A.O. Scott on "The Favourite" directed by Yorgos Lanthimos:

'Lanthimos, his camera gliding through gilded corridors and down stone staircases — in exquisitely patterned light and shadow, with weird lenses and startling angles — choreographs an elaborate pageant of decorum and violence, claustrophobia and release. The law of the kingdom is mutability, signified by the many names its sovereign and her subjects are called by. Sarah is Lady Marlborough, and also Mrs. Freeman. The Queen is Mrs. Morley. Abigail plots to marry a handsome doofus (Joe Alwyn), hoping to acquire a title of her own. No identity or value is fixed. Alliances shift like the weather. Fortunes rise and fall. Beauty transmutes into ugliness and back again. Love is a synonym for domination, or maybe for submission.

The best — and also the most troubling — thing about “The Favourite” is its rigorously bleak assessment of human motivations and behavior. The palace is a petri dish aswarm with familiar pathogens of egoism, cruelty and greed. A sentimental soul might wish for a glimpse of something else, but at the same time it’s hard to say that anything is missing from this tableau, which is also a devastating, flattering and strangely faithful mirror.'

Read the article here.

The Favourite didn't impress me as much as 'The Killing of a Sacred Deer", with may have been less subtle but was deliciously devastating.

But "The Favourite" is "Dangerous Liaisons" without men, the men are just a couple of doofuses. And Emma Stone as Abigail is the quintessential survivor, surviving as a profession, Abigail gives egotism a good name.