Arcadian

[Director Benjamin Brewer] gets to show you his monster-making chops, and it's pretty effective I think.

While a mostly confident production from Brewer with flashes of awe-inducing brilliance — nearly all of it owed to its harrowing monsters — Arcadian is too unengaging to really raise hell, and too uninspired to stand tall in its crowded genre space.

Once the film settles into a fairly standard chase-and-fight movie, its lack of character depth or nuance limits what the filmmakers can do to make this story stand out from all the past projects it echoes.

Balanced and solid, with equal measures of terror and suspense, the movie is Arcadian and I’ll be darned if it didn’t scare the daylights out of me.

A competent director can do only so much with a poor script, and “Arcadian” is littered with shortcuts and screenwriting clichés.

Unfortunately, Brewer and screenwriter Mike Nilon ignored an essential rule: Conceiving an original monster isn't nearly as important as coming up with compelling human characters.

Nicolas Cage's first-rate thriller shows power of male role models.

A totally solid screamer

Arcadian is emotionally authentic, terrifying and often unpredictable. Might that be the ultimate trifecta of a great horror film?

Both harrowing and joyful, Arcadian expertly navigates a complex menagerie of emotions. One family forms as the makeshift clans of past necessity finally fall apart.