Old (M. Night Shyamalan, 2021)

The severe betrayal of The Last Airbender and the more routine disappointment of After Earth were clearly glitches. Ever since 2015's The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan has held on to his title as the best Hollywood director standing and the incredible Old proves that any contender will have to come up with a Showgirls to approach his level. I won't say much here because a talent as formidable as Shyamalan deserves more than a blog post and I want to avoid spoilers so as to preserve the many shocks coming your way. But Old continues his knack, most legible in my beloved Lady in the Water, for creating meta-narratives - stories in which the characters are trying to figure out the stories. Thus, the first act becomes blissfully foreshortened and lends the impression that Shyamalan is not adept at traditional storytelling. (As if that matters. A colleague once complained that Unbreakable had only two acts. Um, yeah, that's part of why it's so great!) In actuality, he's enormously economical, dropping brief bits of narrative information in the first ten, twenty minutes of the film that will become necessary to push the story forward later on. A tight, resourceful, consistently surprising mainstream horror film that doesn't exploit gore and trauma and refrains from wallowing in sexual puritanism? I believe in miracles. 

Grade: hardcore-ass A!