ArcaMax

In the pantheon of notable big-screen comedy duos -- Laurel and Hardy, Olsen and Johnson, Martin and Lewis -- surely room can be found for Venom and Eddie. You know: Venom, the standup Symbiote from outer space, and Eddie Brock, his earthbound straight man. Both of these characters, each played by Tom Hardy, are reteamed in "Venom: The Last ...Read more

As most movie fans know, nothing supercharges a serious weepie like a fatal disease. Almost anything will do, as long as death is seen to be impending. In her 1868 novel "Little Women," Louisa May Alcott got considerable milage out of scarlet fever, which naturally spread to the book's several screen adaptations as well. Even a relatively ...Read more

I wonder who the audience for this movie is supposed to be. Nostalgia-addled geezers who happened to tune in to NBC at 11:30 on the long-ago night of Oct. 11, 1975, for the debut of a new show called "Saturday Night" (soon to be "Saturday Night Live")? Since those moldering oldsters are no longer big moviegoers, perhaps it is hoped that a fit ...Read more

I don't know about you, but I like my social-issue movies doled out with a squirt of prechewed feminist resentments and a barrel of blood and guts. And here we go. French writer-director Coralie Fargeat, making her first English-language feature, has taken the evergreen idiocies of the beauty-and-wellness industry and run them, along with ...Read more

One of the things that elevates "My Old Ass" above the traditional run of Hollywood youth movies -- apart from its sparkling cast and sunny cinematography -- is the fresh particularity of its setting. We're in Canada, which is a nice change, in the woodsy lake country north of Toronto. And the kids we meet, while bright and spirited, are ...Read more

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