroid City star Stephen Park that ranks as one of Anderson’s best ever.
The French Dispatch is streaming on Hulu.
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