There was never anything ordinary about Udo Kier. With his pale blue eyes, sculpted features and slightly dangerous air, he could enter a film for only a few minutes and somehow alter its temperature. Directors used him as a vampire, a sadist, a Nazi, a wealthy eccentric, a supernatural apparition and, late in life, a flamboyant retired hairdresser. He moved effortlessly between exploitation pictures, European art films and Hollywood blockbusters, accumulating more than 200 screen credits during a career that lasted nearly six decades. Yet behind the cultivated menace was a funny, sociable and remarkably unsentimental man who had survived a childhood of genuine hardship before spending his adult life creating characters audiences could not forget.

This series, The Women Who Built Hollywood Before the Movies, looks back at the remarkable women who helped shape Hollywood when it was still a quiet community of orchards, ranches, homes, and dusty roads. Long before the studios, movie palaces, premieres, and stars made Hollywood famous around the world, women were already helping build the institutions, businesses, and civic life that gave the town its identity. Among the most important was a young woman from Ohio named Daeida Hartell, who would help give the emerging community not only its name, but much of the character that defined its earliest years.

To generations of moviegoers, Carl Switzer would forever be “Alfalfa,” the freckle-faced, cowlick-haired boy whose off-key serenades and hopeless devotion to Darla made him one of the most recognizable members of Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedies. By 1958, however, the little boy on the screen was thirty years old, his days of childhood stardom long behind him. Acting jobs had become sporadic, and Switzer supplemented his income as a bartender, dog trainer and professional hunting guide. Then, on a January night in Studio City, someone apparently tried to kill him.

October begins with two very different national releases competing for moviegoers: one is an ambitious, deliberately provocative satire built around Tom Cruise in one of the strangest roles of his career; the other is a glossy psychological thriller adapted from a bestselling Colleen Hoover novel. Neither arrives with unanimous critical support, which may actually make this weekend more interesting. Both are the kind of movies audiences may need to judge for themselves.

For more than a decade, six enormous faces from Hollywood's golden past looked down upon the traffic and pedestrians of Hollywood Boulevard. Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, Bette Davis, James Dean and Clark Gable stood shoulder to shoulder, larger than life, transforming an otherwise ordinary wall into a colorful monument to the movies. Then, in a matter of seconds on the morning of January 17, 1994, they were gone.

I don’t know how I feel about Heartstopper coming back, knowing it’s the end. Netflix's Heartstopper showed us all that there are good love stories on television. Based on Alice Oseman's graphic novels, the series centered on the relationship between Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson, along with the many friends around them. With Heartstopper Forever on Netflix, we finally see the end of these storylines. Some characters will be cut short because it's in film format, but the rest should be able to hold on.

Few American murder cases have proved as durable on film and television as the story of Lizzie Borden. On the morning of August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden and his second wife, Abby, were found brutally murdered inside their home at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts. Andrew’s thirty-two-year-old daughter Lizzie was eventually arrested, tried, and acquitted. No one else was ever convicted. That unanswered question—did Lizzie do it?—has given filmmakers more than a century of room to speculate.

Stretching across Hollywood Forever Cemetery’s northwestern flank are long, quiet halls that most guests will likely never visit. It’s easy to overlook them, as they sit alongside the Cathedral Mausoleum and the lake, staring out over monuments and celebrity graves visited by thousands every year. Yet the Corridor Mausoleums are some of the cemetery’s uniquely atmospheric holdovers from an earlier era. When they opened nearly a century ago, their builders imagined them as part of a dramatic overhaul of Hollywood Cemetery and its burial practices. They might even have changed the way Americans approached death itself.

In the very beginning of American cinema, when motion pictures were still working out their style and the studios which were to shape an entire industry had only just started to be established, the McCutcheon family was one of the most influential. But no episode in that family's history is more tragic—nor does it reveal more plainly the instability of silent-era Hollywood than the short and turbulent life of Wallace McCutcheon Jr. Having once been a well-known figure on Broadway and the husband of the serial queen Pearl White, he died alone in a cheap Hollywood rooming house, all he left behind being a half-full bottle of gin and a moving goodbye: "Have a drink."

The final weekend of September brings an unusually varied group of movies to theaters, ranging from Brad Pitt battling the Alaskan wilderness with a loyal dog to Robert Pattinson taking on one of television’s most controversial personalities. DreamWorks offers an animated adventure steeped in Filipino mythology, Marvel sends Avengers: Endgame back to the big screen, and Jessica Lange and Ed Harris tackle Eugene O’Neill in a prestige drama opening in limited release. Here are the major theatrical choices arriving Friday, September 25.

I really wanted to love Stop! That! Train!. On paper, it sounded like exactly my kind of movie: RuPaul, a train full of drag queens, ridiculous celebrity cameos, an impending disaster, and a spoof sensibility reaching back toward Airplane! and The Naked Gun. There are moments when it works beautifully, when the silliness clicks into place, and the cast seems to be having such a good time that you cannot help smiling along with them. The problem is that those moments never quite come often enough to sustain the entire film.

There are buildings that belong to an administration, buildings that belong to an era, and buildings that eventually come to belong to the country. The Kennedy Center is one of those buildings. For over fifty years, this large expanse of white marble has sat along the Potomac as a unique landmark in Washington, DC. Unlike many of the memorials in our nation's capital, it honors music, drama, and the arts. Whether you like or dislike its architecture, it has become an integral part of our capital's history, and that history may be threatened.