Rob Staeger

There isn’t much marijuana use in Jonathan Berman’s documentary Calling All Earthlings, but its elliptical, ramshackle structure could make one question the merits of legalization.

The cast, led by Dan Ewing, Temuera Morrison, and Stephany Jacobsen, delivers sturdy character work, and the action is clear and well-executed, but none of it ventures beyond well-trod ground.

Psychotic! is best when it leavens the terror with comedy, slipping moments of ridiculousness into horror tropes.

The temptation for an easy score is one of a handful of shopworn plot elements in Anthony Onah’s debut feature The Price, yet the interaction of t

Ahearne deftly builds the suspense, raising the stakes before steering the story into surprising new directions. Despite its modern premise, B&B feels classic — a Hitchcockian nail-biter without a platinum blonde in sight.

What begins as revolting and off the rails peters out into a weak-sauce final payoff presented as an intervention-themed reality show, so tired and quaintly stupid it no longer offends.

Realive’s greatest strength is that it takes its premise so seriously, engaging with its moral and spiritual questions.

The gun-control message is so rote that it’s of secondary interest to the film’s ambitious structure.

What could have been a wordless slog is inventive and even buoyant, as Molly crosses the baked Nevada landscape. And then, like a dog turd lurking in the middle of a jelly doughnut, a needless, brutal rape scene poisons the whole experience.

Under the direction of Phillip Guzman, the whole affair plods along in by-the-numbers fashion, and the characters are all types, displaying little evidence of interior lives.

Mell stages a climax that's thrilling and ridiculous in equal measure.

Mysteries of the characters' pasts are revealed, but Dushku and Crawford are so bland that their secrets barely registered to begin with.

Filmgoers who brave We Are the Flesh may regret seeing it. Forgetting it is another matter entirely.

Bishop isn't afraid to leave the club behind, confidently expanding beyond the seedy premise to become a three-way chase among the bachelor party guys, the club management, and a ferocious supernatural force.

What's the opposite of a jump scare? Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has mastered it in the superb Creepy, revealing the upsetting details with such slow-build subtlety that you don't notice your skin crawling until it's halfway out the door.

The Lennon Report loses some steam in its second half as the immediacy of the operating theater dissipates in press conferences and obituary voiceovers. Even so, Profe does an admirable job walking us through the day's events, weaving together the accounts of people on the scene.

Where most post-Shrek animated films are manic and all too eager to please, Rémi Chayé's deliberately paced Long Way North tells its story with clarity and an urgent calm.

Much of Carnage Park is merely a sun-bleached desert creepshow, a murky soup of a murderer toying with his victims simply because he's cra-a-azy.

Undead fare has to break new ground to stand out from the ravenous crowd, something What We Become never attempts. What might have been the best zombie movie of 2004 can't help looking a little sickly in 2016.

This watered-down throwback to The Wicker Man never really heats up.

Writer-directors Micah Wright and Jay Lender are kids'-cartoon vets and show a facility for comedy on a more human level here — as does the nimble cast, which ably handles the tonal shift from travel nightmare to actual nightmare.

A concurrent plot involving Ava's family doesn't land quite as well, as it travels down some more familiar paths, but the twelve-step satire had me grinning like a fiend.

Slipshod in every way, The Final Project can't even be bothered to show the important stuff.

Ultimately, these feral pooches pose no danger that couldn't be solved by staying inside, boarding the windows, and barricading the doors. It's not a bad approach to the film itself.

Not much substance is buried beneath the irritating style.

He Never Died is a Tootsie Pop of a movie. It has the outer shell of Taken...but there's an altogether different treat in the center.

As a suspense film, Dementia is solid but unremarkable, even considering its ugly snarl of an ending. But hidden underneath, the film has all the elements for a compelling, sharp-edged family drama.

Not every gamble works: The girls' intrusive Bejeweled-like social-media game annoys at every turn, and the plot itself is murky. But #Horror mesmerizes nonetheless, filled with tension, cruelty, and can't-look-away style.