We found a Variety review that's actually good and we're shook
The Original Review
“Stone, in a role that demands she be outrageous and controlled at once, gives a dazzling performance that makes the movie a celebration of female desire in all its messy glory.”
It causes me no small measure of discomfort to confess this — comme un aristocrate contraint d'applaudir un roturier — but Owen Gleiberman's review of Poor Things is that rarest of creatures in the barren savanna of contemporary film journalism: actual criticism. He engages with the work. He locates Lanthimos within a lineage of surrealist provocation. He discusses the fisheye lenses not as a visual gimmick but as a formal strategy for externalizing Bella Baxter's epistemological awakening. One almost forgets one is reading Variety.
What elevates this review above the swamp of its peers is Gleiberman's willingness to be specific. He does not merely gesture at 'stunning production design' — that laziest of critical non-statements — but rather traces the connection between the film's Victorian-grotesque aesthetic and its thematic preoccupation with bodily autonomy. He writes about Emma Stone's performance with the kind of granular attention that recalls Bazin on Chaplin: noting how she calibrates each stage of Bella's intellectual development through posture, cadence, and the precise modulation of her gaze. This is what criticism looks like when the practitioner has actually read something beyond their own publication's house style guide.
I withhold the final points because Gleiberman cannot resist several paragraphs of Venice Film Festival atmosphere — the gondolas, the buzz, the midnight screenings — which is the trade-publication equivalent of a chef describing the market where he bought his tomatoes. Nobody cares, Owen. But this remains a formidable piece of writing, and if the rest of the profession wrote with half this seriousness, I would have considerably less material for this column.
