Monsters of Our Own Making 

POOR THINGS. Yorgos Lanthimos — born of the glorious, unholy, chimeric union of Luis Buñuel, Ken Russell and Terry Gilliam — has spent much of his storied career exploring parentage, innocence and humanity's baser impulses through the bleak and delightful lens of his particular brand of absurdism. And now, having joined in a bizarre and fruitful professional union with Emma Stone, he has taken a run right at the functional, foundational stuff from which most or all his preceding thematic material is drawn. There are layers within layers of self-reference and meta commentary here, all suffused with scientific method, cinematic surrealism and vibrant sexual discovery. And it's a kind of Frankenstein riff, mostly without the torches and pitchforks.

In heightened, quasi-19th century London, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), himself the product of his father's immersive surgical experimentation, teaches medical students at university while operating a more cutting edge (had to be done) private laboratory. The latter facility, having proven out a number of the doctor's pet (did it again) theories, has now yielded a living human subject. Bella (Stone), an adult woman with an ever-developing infant mind, lives sequestered in the manse Baxter, storming about the place as her brain gradually catches up with her body. Godwin, her aptly named father/deity, limits her exposure to the world to control his experiment. In spite of his adherence to the scientific method, though, he has deep paternal feelings for his subjects. And so, motivated by both personal and professional instinct, he enlists one of his more promising students, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) as observer of and companion to Bella. Because or in spite of her developmental infancy, Max becomes fascinated and then infatuated, which eventually leads to Godwin's suggestion of a betrothal. At which point, things get wonky.

Having reached a certain age, Bella has become compulsively sexualized, a phase not lost on attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), the scandalous rake hired to legally formalize her engagement to Max. And so, in service of self-knowledge and to better prepare Bella for married life, she and Duncan set off on a sensual expedition to the continent.

This may well be Lanthimos' boldest, most fully realized project to date (no small feat for a director with one of the most immediately recognizable and vividly rendered bodies of work in contemporary cinema), filled as it is with wildly inventive production design, cinematography and performance. But it is also a return to some of his earliest thematics, simultaneously evoking and departing from Dogtooth (2009) in its fundamental questioning of the notion of innocence and whether knowledge and maturity represent loss or gain in the sum total of human experience. It must be said, too, that Tony McNamara's script (adapted from the novel by Alasdair Gray) is as hilarious as it is insightful, reveling in the coarse, the absurd and the elevated in equal measure. And the cast assembled here, with Stone giving the funniest, most naked (literally and figuratively), most self-aware and contrarian performance of her career, and of the last couple of decades. Ruffalo, note-perfect himself as a preposterously boastful lothario turned outright loser, makes an ideal foil and relationship stepping stone for Bella in a constant state of evolution and self-ownership.

Because it is so funny and crazy and colorful, it is easy to look past the existential questions at the center of Poor Things, but that may in fact be its greatest artistic success; don't blink and miss it. R. 141M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK, MINOR.

AMERICAN FICTION. Pitched as it is, in an unassuming stylistic register, American Fiction might fall into the shadow of a grand, showy gesture like Poor Things. Approached with the right attitude, though, it doesn't because this sort of largely bygone comedy of manners is much more difficult to execute successfully than it would appear.

Adapted from Percival Everett's 2001 novel Erasure by longtime television writer and first-time director Cord Jefferson, the movie describes a brief, tempestuous period in the life of novelist and frustrated American Black man Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (Jeffrey Wright). Finding himself at the uncomfortable intersection of university politics, woke culture, the publishing industry and a family in ongoing crisis, Monk lifts a glass and writes a (to him) winking, pandering, pseudonymous novel that fully embraces stereotypes to the point of parody. Joke's on Monk, though, as My Pafology becomes the most lucrative work of his career.

Confronted with the clash of his personal and professional ethics with the demands of the marketplace, Monk finds himself in an evolving existential nightmare: His financial success will allow him to provide for his loved ones but the truth of it is an unbearable burden.

The key here is that Jefferson and his cast — Wright at an all-time high, Sterling K. Brown, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody, Erika Alexander — maintain the finest of balances between the authenticity of the drama and the outrageousness of the comedic premise. The result is a truly funny, deeply felt and consummately believable story about life and race in America. R. 117M. BROADWAY, MINOR.

John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.

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Fortuna Theatre is temporarily closed. For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.