Here's an excerpt:

The specificity of the camera positioning and slow-motion orchestration in the title sequence is stylistically reminiscent of director Brian De Palma. Anderson said he wasn’t consciously thinking of De Palma when designing the title sequence, but he doesn’t deny the influence or direct connection.

“I think when you’re making something, you’re thinking of the things even that you’re not thinking of [them].  It’s in there,” said Anderson of De Palma’s influence on the scene. “You’re using all the paint on the palette, so for me it’s a natural thing. I’ve seen all [De Palma’s] movies, and I’ve seen them again and again, so I think it’s a part of my — it’s gone into my DNA.”

To hear Wes Anderson’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.

It all started with a tweet that caught my eye. It was a shot that featured both the batter and the pitcher, and many people on X likened it to the work of Brian De Palma.

And when you see it, you feel an emotional swell as you witness the inherent beauty of the game.

How did we get here?

Enter Mets Director for SNYtv John DeMarsico, who is a self-described film junkie and who has been putting some of the most insane shots into broadcasts of Mets games. Shots that are so beautiful and cool that they have sort of reignited people's love of the game, and have also encouraged them to explore the movie homages.

DeMarsico tweets with the tag #Baseballiscinema, and he's living up to it. Just cruising through highlights, I was in awe of shots with shallow focus, shots that homage Lord of the Rings, split screens, cross fades, and many more neat ways to edit, cut, and shoot America's pastime.

It really is cinema.

The only downside is that, as a Phillies fan, I hate that the Mets have this guy, and I demand we find our own auteur to step things up.

But that's beside the point.

Honestly, all of Major League Baseball should be lauding these efforts. Sports are often shot in boring and standard ways. But it is a game rife with emotion and tension and stakes, so we should have these edits. We should lean into the story of the game and get different angles.

The touch here is flawless. It doesn't distract, it only enhances. It makes a sport with 162 regular-season games feel important, and it gives gravity to shots that sometimes can bear no weight.

In the following paragraph, Coogler lists many influences on Sinners, including Brian De Palma:

For this script, this crew, and this cast, I dug deep into myself and reached back to my ancestors who breathed so much life and purpose into me. I also unabashedly reached towards my cinematic influences including but not limited to, Spike Lee, John Singleton, Ernie Barnes, Steve McQueen, Ava Duvernay, Euzhan Palcy, Eudora Welty, Oscar Micheaux, Robert Rodriguez, Barry Jenkins, Quentin Tarantino, Nicolas Roeg, Andrea Arnold, Jeremy Saulnier, Paul Thomas Anderson, Joel and Ethan Coen, Bill Gunn, Jordan Peele, John Carpenter, Boots Reilly, Shaka King, Nia Dacosta, Terence Nance, Rian Johnson, Bradford Young, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Chris Nolan, Emma Thomas, Theodore Witcher, Francis Coppola, Julie Dash, Steven Spielberg, Kahlil Joseph, Mati Diop, Ben and Josh Safdie, Stephen King, Robert Palmer, Amiri Baraka, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Walter Mosley, Stephen Graham Jones, Joel Crawford, Wes Craven, and many others.

And now, this weekend, Drop is opening in theaters. Here's a look at some of the reviews:

Andrew Parker, The Gate

As a director, Landon looks like he’s having a blast getting his De Palma on (with a healthy nod to Wes Craven’s underrated/also implausible thriller Red Eye). As a stylistic exercise, Landon delivers his best outing behind the camera yet, which is fascinating for something that takes place in a single location for ninety percent of the film’s running time. The camera moves swiftly around the tightly packed room, zooming in from above, looking from below (the low angle shots of Violet looking up at her waiter are low key hilarious), and flowing through the space with ease. The little touches (like the bougie washroom and the ribcage mimicking corridor into the dining room that feel like entering the belly of a beast) are what matters here. Landon also does everything in his power to make the usually tedious image of people texting back and forth into a halfway compelling visual. It all comes together nicely, and Landon has put more thought into how the film should look than the sum of the plot’s parts.

