Sorry to report: Even a mostly glossy cast can’t prevent Ti West’s “MaXXXine” from being a bring-down.

It’s a peculiarly static and distant third in the trilogy begun with the ripe and crafty 1979-set “X” and its giddily inventive prequel “Pearl,” set in 1918. With its 1985 Hollywood milieu, “MaXXXine” affords writer-director West, who knows his genre history, a promising immersion in the grubby, heavily saturated low-fi imagery of ’80s horror and thriller movies, preferably something with Betsy Russell or Kelly Preston. “Avenging Angel.” “Spellbinder.” “52 Pick-Up.” “Maniac Cop.” West’s storyline references directly some more widely known genre landmarks, notably “Psycho”; at one point, the Bates Motel and the adjoining “Psycho” house on the hill become part of the heroine’s personal backlot tour.

Mia Goth returns as Maxine Minx, eager to ditch the adult film industry for mainstream stardom. Her arrival in Hollywood coincides with the activities of a serial killer known as the Night Stalker, who’s terrorizing young women all over Los Angeles. But Maxine has her own private stash of serial-killing cred. “MaXXXine” takes place shortly after the “Texas Porn Star Massacre” events that concluded the “X” chapter of her eventful life. This time she’s out to nail the at-large predator, while taking care of her own career ambitions.

Her big break comes when one of rare working female film directors in the business (played by Elizabeth Debicki, evoking Kristin Scott Thomas at her iciest) casts her as the lead in “The Puritan II.” It may be a mere sequel to an ’80s horror project, but it too has ambitions — it’s what Debicki’s character calls one of her “B movies with A ideas.”

“MaXXXine” isn’t so lucky. Goth, who relished every nutty tonal swing in “Pearl,” dutifully goes through much narrower paces here, as dictated by the character we met in “X.” (In “Pearl” she played the elderly farmhouse maniac as a young woman.) The entire rhythm of “MaXXXine” feels draggy, even when the blood’s flying. If anything as slapdash as the climactic shootout behind the Hollywood sign in “MaXXXine” had made its way into West’s earlier features, I’m not sure he’d even have a career. And while there’s some payoff in the many visual callbacks to ’80s-and-earlier genre movies, at some point the filmmaker lost sight of how to best serve Goth a third time.

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She and her fellow actors do what they can. As the shamus just begging for an early demise, Kevin Bacon (sporting a droop of a mustache that says I am a loser) knows how to convey his interpretive zest and enjoyment to an audience. So does Giancarlo Esposito, popping in for a few too-short scenes as Maxine’s agent and partner in corpse disposal.

When Maxine’s whereabouts intersect in mysterious ways with the Night Stalker’s victims, Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale start poking around as a pair of LAPD detectives with less interesting banter than the performers deserve. I feel like an ingrate singling out the one sour note in this ensemble, New Zealand stage actor Simon Prast, who returns in an expanded role as the televangelist we met in “X.” Here he can’t help much in salvaging the messy, ineffectual climax, or in managing his Texas accent and thudding delivery without sounding like an AI experiment.

Well. Anyway. Two out of three for any trilogy is pretty good.

“MaXXXine” — 1.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong violence, graphic nudity, gore, drug use, language, sexual content)

Running time: 1:41

How to watch: Premieres in theaters July 5

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

America’s employers delivered another healthy month of hiring in June, adding 206,000 jobs and once again displaying the U.S. economy’s ability to withstand high interest rates.

Last month’s job growth did mark a pullback from 218,000 in May. But it was still a solid gain, reflecting the resilience of America’s consumer-driven economy, which is slowing but still growing steadily.

Still, Friday’s report from the Labor Department contained several signs of a slowing job market. The unemployment rate ticked up from 4% to 4.1%, a still-low number but the highest rate since November 2021. The rate rose in large part because 277,000 people began looking for work in June, and not all of them found jobs right away.

The government also sharply revised down its estimate of job growth for April and May by a combined 111,000. And it said average hourly pay rose just 0.3% from May and 3.9% from June 2023. The year-over-year figure was the smallest such rise since June 2021 and will likely be welcomed by the Federal Reserve in its drive to fully conquer inflation. Most economists think the Fed will begin cutting its benchmark rate in September, and the details in Friday’s jobs report did nothing to counter that expectation.

Just two sectors — government and a category that includes healthcare and social assistance, neither of which captures the economy’s underlying strength — accounted for roughly three-quarters of June’s job growth. Economists also noted that job growth from April through June averaged 177,000, a decent figure but still the lowest three-month average since January 2021.

Other economists, while agreeing that the job market is slowing, suggested that it remains resilient.

“Both May and June hiring was above 200,000 even after revisions, and the trajectory looks stable,” said Eric Winograd, U.S. economist at AllianceBernstein. “The best available evidence is that the labor market remains strong and that any deceleration remains modest.”

Economists have been repeatedly predicting that the job market would lose momentum in the face of the high rates engineered by the Fed, only to see the hiring gains show continued strength. Still, signs of an economic slowdown have emerged in the aftermath of the Fed’s series of rate hikes. The U.S. gross domestic product — the total output of goods and services — grew at a lethargic annual pace of 1.4% from January through March, the slowest quarterly pace in nearly two years.

Consumer spending, which accounts for about 70% of all U.S. economic activity and which has powered the expansion the past three years, rose at just a 1.5% pace last quarter after growing more than 3% in each of the previous two quarters. In addition, the number of advertised job openings has declined steadily since peaking at a record 12.2 million in March 2022.

During 2022 and 2023, the Fed raised its benchmark interest rate 11 times to try to conquer the worst streak of inflation in four decades, lifting its key rate to its highest point in 23 years. The punishingly higher borrowing rates that resulted, for consumers and businesses, were widely expected to trigger a recession.

They didn’t. The economy and the job market instead have shown surprising resilience.

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