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)
Directed by George A. Romero and written by Stephen King himself, Creepshow is a cult classic of the horror genre, and for good reason. Devised by two of the most gifted and twisted horror creators of all time, the 1982 anthology film tells five standalone stories that double as the contents of an in-universe horror comic. The stories themselves are just as terrifically demented as Romero and King’s involvement would suggest, and they’re executed with such uninhibited glee that you can’t help but enjoy the ride that Creepshow offers.
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)
One of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s greatest late-career achievements, 1990’s Dreams offers eight cinematic vignettes that were — as the movie’s title suggests — inspired by recurring dreams that Kurosawa had throughout his life. The resulting film is one unlike any other. It’s an anthology work that simultaneously feels immensely personal and movingly universal, and it features some of the most stunning images that have ever been captured on film. As is often the case with Kurosawa’s movies, there are moments, shots, and scenes in Dreams that immediately lodge themselves in your brain and stay there — inviting you to rewatch it just to experience them again.
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)
NetflixLike the next film on this list, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was unfairly criticized when it was released for committing the simple crime of failing to be one of its directors’ best films. However, while no one could rightly call the Western anthology movie a masterpiece on the same level as No Country for Old Men, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, or A Serious Man, that doesn’t mean it isn’t great. On the contrary, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is one of the best anthology films of recent memory. Comprised of six completely separate vignettes set against the backdrop of the American West, the film is alternately hilarious, heartbreaking, and terrifying, depending on what kind of story its telling at any given moment.
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)
The French Dispatch is, like so many of Wes Anderson’s movies, a dollhouse-like construction. The 2021 film tells both the history of its eponymous, fictional New Yorker-esque magazine and the four stories that make up one issue of it, which are brought to life in stunning black-and-white and color sequences that blend beautifully together. Written and directed by Anderson, it counts plenty of his favorite recurring players among its cast, including Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson, and Saoirse Ronan, all of whom turn in memorable work in a film that ranks as one of this decade’s most underrated.
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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