And honestly, Drop is a case where that is absolutely the right call. Landon has a flair for allowing the viewer to giggle at dark situations, and he’s not afraid to get theatrical or unsubtle about it, like his use of some dramatic mood lighting swings throughout. He also finds ways to balance the dark humour with deeper character touches, with a heart to heart conversation between the stressed out lovebirds where all of the restaurant’s bustle and background noise pleasingly drifts away and the viewer locks into a tender moment that carries a great degree of poignancy for something that’s otherwise a silly movie.

More importantly: Have I made this sound like a bad movie? It’s actually largely a blast, not because Landon is as talented as De Palma, or even Collet-Serra, but because he works real hard to make up the difference. Moreso than the bright, montage-heavy, performance-dependent (and, to be clear, delightful) Happy Death Day pictures, he and cinematographer Marc Spicer go all in on visual tricks, with short but elegant room-surveying tracking shots, canted angles, impressionistic lighting effects to spotlight individual characters, and the occasional flips and spins for extra disorientation. This could have come across as sweaty, but it’s assembled with a glee that can’t be faked; the obvious effort becomes part of the fun.

This puts Drop well in the zone of Collet-Serra’s recent (and structurally similar) Carry-On, no small praise for the neo-Hitchcockian exercise. What keeps the new movie from further ascension to De Palma levels of bliss is its inability to push those attempts at virtuosity into a state of feverish cinematic overdrive, where the show-off fakeness somehow becomes more viscerally real. If this were easy, De Palma might not look like such a genius. As-is, Drop has a few brief moments of near-operatic derangement, a couple of flashbacks that experiment with bad-taste exploitation, and one climactic gag with a semi-twisted kick. Mostly, though, it trades in predictable stuff about Violet overcoming her past traumas as she navigates this brand new one.

Landon can flip this into a strength; just as the Happy Death Day movies are disarmingly sweet amidst jokes about gruesome slapstick demises, this movie obviously feels warmly toward Violet and he treats a few side characters here, like a too-much server (Jeffrey Self) on his first-ever shift, with similar affection. Drop is ultimately a nice movie about an abuse survivor being terrorized by seemingly omniscient forces, loaded with moments that don’t really hold up to scrutiny and well-sold by Fahy’s performance. To work so well in the moment is its own perfectly ephemeral achievement.

#DroptheMovie is a hard driving nail-biter, that keeps you hanging on the edge. Christopher Landon channels his inner De Palma, in a fresh take on the classic whodunnit. While it takes its time getting there, the climax is worth the wait. Thrill seekers will rejoice.

“It definitely began with a conversation about what kind of movie we both wanted to make. Because it’s not just about what I want to do as a director, but also what you want to do as an actor,” Sloan said, gesturing to Mastroianni. “What kind of role are you not gonna get cast in unless we make that movie?”

“It started with Ryan sharing with me all of the films that really excited him, and revisiting those films.” Mastroianni added, explaining that they were primarily inspired by classic thrillers like “Blow-Up,” “Blow-Out,” “The Conversation,” “The Third Man,” “Vertigo,” and “Chinatown.”

“We were like ‘What is the through line here?’” Sloan said. “And we found out there’s a structure that many of these films follow called the Spiral Structure, where there’s a character that’s traveling through but every time they hit this spiral, it’s something from their past that they can’t escape.”

That structure gave them the narrative core of “Gazer,” with Mastroianni’s Frankie constantly running into lapses in memory caused by her dyschronometria that make it harder to solve the larger mystery she has become immersed in. And much like their fictional protagonist, Sloan and Mastroianni found themselves working with incomplete information throughout the production process. The self-financed film was sporadically shot between April 2021 and April 2023, with the duo opting to jump into principal photography before they had an entire script written.

“We started writing basically as soon as the lockdown happened. And that went a full year, and then in November I just said to Ariella ‘We’re gonna get into production in April 2021.’ And she was just like ‘Uhh… okay,’” Sloan said. “We weren’t even done with the script yet. We went in with an unfinished script. We knew we had the beginning and the end, so we said we’ll do two weekends in April and we’ll do the beginning and the end of the movie, because we know what we want.”

See also: Variety - Embracing Pulpy Genre, Germany’s Hnywood Aims for the Stars

Fittingly, as pure cinema, Only The River Flows is a knockout: eerie and dreamlike. An overture of kids at play is a marvel. Another scene is a dead ringer for gaudy maestro Brian De Palma. And, oh: it never stops raining.

