Bob Garver
Special to Valley News
“A Quiet Place: Day One” made a grave miscalculation with its advertising. Scenes were filmed with the intention of putting them in the trailers, but not the movie. This way, when people saw the movie, they wouldn’t be able to properly anticipate the surprises and story progression. To that end, the advertising succeeded, I was indeed thrown off while watching the movie. But here’s where they didn’t succeed: the scenes shot just for the trailers were terrible, with clumsy dialogue and careless pacing. I was so mad at Hollywood for continuing this series without the creative vision of director John Krasinski, especially when the movie looked like garbage without his input. I only saw this movie out of obligation for the column, and I wouldn’t

Say hello to Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), the antihero of Ti West’s “MaXXXine,” the third installment in his hastily dispatched “X” trilogy. Last we saw Maxine, in 2022’s “X,” she was speeding away from a late-’70s-set Texas porn-star massacre, leaving a trail of bloody carnage in her wake. It’s now six years later, in 1985 Los Angeles, and Maxine, an industrious starlet and peep-show performer, is determined to transcend her trashy, traumatic origins to become a capital S star of the silver screen, no matter what it takes.

Maxine won’t let anything get in the way of her rise after she scores her first mainstream film role in a horror sequel titled “The Puritan II.” It’s her big shot and nothing’s going to stop her: no butchered friends, no city-terrorizing “Night Stalker,” no pesky LAPD detectives and no annoying private eye (Kevin Bacon) on her tail. Maxine, as she often tells herself like a mantra, will not accept a life she does not deserve, and don’t you forget it.

Like “X” and its prequel “Pearl,”, “MaXXXine” offers writer-director-editor West an opportunity for genre play. If “X” was a grimy slasher and “Pearl” was a Technicolor melodrama with ax-killing, “MaXXXine” wears the skin of a sexy, sleazy ’80s erotic thriller. But that proves to be only its aesthetic: There’s neither eroticism nor thrills here, just a cute costume.

All the audio and visual signifiers are there: a great soundtrack of period-appropriate needle drops (including ZZ Top and Ratt), meticulous production and costume design re-creating ’80s Hollywood, lots of stylistic nods to Italy’s leather-gloved giallo films and the filmography of Brian De Palma. But West doesn’t wield these references with any intent, and in fact, there are far too many. The movie is too clever by half, but it’s not even that clever at all.

West bonks us over the head with gestures to film history — a Buster Keaton impersonator threatens Maxine in an alley; Bacon, done up in “Chinatown” drag, chases her on a studio backlot and up the stairs of the house from “Psycho” — but none of these nods adds up to anything meaningful. They’re just increasingly sharp elbow jabs to the ribs. When Maxine stomps Buster’s genitalia, it becomes clear that it’s all just a cheap joke, a cinematic pun engineered for movie nerds but rendered without a lick of suspense or tension.

And what of the murder mystery? The Night Stalker murders thrum in the background, devoid of context, an item to hear about on the nightly news. Maxine’s colleagues do turn up dead, carved with Satanic symbols, but like the ones she left behind in Texas, their deaths are seemingly mere speed bumps on her road to success. It’s not entirely clear why she views the LAPD detectives (Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale) with hostility, except that they’re making her late for her first day on set of “The Puritan II,” where icy British director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki) delivers to Maxine wordy but ultimately meaningless monologues about the philosophy of art and the industry.

Like these talky speeches, West packs “MaXXXine” with familiar quotes, images and truisms that gesture toward “Hollywood commentary,” but there’s no actual comment. He manages to say nothing at all and is unwilling to indict his leading lady, thereby undercutting her power. Ruthlessly ambitious Maxine is far more interesting when we conceive of her as the villain in this story, not its savior. West indicates her true nature with an opening quote from Bette Davis: “In this business, until you’re known as a monster, you’re not a star.” But he consistently waffles on that premise, depriving Maxine — and “MaXXXine” — of any real bite.

Only Goth truly understands her character, as she understood Pearl (who she embodied both as an elderly killer and a budding young murderess), and she plays the porn star with a heart of coal like the ferocious, hard-scrabbling striver she is. When Maxine is bad, Goth is very good; unfortunately, West never lets her off the leash. Goth holds “MaXXXine” together through the sheer force of her charisma, despite the bumpy plot, an underwritten character and the plodding, perfunctory kills that arrive like clockwork.

It’s disappointing, because “X” was a fascinating piece about locating one’s own desire and self-actualization through making movies. It was smart and sly, and there was so much promise in this thesis, which was further explored on a character level in “Pearl” and which could have been built upon in “MaXXXine” through the idea of voyeurism in the erotic thriller. But it all becomes hopelessly muddled.

Ultimately, “MaXXXine” is a lot like the set through which she is chased on the studio backlot: a beautiful facade that’s empty behind the walls — all surface, meaningless symbols and not an ounce of substance to be found.

Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos hasn’t made the world wait long for the follow-up to his engrossing and thought-provoking “Poor Things,” a nominee earlier this year for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Going into wide release this week, not quite seven months after “Poor Things” introduced the world to Emma Stone’s unforgettable Bella Baxter, the director’s intriguing, entrancing and, at times, confounding “Kinds of Kindness” is said to have been shot quickly during the lengthy post-production phase of its visually elaborate predecessor.

A “triptych fable,” “Kinds of Kindness” boasts many of the same actors — among them, not surprisingly, is Stone, who deservedly won the Oscar for Best Actress for “Poor Things” for her spectacular and fearless performance — playing different characters in its three stories.

To say this trio of tales is “loosely connected” is a bit generous, although Yorgos Stefanakos’ R.M.F. is a titular figure — but also only so relevant narratively — in each.

One would expect there to be a greater thematic thread tying together “The Death of R.M.F.,” “R.M.F. Is Flying” and “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” but, at least on initial viewing, that connective tissue is pretty thin. In each, at least one character is some degree of desperate to please at least one other character who is some degree of controlling — and, more often not, one of the latter figures is portrayed by fellow “Things” alum Willem Dafoe (“The Florida Project”). Given the gifts of Lanthimos, there surely is more metaphorical meat on the bone to be chewed upon during and after a repeat viewing.

Know, however, that “Kinds of Kindness” is co-written by Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou, the latter a collaborator on the former’s more self-indulgent (if still radically interesting) films, including “The Lobster” (2015) and “The Killing of the Sacred Deer,” in which the pair’s absurdist leanings sometimes got the better of them. (Nowhere to be found in the credits here is writer Tony McNamara, who helped shape “Poor Thing” and Lanthimos’ other unquestionably terrific — and Oscar-nominated — film, 2018’s “The Favourite.”)

It comes as no shock, then, that “Kinds of Kindness” sometimes, perhaps even often, feels like it’s being absurd because … well, just because.

That said, it also is a film that, with every scene, has you hanging on with great interest to see what will come next. As a result, it is a two-and-a-half-hour-plus endeavor that goes by remarkably quickly. Whatever its sins, stagnation isn’t one of them.

Stone, appropriately, receives top billing, but Jesse Plemons gets at least a bit more time within the frame.

That’s mainly because while the two are co-leads in the subsequent acts, Stone is a supporting player in “The Death of R.M.F.” Plemons is front and center as Robert, who doesn’t just work for Dafoe’s Raymond but long has been engaged in a bizarre agreement with him. Raymond dictates areas of Robert’s life from his weight — the former is frustrated by the latter appearing to have lost weight, as he finds thin men to be ridiculous — to his intimacy and more with his wife, Sarah (Hong Chau, “The Menu,” “The Whale”). This power dynamic is upset when Raymond finally asks too much of Robert, with Robert subsequently seeing Stone’s Rita as a means to an end.

Next comes “R.M.F. Is Flying,” in which police officer Daniel (Plemons) is distraught because his beloved wife, Liz (Stone), has been lost at sea. When she is found alive and returns to him, Daniel believes something is amiss, Liz enjoying things — chocolate and cigarettes among them — she didn’t previously and, more mysteriously, not fitting comfortably into her shoes. While some around him believe Daniel to be having a psychotic event, he sets about proving his theory.

Lastly, we get “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” which sees Stone’s Emily and Plemons’ Andrew as members of a spiritual cult led by Dafoe’s Omi and Chau’s Aka. Omi and Aka, who bless the group’s all-important “uncontaminated” water with their tears, regularly dispatch Emily and Andrew on missions to search for a figure to fulfill a prophecy of a female twin who can raise the dead.

We’ve kept things vague — believe it or not, it’s all even stranger than it sounds — purposefully because, again, revelations along the way comprise much of the enjoyment “Kinds of Kindness” has to offer.

It also offers fine supporting work from Margaret Qualley (“Poor Things,” “Drive-Away Dolls”), Mamoudou Athie (“Elemental,” “The Burial”) and Joe Alwyn (“The Favourite,” “Catherine Called Birdy”) in each of the three parts.

Plemons (“Power of the Dog,” “Killers of the Flower Moon”), who seems almost as if he’s in more films than he isn’t these days, is his usual dependable self and oddly likable even when the person he’s playing isn’t.

Meanwhile, Stone — also an Academy Award winner for 2017’s “La La Land” and a nominee for 2015’s “Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)” and “The Favourite” — is sensational again. There may be no Oscar in her future for her work here, but with the energy and personality she brings to each, her character is the most interesting thing on screen in any scene she’s in, which is saying something given some of the happenings in “Kinds of Kindness.”

Stone won’t be enough to keep some viewers from becoming turned off by “Kinds of Kindness.” It’s weird, to be sure, sometimes sexually gratuitous, often dark, occasionally violent and longer than the average movie. As such, it simply won’t fit the tastes of some folks.

Poor things.

“Kinds of Kindness” is rated R for strong/disturbing violent content, strong sexual content, full nudity and language. Runtime: 2 hours, 44 minutes.