Odd dancing. Awkward chats. Tearing clothes apart. Ultra wide angles. An imbalance of power. Bra on, knickers off. Greek film director Yorgos Lanthimos knows what he’s interested in and, like any auteur worth his salt, keeps mining his peculiar seam for more of the good stuff. Known for his signature combination of black comedy, violence and off-kilter social scenarios, he’s now a decade and a half on from leaping from experimental European arthouse to one of Hollywood’s most unusual directors.
Here, we’ve ranked Lanthimos’ nine films as a solo director, including where Bugonia, his new kidnapping thriller starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, slots into the canon.
We’ve made the artistic choice to leave off Lanthimos’ 2001 co-directed sex comedy My Best Friend, but his short films are well worth seeking out, in particular the standout 12-minute Nimic, with Matt Dillon, and his 90-second long Necktie, made for the Venice Film Festival. Lanthimos has also been pretty busy on side projects in 2025, making a music video for his collaborator Jerskin Fendrix’s track Beth’s Farm (the song is kinda mid but stick with it) and a high-concept, witchy Prada ad, featuring multiple ScarJo’s.
If you’re a completist, good luck finding the more obscure shorts like Uranisco Disco, The Rape of Chloe and Bleat, a 30-minute black-and-white silent film that’s designed to be screened only with a live accompanying orchestra. A final note: Yorgos Lanthimos is not a director whose films are made for binges or one-night marathons, so space them out and let them wriggle their way into your brain in good time.
9. Kinetta (2005)
This mid-00’s solo directorial debut from Yorgos is slow, low budget, muted in colour and goes for long stretches without any dialogue or music. Much of it can be summed up by the line “they move irregularly in space”. And yet. There’s something here in this Greek-language story of a ‘director’ who’s into BMWs, a ‘cameraman’/photo clerk and a maid/’actress’ shooting scenes of struggle and violence in and around an off-season hotel.
Many beats we now expect from Lanthimos films are here in Kinetta: coercion, instruction, tension, strange physicalities and unsettling social interactions. Seeing his visual and intellectual ideas develop from Kinetta to Alps and beyond to his star-studded American films is fascinating.
8. Alps (2011)
Another early, low-key Greek-language film, the concept for Alps sounds a little like The Rehearsal crossed with Synecdoche New York: a gymnast, her coach, a nurse and an EMT start charging people to act as substitutes for their dead relatives. Coming into their homes, dressing like them, eating like them, saying lines, re-enacting scenes.
Featuring Lanthimos’ wife Ariane Labed and his regular collaborator - and for us, the ‘face’ of his films before Emma Stone - Angeliki Papoulia, Alps presents as cold, awkward and distant but there’s an underlying tenderness towards the oddballs on both sides of the transactions, as we see their frustration, grief and, in the case of Papoulia’s nurse/actor, nicknamed Monte Rosa, something of a descent into chaos.
7. Kinds of Kindness (2024)
If you’re not rushing out to Lanthimos’ latest flick, I suggest watching the Kinds of Kindness films one per night, then heading out to see Bugonia on the big screen as the finale. The 2-hour 45 anthology, which some people might have missed because of the format, acts as an excellent set of appetisers.
Here, you have Emma Stone up against Jesse Plemons in three stories: as rivals, as romantic partners, as pawns in the same games. And there’s plenty of juice in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Twilight Zone, as it takes in cults, sex, money and gothic doubles, through his particular lens.
Shot by Robbie Ryan, Kinds of Kindness looks super vivid and suitably hyper-real with intentionally jarring monochrome flashbacks. And the supporting cast - Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie and Joe Alwyn - really makes this one: like the leads, they’re game for just about anything.
6. Bugonia (2025)
![BUGONIA - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters October 24 - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/bd_5HcTujfc/maxresdefault.jpg)
Emma Stone’s shaved head in Bugonia has been much discussed on the internet, but seriously: Jesse Plemons is astounding, give him all the awards. In this unofficial Kinds of Kindness Part 4, they antagonise each other yet again, this time with Plemons as conspiracy theorist Teddy, who, with his cousin Don, kidnaps Stone’s glossy corporate chemicals CEO Margaret Fuller. (RMF??) I’ll stay spoiler-free free but suffice it to say, there’s action, there’s violence, there’s comedy, and there are stylistic and casting choices that place Bugonia firmly in the auteur’s universe.
It’s an adaptation of South Korean director Jang Joon-hwan’s film Save The Green Planet with a script by Will Tracy, the former editor-in-chief of The Onion and co-writer of The Menu. So yeah, things get bizarro (and perhaps a touch more spelt out) even by Lanthimos’ usual standards. It’s a wild ride on first watch with an even wilder coda. Catch it on 35mm if you can.
5. The Killing of A Sacred Deer (2017)
You know, the one where the characters drag themselves across the floor. The Killing of A Sacred Deer is modelled on Greek tragedies; it’s an A24 release made after Lanthimos had broken into Hollywood’s consciousness, and sees Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman playing heart surgeon Steven Murphy and his wife Anna. The revelation in the cast, though, is, of course, a young Barry Keoghan as Martin, the sixteen-year-old son of a patient who died on Steven’s operating table.
He’s superb: measured and completely convincing, but you can’t take your eyes off him. For much of the runtime, this is an aesthetically bleak but somewhat conventionally plotted psychological horror-thriller with the soundtrack to match.