But Wei also tethers his film to everyday realities. China’s former one-child policy takes a key supporting role. If the movie is a philosophy lesson in unknowable truth, it also has cynical police chiefs who just want someone locked up fast.

Released in China last year, the film became a domestic box-office smash: no minor feat for an art-house movie shot on 16mm film that opens with a quote from Albert Camus. In the west, it might be tempting to see crowds flocking subversively to a portrait of flawed authority. But those flaws are safely three decades in the past. Anyway, a simpler pleasure may well have been more influential. Having seen the movie, Chinese audiences then thronged social media to debate the plot, a modern forum for an age-old question. No, but seriously, whodunnit?

In Ti West’s 1979-set slasher movie X, Mia Goth played would-be porn star Maxine and elderly killer Pearl. Spinning the film out into a triptych rather than a trilogy, the 1919-set Pearl was about the younger days of the murderess, while MaXXXine is set in 1985 and catches up with what the final girl of the Texas Porn Star Massacre did next in her life. Eventual binge-watchers will notice the way elements recur with variations across all three movies — something Maxine does at the climax mirrors what Pearl did in her film.

In a moment of metatextuality which functions also as a scare scene, Maxine has her head coated with goo as a make-up artist makes an impression to be used to create a severed-head prop for a dream sequence. She is transformed by dripping white gunk into the ghost image of old Pearl, who actually told her she would end up looking like her. The fact that Mia Goth must have been through this process in real life to create the make-up mask which transformed her into Pearl in X adds a further layer to a film which is in some danger of becoming too clever by half, but consistently pulls back to deliver a cinematic coup or reveal another facet of determined protagonist Maxine. Goth’s not-exactly-admirable survivor-type is always centre-screen.

X was a homage to the grainy, gritty, sunstruck look shared by 1970s porn of the Deep Throat variety and the down-home horror-movies often made by the same film students at a different step in their careers. Pearl was a sumptuous candy-Technicolor recreation of the style of classic Hollywood melodramas, musicals and small-town nostalgia movies, with a lush, sweeping old orchestral score. It’s a risk to make a series where every instalment looks and sounds different, but West has been a master of evoking bygone styles since his homage to 1970s TV movies, The House Of The Devil.

In Maxxxine, the series moves away from the made-in-New Zealand Texas farmhouse with adjacent alligator lake of the first two pictures into a 1980s Hollywood which is at once scuzzy and vibrant. With perfect needle drops — Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’, Kim Carnes’ ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ — and an array of authentic costumes and hairdos, this inhabits video-rental space with Abel Ferrara’s Fear City, Brian De Palma’s Body Double, William Friedkin’s To Live And Die In L.A. — not to mention a whole lot of non-auteurist exploitation pictures like the teenage-hooker classic Angel trilogy, the cult-of-killers cop flick Cobra and the extraordinary mad-movie-buff film Fade To Black. MaXXXine revisits the Hollywood locations of some of these VHS gems and is packed with film Easter eggs: an early alleyway threat comes from a stalker dressed as Buster Keaton, and a key backlot chase scene has Mia Goth chased by Kevin Bacon through the Bates Mansion created for Psycho II.

X and Pearl both take their time getting to the very gory horrors — that house façade isn’t the first reference to crime story-turned-gothic Psycho in the series. MaXXXine is more upfront and ’80s about things, with a simmering air of menace and regular atrocities as Maxine sticks to her plan of getting out of adult movies into mainstream cinema, despite bodies dropping all around and a sinister figure out to coerce her into appearing in yet another type of film with an even more twisted agenda.

Where X riffed on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Pearl was inspired by Sirkian Technicolor, MaXXXine owes a debt to Body Double, which was also set in the blurry borderlands between disreputable B-movies and adult film. As touchpoints go, it’s a pretty good one. Like Brian De Palma’s tawdry-gorgeous thriller, MaXXXine takes place in a city where seediness and luxury coexist, and where a mansion in the Hollywood Hills is just a quick ride away from the peep show where Maxine works when she isn’t shooting porn. The trick isn’t accessing those elite spaces — the women Maxine meets, played by the likes of Halsey and Lily Collins, are always headed off to parties in the hills — but proving you belong there as more than just a party favor for powerful guests. The first time we see Goth in the film, she’s a silhouette strutting through the massive doors of a soundstage: a literal gate, behind which are sitting the metaphorical gatekeepers for whom she’s about to try out.

