Pictureland

What-ho! Yorgos Lanthimos down some dark, rich, reimagined corridor of English history?  The Greek filmmaker has generally confined himself to the relative present.  Much as he has charted out unique little worlds in his films beyond the obvious grasp of time or place, each has occurred in an astringently modern setting.  You know - cars, electricity and whatnot.   Alps (2011) And yet Mr. Lanthimos has followed his most punishing work, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) with a kind of dark comedy set, however fancifully, during the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714).  But this being Yorgos Lanthimos, his latest film is nothing so simple as black comedy or period piece.  Through a fairly quick ascension of features - this is somehow only his seventh - Lanthimos has brought us characters that don't move side by side or passionately embrace so much as collide like bumper cars, even as they might be moving in for some needed bit of affection. ...

It's a jungle out there, lonelyhearts.  Or at least a forest.  Which seems better than the hotel.  But is it?  And the city - it's a cold, cold place.  But we all knew that, right?  The options are daunting for the lonely in search of real connection, those who don't necessarily want to go it alone and for whom couplehood, as it so often presented, seems the least appealing choice of all.  So goes the old story, rendered almost unrecognizably new by director Yorgos Lanthimos in The Lobster. The Lobster is writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos' first film in English, the first produced outside of his native Greece.  Like his earlier  Dogtooth and Alps (as well as Attenberg, by his colleague Athina Rachel Tsangari, a film in which Lanthimos deadpans his way through a secondary role), The Lobster sees human relationships stripped down to their basic truths and conflicts and given absurd projection, a kind of psychological caricature. ...