ArcaMax

If you believe the blurbs, half the movies passing through theatres feature "tour de force" performances -- star turns by actors operating at the very top of their talents, laying bare every cranny of their characters' complexities. Such performances are kind of rare, actually, but a new British film called "The Wasp" is graced with two of them....Read more

"Strange Darling," a spunky new scuzz-thriller by writer-director JT Mollner, sets right out to mess with your head, relating a serial-killer story in six "chapters" that are shuffled around out of order for maximum misdirection. There's nothing especially novel about the movie's time-chopping design, which has lent temporal pizzazz to such well...Read more

So what is there left to learn about our slobbery sci-fi friend the Alien? Or I should say Aliens, since their number has evolved from a solo horror in Ridley Scott's original 1979 movie to a clamoring horde in James Cameron's 1986 action-classic sequel, and remains alarmingly large in the new "Alien: Romulus," which effectively replays some of ...Read more

Apart from being a fine source of blarney and beans, the city of Boston also has a long history of Irish criminal enterprise, spattered with names like Spike O'Toole and Punchy McLaughlin and spiked with the homicidal doings of the late lunatic Whitey Bulger. This violent underworld has been a rich source of material for the movies -- for ...Read more

"Crumb Catcher," a first feature by writer-director Chris Skotchdopole that's being ushered into the world by low-budget filmmaking eminence Larry Fessenden, has a vaguely familiar feel. There's a nasty buzz to the plot and the performances that recalls old bad-vibes character studies like "The Last Seduction" and "The Honeymoon Killers," and ...Read more

The most special of the many special effects in "Twisters" isn't what you'd expect. It's not the howling winds, the towering thunder spouts, the hollering woman getting yanked up into a stormy sky by a bunch of bad weather. No, the biggest kick in this movie is the easy chemistry between its two stars -- the smiley and inordinately likable Glen ...Read more

"Longlegs," a combination supernatural thriller and gritty police procedural by writer-director Oz Perkins, mines elements from a host of well-known films, among them David Fincher's "Zodiac" (there's a sinister code) and "Se7en" (sinister boxes), and the pictures that make up the "Conjuring" universe (sinister dolls). But the movie's primary ...Read more

Fans of the "Quiet Place" franchise will get a reasonable ration of what they presumably crave in the story's third installment. Which is to say they'll see herds of rampant space aliens scampering up the sides of buildings and dropping from the sky and generally tearing around like the world's biggest mutant basketball team in a hard-fought ...Read more

Like the rest of us, good filmmakers sometimes screw up. David Cronenberg has made several canon-level movies ("Videodrome," "Dead Ringers," etc.), but his mopey 2012 take on the Don DeLillo novel "Cosmopolis," which starred Robert Pattinson, was anti-watchable. Similarly, when the great screenwriter Charlie Kaufman ("Adaptation," "Being John ...Read more