One of them is Elizabeth Bender (an iceberg-lettuce-crisp Elizabeth Debicki), the director of the first Puritan, whose declarations about wanting to make a sequel that’s a “B movie with A ideas” are clearly meant to be self-referential, as well as self-deprecating. But that’s the irritating thing about West’s project — it’s not a compliment to say that it’s easy to imagine the three films being projected simultaneously on opposing walls of a museum display, because they feel more like an installation to be sampled than stories that need to be experienced one after another. West knows how to move a camera and light a scene, to be sure. When the lens glides from Maxine’s shitty apartment building to follow the departure of her best friend, Leon (Moses Sumney), on a skateboard, and then across the street to the figure staking her out in a car across the street, the sheer artfulness of the shot is its own satisfaction. But MaXXXine, like X and like Pearl, is more focused on being in conversation with the horror genre than it is on its audience. When the film arrives at the conclusion that being a star requires a helping of psychopathy, it’s Goth who’s able to make that feel like something other than a glib punchline.

X paid tribute to horror films of the 1970s, while the 1910s-set Pearl slyly referenced live-action Disney pictures, but MaXXXine is not as entertaining an homage to its cinematic influences. Cinematographer Eliot Rockett and production designer Jason Kisvarday provide West with an appropriately seedy and sun-soaked L.A., but the film fails to cleverly embody 1980s’ cinematic hallmarks, its Brian De Palma allusions fairly obvious. Still, those who enjoy period hits from ZZ Top and Kim Carnes will be happy to hear them blasting on the soundtrack.

West seems more invested in the political forces at work during the era, noting the rise of religious conservatism in America which led to the entertainment industry being accused of promoting godlessness, even Satanism. No surprise, then, that the name of the film that will be Maxine’s big break is willfully blasphemous — and that the mysterious killer brands his victims with a pentagram, the mark of the devil. Incorporating archive clips of Ronald Reagan, MaXXXine seeks to spotlight a period in which horror stood in defiance of the Moral Majority, a reactionary movement that sought to demonise art it found abhorrent.

Unfortunately, that commentary is never especially insightful and, likewise, West has little success critiquing Hollywood (both the city and the industry) as a place that lures in aspiring performers only to exploit them. Maxine encounters cliched characters wherever she turns and, while some are meant to be parodies of specific types — such as Bacon’s no-good New Orleans detective — neither the script nor the performances contain enough wit to make the satire stick. Debicki plays a blandly intimidating film director, while Monaghan and Cannavale are one-note cops in search of the killer. (The meagre running joke about Cannavale’s character is that he wanted to be an actor, delivering every line with extra gravitas as a way to hold onto his thwarted aspirations.) Even worse, the film’s expected gross-out violence is subpar, rarely offering the liberating rebuke to the era’s uptight handwringing.

And now a public service announcement for the genre-savvy: know upfront that the trailer is something of a bum steer; Brian De Palma’s twisty erotic thrillers simply inform the mood, and you won’t get very far trying to guess who the teasingly little-seen killer is simply from their androgynous black get-up. In the same way, it’s really not an homage to Italian giallo; with the exception of one very bloody set-piece, this isn’t a murder-mystery in the usual sense.

In fact, the reveal is really quite disappointing after the hell-for-leather lead-up of X and Pearl, both of which freely experimented with storytelling techniques and film grammar to sell the sizzle as well as the steak. Surprisingly, despite an obvious nod to the Mitchell brothers’ 1972 porno-chic breakout Behind the Green Door, West is very traditional this time round, literally romping through the Universal studio lot in a journey that will take Maxine to the Psycho house and, well… is that really the Back to the Future town square set?

