Making its way to Canadian theaters for a limited run beginning today, director Casey Walker's rom-com/horror flick A LITTLE BIT ZOMBIE recently won the Gold Remi Award for Best Dark Comedy at the WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival and Best Feature Film at the Canadian Film Festival.

Tim Burton has remade everything from science-fiction favorites to children’s classics, but DARK SHADOWS marks the first time that he (or anyone in decades) has brought a TV soap opera to the big screen. The attempt to maintain a semblance of fidelity to the source has its pleasures, but also proves to be the movie’s downfall; it suffers from what feels like an attempt to cram a few seasons’ worth of plot into a two-hour movie.

Tagging this as a movie review is actually a bit of a misnomer, as THE DEVIL’S CARNIVAL, appropriate to its title, is just part of a multimedia circus, with assorted sideshows surrounding the main attraction. The film itself runs a brief 58 minutes, but there’s enough on the overall Road Tour bill to comprise a full entertainment experience.

Filipino director Yam Laranas’ THE ROAD (opening May 11 in U.S. theaters from Freestyle Releasing) is broken into three distinct parts and, in reverse, tells a story that encompasses both supernatural phenomena and very human evil.

I wanted to like this film. While many critics have become tired of the found-footage style of filmmaking, I’ve been a loud supporter, championing the intelligence behind this often overused approach. Though I may have become a bit nauseous from watching shaky footage, I’ve rarely become sick of it, always discovering some new, smart technique the filmmakers implemented to convey an organic feel.

The opening scene of THE RAVEN finds Edgar Allan Poe, played by John Cusack, gazing upward at the eponymous bird circling a full moon. It’s a promise of an obvious, on-the-nose interpretation of Poe’s enduring fiction, one sadly fulfilled by the movie, which squanders Cusack’s committed performance.

A peer of mine recently referred to a current of wave of genre films as “stealth horror.” That is, pictures seemingly very interested in a more dramatic reading until finally giving themselves over to the throes of terror. And while RESOLUTION (currently seeing its premiere at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival) is much more clearly aiming for scare territory—not to mention, being undoubtedly reverent of the power of that territory— its ambiguous, lo-fi nature wouldn’t be out of place in the likes of such recent fare as ENTRANCE, MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE and WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN.