Every Yorgos Lanthimos Movie Ranked

Yorgos Lanthimos makes movies that feel like they crawled out of a parallel universe where human behavior got scrambled and put back together slightly wrong. His films share a cold, clinical tone that somehow manages to be both deeply unsettling and darkly hilarious. Nobody else working today makes films quite like this. The flat affect dialogue, the bizarre power dynamics, the way characters follow absurd rules with total sincerity. Love him or hate him, his filmography is one of the most distinctive in modern cinema.

But here’s the thing: not every Lanthimos film lands with the same force. Some are genuine masterpieces that rewire how you think about storytelling. Others feel like experiments that don’t quite come together. So let’s rank them all.

The Early Greek Weird Wave Stuff

Before Lanthimos broke through internationally, he was making low-budget Greek work that established his voice. His 2005 film Kinetta is generally considered his feature debut, though he’d done shorter work prior to that, including the 2001 project My Best Friend. Both are hard to track down and feel more like sketches than finished works. Kinetta follows three characters in a Greek resort town reenacting crime scenes, and you can see the seeds of everything that came after: the detached performances, the ritualistic behavior, the clinical remove. They’re interesting as curiosities if you’re a completist, but they don’t represent what he’d become. Think of them as warm-ups. The DNA is there, the weirdness is there, but the precision isn’t yet.

Where It All Clicked: Dogtooth (2009)

This is the film that put Lanthimos on the map, and it’s still one of his most disturbing. A father keeps his adult children imprisoned in their home, controlling every aspect of their reality. They’re taught that cats are deadly predators. Airplanes are tiny toys that fall from the sky. The horror isn’t supernatural. It’s entirely human. It’s about control, isolation, and what happens when reality is whatever the person in charge says it is. Dogtooth earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and announced Lanthimos as a filmmaker who wasn’t interested in playing nice.

The One That Divides People: Alps (2011)

Alps follows a group of people who offer a strange service: they impersonate recently deceased loved ones for grieving families. It’s a fascinating premise, and there are moments of genuine brilliance here. But it also feels like Lanthimos repeating some of the same emotional frequencies as Dogtooth without quite finding a new angle. The detached performances work, but the film never builds the same suffocating tension. If you’re already a fan, it’s worth seeking out. If you’re new to his work, start elsewhere.

His Best Film: The Lobster (2015)

I’ll say it plainly. The Lobster is Lanthimos’s masterpiece. Colin Farrell plays a man who checks into a hotel where single people have 45 days to find a romantic partner or they’ll be turned into an animal of their choosing. The concept is absurd. The execution is flawless. Every line reading is perfectly deadpan. Every rule of this world makes no sense and total sense simultaneously. It’s the funniest film about loneliness and conformity you’ll ever watch, and the way it shifts gears in its second half, when Farrell escapes to the woods and joins a group of militant loners, is brilliant. That final scene at the restaurant? You’ll still be thinking about it days later.

The Ambitious Swing: The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Barry Keoghan is terrifying in this. Absolutely terrifying. He plays a teenager who insinuates himself into the life of a heart surgeon, played by Colin Farrell, and then essentially curses his family. One by one, Farrell’s children fall ill, and the only cure involves an impossible moral choice. The film borrows heavily from Greek tragedy, specifically the myth of Iphigenia, and Lanthimos leans hard into that ritualistic, fate-driven tone. Some viewers find it too cold, too deliberately paced. I think that coldness is the point. The dinner table scene where Farrell’s son tries to prove he can still walk is one of the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever watched.

The Oscar Winner: The Favourite (2018)

Olivia Colman won Best Actress for this, and she earned every bit of it. Her Queen Anne is petulant, heartbroken, physically deteriorating, and somehow sympathetic despite being surrounded by manipulation on all sides. Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone circle each other like sharks, each scheming for the Queen’s favor with escalating ruthlessness. What makes The Favourite work is how Lanthimos took his usual coldness and applied it to a period setting where that kind of cruelty actually fits. The fish-eye lens shots are a flex, and the dance scene with Weisz is genuinely electrifying. This is probably his most accessible film, and it’s the one I’d recommend to someone who thinks they’d hate his work. It also earned Lanthimos his sole Best Director Oscar nomination to date, cementing his reputation with the Academy.

The Wild Card: Poor Things (2023)

Poor Things is Lanthimos’s most visually extravagant film by a mile. The sets look like a storybook designed by a mad scientist. Emma Stone plays Bella Baxter, a woman brought back to life with an infant’s brain, who then experiences the world with zero social conditioning. It’s frequently hilarious, occasionally shocking, and genuinely moving by the end. Mark Ruffalo is doing career-best comedic work as the pompous Duncan Wedderburn. The film swept awards season, winning four Oscars including Best Actress for Stone and Best Production Design. But I’ll be honest: the film runs a bit long, and some of the philosophical points it’s making about female autonomy feel more stated than felt. Still, it’s a wild ride, and Stone is phenomenal in it.

The Latest Chapter: Kinds of Kindness (2024)

This anthology film reunited Lanthimos with Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and Willem Dafoe for three separate stories about control, devotion, and identity. Plemons won Best Actor at Cannes for his work here, and he’s incredible across all three segments. The problem? The film runs nearly three hours, and the three stories don’t build on each other the way you’d hope. Each one explores similar themes of submission and power, but by the third story, you feel the repetition. It’s good. Specific moments are great. But it doesn’t have the focus of his best work, and it felt like Lanthimos spinning his wheels rather than pushing forward.

The Full Ranking

1. The Lobster (2015) , The perfect balance of his humor, his cruelty, and his insight into how desperately people want to belong. His masterpiece.

2. The Favourite (2018) , His most entertaining film. Three incredible performances and a period setting that suits his sensibilities perfectly.

3. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) , Greek tragedy filtered through suburban horror. Barry Keoghan is a revelation.

4. Poor Things (2023) , Gorgeous, funny, and bold. A little overlong, but Emma Stone is extraordinary.

5. Dogtooth (2009) , The one that started it all internationally. Still horrifying, still brilliant.

6. Kinds of Kindness (2024) , Strong performances can’t fully overcome the bloated runtime and repetitive themes.

7. Alps (2011) , Interesting ideas, inconsistent execution. A minor work from a major filmmaker.

8. Kinetta (2005) , An early experiment. Fascinating for completists, but not essential viewing.

If you’re new to Lanthimos, start with The Lobster or The Favourite and work outward. If you’re already a fan, Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer are where his voice is at its most uncompromising. And if you love directors with a similarly singular and unsettling vision, Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid operates in a comparable register of absurdist dread and dark comedy, though Aster’s anxiety is more personal where Lanthimos’s is more sociological. Aster’s latest, the western Eddington, which came out last year, suggests he’s continuing to push into unpredictable territory just like Lanthimos has throughout his career. As for what Lanthimos himself does next, nothing has been officially announced yet, but whatever it is, it’ll almost certainly be strange, precise, and unlike anything else in theaters. He hasn’t made a bad film yet. He’s just made some that are better than others.