Mia Goth returns for the third chapter of the X trilogy as an adult film star trying to take a crack at horror while a serial killer stalks the city’s sex workers

Director Ti West goes three for three, serving up a horribly watchable new episode in his outrageous black-comic franchise of aspirational horror porn, this time set in 80s Hollywood. Mia Goth returns triumphantly as Maxine, now known as adult movie star MaXXXine Minx, whose traumatic teen story was told in X from 2022 and its 2023 prequel Pearl. West mulches up a thick impasto of pulp, gore, filth and fear and gets away with some colossally self-aware scenes, including one in the Bates Motel set on the Universal studio lot, and one under the Hollywood sign; there is also some blue chip acting talent in the supporting roles.

The year is 1985 in sunny Los Angeles and the titles for this film are striped across the screen in Flashdance-type lettering, flickering a little at the edges as if being broadcast on live TV. Ronald Reagan is telling America its best days are by no means behind it; Frankie Goes to Hollywood and ZZ Top are on the turntable and at one cinema Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary is evidently being shown for one night only. MaXXXine is now in her early 30s; a ruthless survivor and Ripleyesque careerist, she is determined to crown her work in porn with a crossover to horror, from where the further move into legitimate movie stardom is surely but a small step.

Peter Finch won a posthumous Oscar for his uproarious performance as a swivel-eyed news anchor – a cross between Billy Graham and Donald Trump

‘The time has come to say … is ‘dehumanisation’ such a bad word?” The speaker is Howard Beale, the sweat-drenched, swivel-eyed TV news anchor in this classic 1976 satire from screenwriter Paddy Chayevsky and director Sidney Lumet, now on rerelease. Depressed by the loss of his wife and by getting fired due to dwindling audiences, Beale proclaims he will kill himself live on air and is then re-hired as a colossal popular and then populist success, his celebrity delirium turning him into a crazy prophet, telling millions of Americans to scream out of the window that they are as mad as hell and not going to take it any more. Beale is a mixture of Billy Graham, radio star Orson Welles telling America the Martians are coming, and that notorious ratings-obsessive Donald Trump.

Network finds its place in the distinctive Hollywood tradition of showing TV as meretricious, mindless and corrupt … as opposed, presumably, to movies. It’s a classic 70s mainstreamer, a terrifically well-made, well-written talking point to put alongside other richly enjoyable small-screen dramas such as Robert Aldrich’s The Killing of Sister George from 1968, James L Brooks’s Broadcast News in 1987, Robert Redford’s Quiz Show from 1994 – and Antonio Campos’s Christine, about Christine Chubbuck, the American TV news reporter who in 1974 really did kill herself live on the air. Chayevsky denied she was the inspiration for this film. Peter Finch gives an uproarious performance as Beale, for which he posthumously won the best actor Oscar after succumbing to a fatal heart attack in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel – a fate hardly less satirical or poignant than Beale’s own.

Film-maker Erica Tremblay tells a thoughtful tale about a woman’s battle to care for her niece against backdrop of the authorities’ ambivalence towards Native American peoples

In Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily Gladstone made a deep impression with her stillness and controlled presence. This is different; in a fiction-feature debut from Native American documentary-maker Erica Tremblay, Gladstone’s performance is looser, more open, less reserved. Simply put: she does more acting, and gives strength and substance to a dense, knotty family drama which though maybe anticlimactic in the final act – and too reliant on a handgun plot-point – is fluent and heartfelt.

Gladstone plays Jax, living on Oklahoma’s Seneca-Cayuga Nation reservation, trying to put behind her a life of dealing drugs but still on the fringes of crime. She has been looking after her teen niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), since the disappearance of Roki’s mother Tawi, but Roki fervently believes that Tawi will reappear for the annual powwow at which they once the stole the show with their mother-daughter dance. Things are even more complicated by the fact that Jax’s father is white; this is Frank (Shea Whigham) who, since the death of Jax’s mother, has remarried Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski), a white woman.