Yorgos Lanthimos is our leading auteur of half-baked ideas, but since he’s begun working with screenwriter Tony McNamara on movies starring Emma Stone, things have started to gel and get moist. Poor Things, a film of “sugar and violence,” is a bizarro Barbie, a forceful, entertaining movie without smugness, featuring a kind of outré production design all its own. Every effect is thrown in: the film is in color and black-and-white, it pushes the use of wide-angle cinematography in new directions, hybrid animals wander about, and mad scientist Willem Dafoe belches floating orb-like bubbles—all this before the film gets to Emma Stone’s Bella, a Victorian wild child chasing mysteries of the organism through an ocean liner’s casino and a Parisian brothel.