Split

The King is back in full force. While others pound it into you for two hours and go soft at the end, Shyamalan spends more than half the film escaping to comedic proprieties that are quite creepy knowing that three young girls are being held against their will in the basement. While McAvoy is cutely tripping on his tongue, or strictly driven by OCD (if the Academy wasn't so exclusive to certain genres, the Oscar nomination would have been there for him), somewhere in the back you begin to sense a creeping evil. The last half hour is pure phantasmagoria driven to the extreme, but so precisely handled cinematically that the dark vibe will knock a hole out from within your head. Anya Taylor-Joy will be a big star one day (hopefully outside the genre). PS: The bar scene isn't gratuitous - it's a confident and bold joke that harkens back to a time when some people and some things made us feel confident. (01/19/2017)

They say Shyamalan is back with this film, but I have the feeling that he never fully left. With a few exceptions, he's still doing the same stuff: ghost stories, or at least thrillers, often with naturalistic elements, where the primary role is played for 90 percent of the film's running time by a crystallizing twist that more or less shocks at the end. But once the rules are set, it's good to stick to them. And so, when the whole film has the undertone of the reality of the laws of physics of the contemporary world, it is good to stick to them for the whole duration, because that final game-changer irritated me a lot. And this is one of the reasons why Now You See Me, which pissed off many a film fan with its digital trick escapades, was a flop. Maybe at least McAvoy will get an award for his performance, it was awesome! (01/29/2017)

Finally! A couple of years after I declared war on Shyamalan, the formerly miraculous revelation of mystery cinema, and condemned his more recent works with a series of expletives, the stubborn Indian managed to hold his own and in less than two hours didn’t make me sleepy, angry or bored. Split may not match the claustrophobic atmosphere of Signs or the subtlety of Unbreakable, but the overall concept of a narrative based on the gradual unveiling of the two main characters, the hunter and the victim, is outrageously appealing and, hand in hand with the impeccable performance of McAvoy, and Taylor-Joy and the director's renewed sense of intense and believable tension, creates an impulsive whirlwind of interesting filmmaking ideas and games. I was a little disappointed by the lack of any truly surprising twists, but if Shyamalan has longer term plans for this fictional world (as the final scene suggests), as an interlude, Split is more than satisfying and successful. The climax with the shotgun in the gloomy corridors is the best in years. (04/18/2017)

McAvoy's captivating showreel, which is very good for a long time, then sometimes it gets quite bad (because it is unreasonably long) and boldly sophisticated during the meta-closing... Or desperate that already missed the bus. I do not (yet) know, since neither I don´t have a clear opinion on this. It will depend a lot on whether or not it's over, because it's not finished. (01/19/2017)

An uncompromising thriller about everything bad being good for something. James McAvoy shines fully, supporting characters deliver adequately, and if it weren't for the fact that the script occasionally pushes too much, I would leave with nothing but applause. The subject matter, which is professionally close to me, is just sufficiently overdone at the edge of the supernatural, so it could perhaps open the eyes of a few people. M. Night Shyamalan is, to my great delight, once again being hailed by the public as the king, but I don't plan to welcome him back. Because, for me, he never left. (01/19/2017)