Review: 'Poor Things' is Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos' richest work to date

There comes a moment when "Poor Things," a gloriously bonkers fairy tale from the director Yorgos Lanthimos, explodes from black-and-white into wild, ecstatic color. Bella Baxter — played by a grinning, gasping, rutting, entirely astounding Emma Stone — is having sex for the first time, and it's an experience of purest Technicolorgasmic delirium. The abrupt shift in visual palette naturally evokes "The Wizard of Oz," even if the circumstances decidedly do not: Think of it as the R-rated art-house equivalent of Dorothy opening the door to Oz for the first time, though this particular Dorothy might as well be singing her own bizarre riff on "If I Only Had a Brain."

Bella, as we learn early on, is the beneficiary of the world's first mother-daughter cranial transplant, a procedure performed by a sweetly deranged, unsubtly named scientist, Dr. Godwin Baxter. (He's played by Willem Dafoe, emoting beautifully through a faceful of prosthetic scars.) The reasons for this operation are too elaborate and nonsensical to give