I love a good horror movie anthology, and XX is a good horror movie anthology. It’s also a necessary film if you’re bothering with that whole #52FilmsByWomen hashtag, an endeavor I can neither recommend nor condemn; it’s important to seek out movies by women and watch them, but if half of the 52 films by women you see in a single year were released in other years than the current one, then you’re both proving the hashtag’s thesis while also perpetuating the need for its existence. (Meaning: Nobody gives a shit if you finally decided to see The Night Porter, because seeing The Night Porter in 2017 doesn’t help women get movies made in 2017, now, does it? Try harder to give money to the female-helmed movies being made in the present tense, you plonkers. Christ, I love you all, but you’re so damn dense sometimes that it makes me want to hurt myself.)
Anyways! XX satisfies both your hashtagging enterprises and your horror cravings, being not terribly scary for the most part (outside of Roxanne Benjamin’s segment, which I would love to see adapted into a feature), but being thoroughly disturbing from start to finish, often striking to look at, and occasionally hilarious. I dug it. Obviously. There’s a whole article with my name on it over at Paste Magazine explaining why I dug it so much. I might advise you turn your gaze over that way.
A Constant Visual Feast 