These incremental moments build up, because — and this may be complete conjecture — West doesn’t seem to be that interested in wrapping up his trilogy with yet another pastiche horror movie. Sometimes clumsily but more often not, MaXXXine has things to say about the objectification and humiliation of women in Hollywood, as actors and directors, and, alongside that, the belittling of horror as a genre too. As the figurehead for this, Debicki is a little on the nose with her delivery, demanding perfection while not exactly exuding passion, but it’s hard not to see where she’s coming from when she gives Maxine an on-set pep talk, insisting, “We’ll prove them all wrong together in a beautiful f*cking bloodbath.”

Tinseltown, 1985. Maxine Minx is a porn star who wants to be a legit movie actor, but this is a horror movie by the schlocky Ti West, so you ought to adjust your expectations accordingly. West – swapping mediums and using scratchy VHS to match the film’s period, as well as splashy cuts and Brian De Palma split-screens – leans heavily into the 80s setting. As an opening montage informs us, this is the era of the video nasty, evangelical boycotts of pornography, and a serial killer known as the Night Stalker haunting the streets of the city: Maxine (Mia Goth) is in a pressure cooker.

MaXXXine is the splashy third instalment in Ti West’s loose trilogy of self-conscious period-set horror flicks, following on from his slasher movies X and Pearl. It’s also the weakest of the three. Each film shares a lead actress – the alien-eyed, strange, baby-voiced powerhouse that is Mia Goth – and themes around stardom, sex, fame, violence, and the act of filmmaking. Each are glossy pastiches of movie history, which makes them both great fun and not particularly deep.

Here, Maxine is a self-invented star of the early home video porno craze, working out of Los Angeles after discarding a traumatic past back in the heartland. (We soon realise she is the previous protagonist of X, who was the sole survivor of a homicidal rampage).

“X,” the first movie in Ti West’s grungy but elevated artisanal-trash horror franchise (it’s been billed as a trilogy but may yet produce further installments), was an unusually effective stab at recreating the ’70s farmhouse-turned-charnel-house vibe of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” spiced with the fleshpot voyeurism of ’70s porn. For a retro slasher movie, it was a novelty and a curio. The insane killer was an old farm wife suffering from erotic frustration — played, under a ton of make-up, by Mia Goth, the same actress who played one of the film’s porn performers. The movie was leagues better than your average “Chain Saw” knockoff, yet it never quite transcended the slasher formula. It was a psycho thriller crafted with a fanboy filmmaker’s encyclopedic rigor.

But “Pearl,” a prequel that West shot directly after “X” (it was released just six months later in 2022), took a startling leap. It told the backstory of that ancient farm lady — who, in “Pearl,” was now an apple-cheeked lass living on her family’s Texas homestead in 1918, obsessed with becoming a star in the racy new world of motion pictures.

Goth played her once again, only this time the character was vibrant and driven, alive with aspiration — and the movie took us inside all that to the point that when she starts to kill people, you have the rare sensation of empathy for a demented slasher. Goth had a seven-minute confessional monologue in “Pearl” that was like something delivered by Liv Ullmann. And yet, wielding a pitchfork as a murder weapon, she was also terrifying. The movie was about madness, about the dawn of feminism, about “Carrie” and “The Wizard of Oz,” about the bloody horror of dreams denied. And Mia Goth proved that she’s a wonder of an actress. “Pearl” was a quantum leap over “X,” and it made you think: If this is Part 2, what does Ti West have up his sleeve for the third installment?

That movie, which opens July 3, is called “Maxxxine,” it’s set in 1985, and it’s named for the character Goth played in “X,” who is now a noted adult-film actress, Maxine Minx, in the halfway corporatized straight-to-video world of Los Angeles skin flicks. Maxine, like Pearl, longs to be a star. Early on, she auditions for a role in a horror movie called “The Puritan II,” which looks like “The Crucible” redone as a grade-Z blood feast. For her, though, it would be more than a step up. It would be a step toward legitimacy and maybe stardom. Porn stars, at the time, had little to no chance of breaking into mainstream movies, an idea that was at least flirted with when Brian De Palma considered casting the triple-X superstar Annette Haven in “Body Double” (the studio said: over our dead stock portfolio). But in “Maxxxine,” the title character’s yearning to cross over endows her with an underdog fervor.

