ArcaMax

Welcome to The Shrouds, an afterlife community where the dearly departed await your return and invite you, through the miracle of necro-technology, to come inside and watch them rot.

Yes, David Cronenberg is back. For 50-odd years now, the Canadian writer-director has probed the pulpy depths of body horror in a run of features that extends from...Read more

"The Amateur" is based on a 1981 Canadian secret-agent movie as forgotten today as this one will probably be 44 years from now. Don't get me wrong: The new picture is perfectly OK; it does its job. Well, pretty much. There's some gunplay, some bomb play, some Euro travel. But there's nothing new about most of it. (The big glass swimming pool in ...Read more

The star of the new movie "The Friend" ... well, not the star, maybe, but the presiding spirit ... is a 150-pound dog, a Great Dane called Apollo (played with effortless expertise by a Great Dane called Bing). Apollo is huge -- much too big to squeeze into the cramped apartment of a New York City writer named Iris (Naomi Watts). If Apollo were ...Read more

In the spring of 1984, shortly after Andy Kaufman died of lung cancer in Los Angeles, friends and colleagues gathered for his funeral, which was held in his native New York. Carol Kane, who had played the wife of Kaufman's character, Latka, on the long-running TV series "Taxi," was among the mourners. Kane approached Andy's casket and she ... ...Read more

How much does it suck, you ask? Actually, it doesn't. Not really. Oh, it overstays its welcome, of course -- it's a totally wholesome trad musical, after all. But Disney's latest "live action" remake of one of its legacy properties -- in this case the 1937 animated classic "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," which was the company's first feature ...Read more

As a contemplation of the post-Bond English spy thriller, Steven Soderbergh's "Black Bag" rings some familiar bells. The protagonist, George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), is a quietly devious London spymaster with a problematic wife, rather like George Smiley in John le Carre's Karla novels and the movies made from them. And Woodhouse's ...Read more

Having taken time out to be dead since 2017, Charlie Manson is back among us once again, crazy as ever and maybe even creepier. You'll recall Charlie from his first incarnation as the charismatic whack-job who directed several of his lumpen-hippie followers -- the Manson Family -- to brutally slaughter seven innocent people in Los Angeles over ...Read more

Osgood Perkins' "The Monkey" isn't a horror movie really -- it's not scary enough. And try as it might, it doesn't really succeed as a comedy, either -- it's not funny enough. What we have here is a sort of slasher-tribute movie that never commits to the fright-flick gross-out esthetic from which it seeks to mine laughs. Writer-director Perkins,...Read more

There have been other less-than-super Marvel movies before this latest one. Remember the dreadful "Eternals"? Or the only slightly less awful "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania"? Remember not long ago when whispers of "superhero fatigue" started making the rounds? The new "Captain America: Brave New World" is a reminder that the Marvel Cinematic...Read more

"Love Hurts" is yet another helping of Valentine's Day product that doesn't put enough new comic spin on its purported subject. It's essentially an action flick intended to turn its star, Ke Huy Quan, into a full-fledged romantic lead. Anyone who remembers Quan as the fast-talking Short Round ("Hold on to your potatoes!") in Steven Spielberg's ...Read more

Josh and Iris meet cute in the fruit section of a supermarket, beaming at each other over crates of melons and carefully stacked mounds of oranges. Later, looking back in a retrospective voiceover, Iris tells us this initial encounter was one of those magical moments you might experience just once in a lifetime. However, "For me it happened ...Read more

"Presence" is like an old "Paranormal Activity" movie told from the point of view of the paranormal entity. This is not immediately apparent. The movie opens with darting interior shots of a luxe suburban house in Anywhere USA (actually New Jersey). The camera, operated, as is often the case in his movies, by director Steven Soderbergh, whips us...Read more