ArcaMax

"Arrival" is a thinking human's alien-invasion movie. The mood is austere, the story oblique (at first), and the invading aliens are somewhat obscured by a home-world mist they've brought down to Earth with them. Serious humans will be happy to know there's no cheap sci-fi action.

All of this is a little problematic, though. Director Denis ...Read more

Another bleedin' Spider-Man movie, you say? "Homecoming" is the second attempt in five years to reboot this wobbly franchise -- and it might do the trick. For one thing, thanks to some desperate corporate deal-making, Spidey is now officially a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which enables cross-promotional high-fives by fellow Avengers ...Read more

ATTENTION 'SCREENER' EDITORS: KURT LODER IS OFF THIS WEEK. THE FOLLOWING COLUMN WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 2016. THANK YOU. -- CREATORS

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'La La Land': Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in a Lush New Kind of Movie Musical

Damien Chazelle's "La La Land" takes the standard objection to movie musicals -- Why are all these people suddenly bursting ...Read more

Somewhere in Cornwall, on the stormy southwest coast of England, there's a village where people have lost track of time. It's not much of a place, hardly worthy of a name; but once things were different here. Once the surrounding waters were thick with fish and the people prospered. The local pub was filled with dancing and laughter. It wasn't...Read more

A guy, a girl, a gun -- the classic setup for a bullet-riddled crime flick. In the 1950 "Gun Crazy," a series of bad decisions made by a firearms aficionado named Bart (John Dall) and his full-on gun-nut wife Laurie (eternal noir pinup Peggy Cummins) set them both on the road to perdition (the usual destination in these pictures). More ...Read more

You are here. The middle of nowhere. Over there, a shabby building -- a faded, failing furniture store called, for no evident reason, "Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire." There's a sale going on. Apparently everything must go.

That's what you see on the outside. On the inside of this store, as you'll soon learn, are the bowels of Hell.

"Backrooms" ...Read more

"Tuner" is an ambitious low-budget indie fueled by two kinds of star power -- one old-school, the other seductively new. The leads, Leo Woodall and Havana Rose Liu, aren't newbies, exactly -- Woodall built considerable momentum in S2 of "The White Lotus" and Liu was already memorable in the high school lesbian comedy "Bottoms." But here they ...Read more

"The Wizard of the Kremlin" is a slow-drag chronicle of the rise of Vladimir Putin in the wild-west days of post-Soviet Russia. (Those unfamiliar with this period might want to do a little Wikipedia catch-up before braving the film.) The story begins in Moscow in 2019, with a political schemer named Baranov (Paul Dano) relating his many years of...Read more