The way the film presents it, it’s Maxine’s hunger for stardom, her hellbent wish to lift herself out of the trough of the sex industry, that sets her apart. That and her inner fire. And inner fire, as we know from “Pearl,” is something that Mia Goth can really bring. She plays Maxine with a come-hither aggression that’s direct and compelling enough to let us wonder if Maxine could be hardcore porn’s hidden answer to Vivien Leigh.

When a filmmaker recreates an old genre, to the point that it’s obvious he has steeped himself in it, it’s generally a sign that he’s aiming high, trying to make “cinema.” That’s certainly true of Ti West. In his up-from-low-budget-gone-A24 way, he’s as obsessed with old movies as Quentin Tarantino; he riffs on them as a fetishistic act of cult homage. But just as Tarantino can draw on the lowest of grindhouse muck, West, in “Maxxxine,” applies his genre-movie scholasticism to a form that seems, on the face of it, to be the definition of disreputable: the ’80s sexploitation thriller — the kind of badly lit product, featuring women in heavy-metal lingerie and psycho stalkers who are like leering stand-ins for the men in the audience, that no one ever pretended was any good. De Palma drew on some of these films too, but “Maxxxine” is less contempo De Palma than a knowing nod to the movies you used to see stacked up in VHS bargain bins in convenience stores.

These overlapping cases begin intruding on Maxine’s career, and beneath her defiant persona, the horrors of the past are never too far from her mind. And to show this, with his tongue very firmly in cheek, West depicts Maxine on a tour of the Universal lot, outside the Bates Motel, imagining that she’s seeing the ghost of Pearl in the windows of the looming house above, where another cinematic killing spree took place. If directly invoking Psycho will further embolden the horror auteurists who have begun to view West as a hack who adds nothing to his myriad influences, then directly drawing narrative parallels between it and X––which should be uncontroversial on paper, considering the well-trod slasher template Hitchcock forged––will turn them apoplectic. It’s not even the only time a set piece takes us to the Bates Motel, and if such shameless Hitchcock pastiche feels designed to get his biggest critics labeling him a poor man’s Brian De Palma, well, West is self-aware enough to be on the defensive before a single blow has been struck. Why else would there be a Frankie Goes to Hollywood-scored nightclub scene if not to tip the hat to Body Double?

Before the film starts, there’s a quote from legendary actress Bette Davis: “Until you’re known in my profession as a monster, you’re not a star.” Funnily enough, that quote clues into why the movie didn’t work much for me. To West’s credit, like his previous two films, MaXXXine displays his knowledge of the aesthetics that each film inhabits, in this case, the 80s slashers and Giallo films. In particular, MaXXXine plays very similar to Brian De Palma’s 1984 erotic thriller Body Double.

That film was one that De Palma made in response to the criticism he was receiving for his other erotic thrillers at the time, and he intentionally went all out with sexuality and violence. It seems like in making a movie that wants to be as sleazy as those thrillers; you need elements of sleaziness in your real-life personality. West doesn’t have that, and as a result, MaXXXine feels way too sanitized and glossy to stand alongside those thrillers.

West’s Los Angeles “sleaze noir’ is a seedy haven for murder, treachery, and broken dreams. At first glance, it’s giving Brian De Palma, Dario Argento, and Nicolas Winding Refn; Los Angeles is burning behind VHS static that recreates the experience of watching outdated tubular televisions. An unnamed criminal with squeaky black leather gloves slices victims open in West’s horror-forward scenes, while procedural true crime inspirations — Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale play persistent detectives — chase a dangerous whodunit. It’s West doing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by way of Deep Red, but also daffily unserious at parts, which can become a tonal mishmash.

Maxxxine is pulled in too many thematic directions, trying to wrap a young starlet’s evolution from zero to hero, while also encapsulating 1980s Los Angeles’ lawless Wild West period. There are details that remain vivid, like Maxine evading John by sprinting into the backlot Psycho house, or pentacles seared into dead flesh — but also an overall glitzy shallowness. Giallo notes are muted, horror fierceness takes a backseat, and the dopey B-movie sheen that promotes illicit entertainment reads like caricature exaggerations. Where X had me on the edge of my seat, enraptured by tension, Maxxxine struggles with momentum. West never quite delivers a soup-to-nuts slasher, or fulfilling Night Stalker caper, lost in Maxine’s ascension to a detriment.

