Glass (2019)

** SPOILER WARNING **

Having in the last unexpected scene of 2016's Split created a connection between that film and his Unbreakable film from sixteen years earlier, M Night Shyamalan continues the unlikely series in this third film by having a new character, Dr Ellie Staple, assemble the old characters in a psychiatric ward for sessions of psychoanalysis designed to break the patients' shared delusion that they are superheroes, which, as a plot, raises interesting ideas about human potential, shared experience and the limits people place on themselves, and with the glut of superhero blockbusters in cinemas, this plot provides a welcome spin on a tired genre, but the movie errs in the end when it seems to choose a side but abandons viewers on the other side of the movie's central question: is anything extraordinary happening on the screen?

★★★☆☆

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Split (2016)

I went into this horror thriller about three girls kidnapped by a man with 23 or perhaps 24 distinct personalities confident I had worked out in advance director M Night Shyamalan's trademark twist and I am pleased to say the always fascinating Split is not one of Shyamalan's bad films like Lady In The Water but a good one like Unbreakable in that it delivers a delicious curveball in the end that is as unexpected as it is dismaying (because my ending was less surprising but better and certainly what was intended, I think, before the marketing team's endscene got tacked-on instead).

★★★★☆

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Unbreakable (2000)

M Night Shyamalan has made some good movies and some stinkers, and this one with its hypnotic tone, Bruce Willis' gravitas as the sole survivor of a plane crash, and a clever slow shift of the story into an unexpected direction is terrific.

★★★★☆

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