La favorita

...deserves credit mostly for rising the desperate humanity of its female characters up to the surface, as they get challenged by their respective demons...

...is about power in all its forms, where sex and policy and even brute violence are deployed as the moment calls for it.

Yorgos Lanthimos (...) has conjured up a “Moll Flanders” or “Tom Jones” for a feminist age — nasty and brutal, slapstick that draws blood.

It is a scabrous and often hilarious film, made loopier by the nightmarish visions and wide-angle distortions contrived by the cinematographer Robbie Ryan.

...buried in its black, raucous heart is a melancholic ode to foiled love and unfathomable loss.