Later, Lanthimos and his co-writer Efthimis Filippou make some bold choices in the final act - that ending, of course, but smaller, creepy details stay with you too. Like the way that the parents’ everyday scolding of their two kids comes back into focus towards the finale is just diabolical (complimentary).
4. The Favourite (2018)
Sure, The Favourite is probably the safest, most accessible pick of the lot. It’s a funny costume drama, set in early 18th-century England and written by the extremely witty Tony McNamara, that won Olivia Colman the Best Actress Oscar for her tragicomic turn as Queen Anne, after all. It’s also brilliant. And queer. And prime Yorgos Lanthimos material. I mean, who are we more accustomed to seeing bark extreme orders at subordinates than dead monarchs? It deploys that signature Lanthimos fisheye lens on those royal corridors impeccably.
And features Rachel Weisz at her aristocratic finest, alongside now main muse, here lowly pleb Emma Stone, both vying for the Queen’s bed. And, with the very spikiest edges softened, the much copied The Favourite delivers laugh-out-loud moments piled on top of laugh-out-loud moments for the broadest audience. Gosh, and the men are very funny too. Nicholas Hoult alone. The costumes.. I could go on. It might not be cool to say so, but it is very good.
3. Dogtooth (2009)
Maybe it’s because it was the first Yorgos Lanthimos film I ever saw, maybe it’s because I’m still drawn to Angeliki Papoulia as one of the quintessential actors collaborating with this director, maybe it’s because these scenes in a household setting are still shocking enough to sear into fresh, innocent brains. But Dogtooth is still right up there in the canon for me. It’s also the film that put him on the map, with a Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard prize and a first Academy Award nom.
Like a much darker cousin of Captain Fantastic and other zany, homeschooled-wild-kids dramas, the Greek-language Dogtooth follows Christos Stergioglou as an imaginatively controlling ‘bad dad’ who, together with his wife, keeps his adult children locked up, at home and in the grounds, and mostly in the dark about the ways of the outside world.
The stuff they do for fun is... really something and includes the first of many memorable dance sequences in the Lanthimos oeuvre. Absurdist, repulsive but always singular, the lo-fi Dogtooth retains that unnerving sense, which is often less present in the later works, that this could be happening anywhere.
2. Poor Things (2023)
Poor Things might not be as perfect start-to-finish as, say, The Favourite, but it achieves that rare and precious thing in cinema: you leave the film with fresh eyes with which to see the world. Eating a pastel de nata will never be the same again. It’s all so ambitious and warped, and everyone involved is giving precisely no fucks.
Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, the Tony McNamara script becomes a sadistic plaything in the mouths of Emma Stone as the reanimated Franken-woman Bella Baxter, Willem Dafoe as the scientist ‘God’ and the side-splittingly funny Mark Ruffalo as steampunk cad Duncan Wedderburn.
The uncanny, plinky plonky Jerskin Fendrix score becomes inseparable from the surreal, Terry Gilliam-like technicolor images. Oh, and the discourse around it, so much fun discourse. As always, let the men make their perverted little films about women and let more women make perverted little films about men.
1. The Lobster (2015)
It’s not a coincidence that The Lobster is almost smack bang in the middle of the Lanthimos filmography; it’s the perfect mix of his original, sicko vibes with ambitious, idiosyncratic ideas and a bigger canvas to paint with. Up there alongside Punch-Drunk Love in the pantheon of rom-coms for weirdos, the premise is a near-dystopia where single people are taken from ‘The City’ to a hotel and given forty-five days to find a new partner or they’re turned into an animal.
Two genius performances - Rachel Weisz as a pragmatic but unknowable woman and Colin Farrell as a crafty sad sack feature alongside an incredibly stacked cast: Ben Whishaw, John C. Reilly, Olivia Colman and Lea Seydoux alongside the stalwarts Labed and Papoulia. Everyone fully commits. Both real and unreal, The Lobster offers a sense of danger beneath the deadpan; it offers beautiful filmmaking but never leans too lush or whimsical, and some of the concepts echo TV dating shows to an alarming degree.
Everything is pitched just so. The slow-mo hunting scene, the fate of the Heartless Woman, the toaster, the nosebleed in the swimming pool and, of course, that wonderfully ambiguous ending. A stone-cold masterpiece.
Skip the search — follow Shortlist on Google News to get our best lists, news, features and reviews at the top of your feeds!
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
-
10 of the coolest things we saw at MCM London Comic Con 2025Celebrities, unreleased games, world record attempts and more!
-
Coraline maker Laika is bringing back stop motion animation in WildwoodA herculean animated effort
-
The best 1930s movies: 20 of the greatest films of the '30sDo the monster mash with Frankenstein, Dracula, Kong, the Wizard and the Invisible Man.
-
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’s Stephen Graham on fatherhood, authenticity, and bringing The Boss’s dad to lifeThe Merseyside master offers up another magnificent performance in the Bruce Springsteen biopic.
-
A Minecraft Movie sequel officially gets the green light — and a 2027 release dateMore Momoa
-
Late-night London, love, and letting your phone go: Alexander Lincoln on his new film A Night Like ThisHe’s also a cinnamon bun connoisseur...
-
Quentin Tarantino's martial arts masterpiece is now streaming on Netflix — and a third in the series could be on the way...Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2 have both landed on Netflix
-
Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence cast in Martin Scorsese’s next film - and it’s a ghost storyTime to get spooky
