“Poor Things,” April 21, 2024 (2023), Hulu (with commercials). We really appreciated this film. It feels like a philosophical combination and discussion of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, H.G. Welle’s Island of Dr. Moreau and its original film version as Island of Lost Souls, Voltaire’s Candide, Sade’s Story of O, and even Terry Southern’s Candy. Searching for that which is life through a newly incarnated being or one struggling for knowledge and understanding, reason and emotion, science and society, pleasure and pain. Great work from principals Emma Stone as the creature, Bella, Wilem Defoe as the Dr./monster/God(win) Baxte, Ramy Youssef as his assistant Max McCandles, and Mark Ruffalo as the smarmy lawyer Duncan Wedderburn leading Bella on her search for knowledge until her search leaves him undone. It’s wild, sometimes very funny, and sometimes very repulsive. Explicitly sexual, so of course funny and unpleasant, where discussions of class and exploitation within capitalism form the base for understanding. The cinematography is very much in the Wes Anderson school of realist fantasy. Well worth watching. Visually wonderful if sometimes very disturbing. Excellent directing by Yorgos Anthimos.