West has set his film in 1985, when another (real-life) killer, known as the Night Stalker, was terrorising LA – and there is something of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in its bleary mingling of fiction and fact. The photography by longtime West collaborator Eliot Rockett evokes the era with vivid ease: his hot colours and grimy surfaces leave a residue, but one you don’t necessarily want to wash off.

The style is impeccable. The substance, not so much. Perhaps after Pearl, MaXXXine is simply a victim of heightened expectations, but it has little of its predecessor’s mischief or steely psychological brinksmanship. Instead, we get a jumble sale’s worth of homages and an odd and eventually derivative stop-start storyline, in which you often feel as if you’re watching Goth literally walk from one subplot to the next.

The references are enormous fun: we get Psycho’s Bates Motel as an unlikely refuge, Kevin Bacon as a scummy private eye with a Chinatown nose plaster, and lashings of Brian De Palma’s Body Double and Paul Schrader’s Hardcore. West clearly adores these films, and in an ideal world, MaXXXine would have joined them in the canon. In the event, though, it’s content to lust after them from the confines of the peep show booth, nose pressed up against the grubby glass.

Shocking and resonant, disarmingly grotesque and weirdly fun, “The Substance” is a feminist body-horror film that should be shown in movie theaters all over the land. By that, I don’t mean that it’s some elegant exercise in egghead darkness like the films of David Cronenberg, or a patchy postmodern punk curio like “Titane.” Coralie Fargeat, the writer-director of “The Substance,” has a voice that’s italicized, in-your-face, garishly accessible and thrillingly extreme. She draws on much of the hyperbolic flamboyance that’s come to define megaplex horror. But unlike 90 percent of those movies, “The Substance” is the work of a filmmaker with a vision. She’s got something primal to say to us.

Fargeat, who has made one previous feature (2017’s “Revenge”), works in a wide-angle-lens, up-from-exploitation style that might be described as cartoon grindhouse Kubrick. It’s like “A Clockwork Orange” fused with the kinetic aesthetics of a state-of-the-art television commercial. Fargeat favors super-close-ups (of body parts, cars, eating, kissing), with sounds to match, and she also vacuums up influences the way Brian De Palma once did (though he, in this case, is one of them). We’ve all seen dozens of retreads of the Jekyll-and-Hyde story, but Fargeat, in her imaginative audacity, fuses it with “Showgirls,” and even that isn’t enough for her. She draws heavily on the hallucinatory moment in “The Shining” where Jack Torrance embraces a young woman in a bathtub, only to see her transformed into a cackling old crone. Beyond that, Fargeat‘s images recall the exploding-beast-with-a-writhing-face in John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” the bloodbath prom of “Carrie,” and the addiction-turned-dread of “Requiem for a Dream.”

What makes all of this original is that Coralie Fargeat fuses it with her own stylized aggro voice (she favors minimal dialogue, which pops like something out of a graphic novel), and with her feminist outrage over the way that women have been ruled by the world of images. At first, though, the over-the-top-ness does take a bit of getting used. Dennis Quaid plays the brash pig of a network executive, in baroquely decorated suit jackets, who has decided to fire Elisabeth, and when he’s having lunch with her, shoving shrimp in his mouth from what feels like four inches away from the audience, you want to recoil as much as she does. But Fageat is actually great with her actors; she knows that Quaid’s charisma, even when he’s playing a showbiz vulgarian as reprehensible as this, will make him highly watchable.

Special makeup effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin becomes the film’s secret weapon in its second half. Unlike other films that claim to be body-horror, Fargeat delivers in spectacular and revolting fashion, not just conjuring memories of David Cronenberg but also Brian De Palma. At 140 minutes, The Substance can feel bloated and a tad repetitive, but the extra runtime allows Fargeat to push her disturbing premise to its logical, funny, utterly disgusting end point.

On his twitter-X page this afternoon, Landon himself posted, "Finally get to announce this one. I’m so excited to work with such a talented group of people. This is my love letter to DePalma."