Kinds of Kindness

Yorgos Lanthimos' Kinds of Kindness premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, where it competed for the Palme d'Or and won the Best Actor prize for Jesse Plemons. It was Lanthimos' first feature after the back-to-back Oscar campaigns for The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023), which won Best Actress for Olivia Colman and Emma Stone respectively, and it is a deliberate return to the colder, more austere register of his Greek-language work (Dogtooth, Alps) and his English-language debut, The Lobster.

Lanthimos wrote the screenplay with Efthimis Filippou, the Greek co-writer of his early features, who had sat out the warmer Tony McNamara-scripted projects in between. The cast takes on multiple roles across three loosely connected stories: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn and Mamoudou Athie. Robbie Ryan, the longtime collaborator who shot both The Favourite and Poor Things, is behind the camera, and the score is by Jerskin Fendrix, who had also scored Poor Things.

Searchlight Pictures, Lanthimos' regular American distributor since the Element Pictures partnership, released it, and it grossed approximately $20 million worldwide on a moderate art-house release. Critics split sharply over whether the triptych structure and chillier tone were a return to form (Cahiers du Cinéma, Sight & Sound) or a step back from the more accessible recent work (Variety, Vulture). Lanthimos reunited with Stone and Plemons for his next film, Bugonia (2025).