Whereas the directing duo’s first feature, Resolution, centered on drug withdrawal, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s fourth, Synchronic, enables and endorses a pharmaceutical bender. But, hey, as you’ll see, it’s for a good cause!

In New Orleans, word on the street is all about a new designer drug called Synchronic. Like DMT, it’s highly hallucinogenic, pummeling the user’s pineal gland into psychoactive submission. Side effects include venomous snakebites, sword stabbings and elevator-shaft dismemberments. That’s because the drug transports the user back in time — prehistoric, even — at seven-minute intervals with lasting real-world results.

As paramedics, best buds Steve (Anthony Mackie, Avengers’ Falcon) and Dennis (Jamie Dornan, Fifty Shades of Grey’s BDSM BMOC) have seen the worst of that damage. But when Dennis’ sullen teen daughter (Ally Ioannides, TV’s Into the Badlands) disappears after a dose and doesn’t come back? Steve starts experimenting to see if she can be retrieved. That’s when things get — in his words — “kangaroo-shit loony.”

Rich in New Orleans tradition and superstition, Synchronic’s story is haunted by the ghosts of Hurricane Katrina. The filmmakers shoot the city as if in recovery — under a woozy, narcotized haze, with a camera that sometimes floats like a week-old helium balloon and the sky coated in an unnatural baby-aspirin orange. The sudden merging of time periods in a Bourbon Street slipstream gives the movie its strongest and most memorable visuals, as worlds collide with an unsettling weirdness as “off” as the mutated flora and fauna of Annihilation, to name another extraordinary modern film that doesn’t play by sci-fi’s standard rules. As a viewer accustomed to every templated move of the genre, I like not knowing quite where a film is headed.

Although initially a two-hander, Synchronic shifts focus to Steve and his time-travel tests, which Mackie is amiable enough to sell. You can’t help but like his deeply flawed character as over and over, he embarks on what increasingly looks to be a suicide mission, strictly out of brotherly love for his lifelong friend. That sidelines Dennis to cope and mourn — more or less offscreen — with his wife (Katie Aselton, 2015’s The Gift). Effectively hamstrung against Mackie’s magnetism, Dornan is a bit of a nonentity as Dennis, but in the works of Moorhead & Benson (as they now bill themselves, like a cigarette brand), the concept is the star. —Rod Lott

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In space, no one can hear you jog, trot and, most especially, run.

That’s actually pretty good, because crazed environmental astronaut Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) goes on the lam — the space-lam, that is — into the farthest reaches of the universe, all to protect his beloved plants, including flowers, shrubs and all the cute little insects and animals living in and around them. He’s silently running, see?

With Earth’s precious resources pretty much dead, most of humanity is encased in domes and that can’t be too fun to hang out in. On a massive spaceship carrying one of the few living gardens, Lowell — and a trio of irresponsible living bodies, natch — are in outer space, testing various theories about plant growth or something to that effect.

However, mission control eventually turns tail and decides to blow up the whole project for the sake of capitalism. Lowell goes suitably nuts and kills off his trio of shipmates — thank you, by the way — and heads out into deep space with his newly reprogrammed robot pals in order to save the lives of the remaining plants.

As simplistic as ’70s sci-fi can be, Silent Running is a strange amalgam of subgenres, from, of course, the environmental fear film to a wacky robots flick, but it mostly works thanks to a delightfully off-kilter Dern; in every scene, he looks close to strangling someone, but hopefully not director Douglas Trumbull, who gives the sci-fi film his special-effects all.

Like the spaceship in the film, in the end, Silent Running just explodes under the weight of its own self-importance, something that is, by me, sorely missed in many prophetic science-fiction films, the Joan Baez soundtrack definitely included. —Louis Fowler

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Living in Perfection, Nevada, is a daily reminder that the world has passed you by. With a population of only 17 people and one general store, it’s a place that reminds me of the Texas towns I lived around — sometimes with even less than that — so I can truly see why the people in Tremors dream of leaving it.

But when best buds Valentine (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Fred Ward) come across very large — and very ugly — worms out in the desert, it makes leaving a whole helluvalot easier.

These are two dudes out in the sands putting up posts just to get by, when they manage to mess with a whole mess of these creatures — nicknamed “graboids” — making them the unlikely heroes of the story. With a seismologist named Rhonda (Finn Carter), as well as all the townspeople, they team up to fight the below-earth monsters, which seem to operate on the vibrations in the ground (although one of its six sequels might have changed that; I haven’t seen them all) and represent a species that science is quite late in discovering.

Although Bacon had many bombs at the time — many films I dug, mind you — this video-store hit was seemingly everything he needed to get back into Hollywood’s good graces. That same year, he was also part of the ensemble cast of Flatliners, which recently had a terrible remake; until 2018, this film only had sequels, all made for video.

Featuring an additionally somewhat-name cast that includes Victor Wong, Oklahoma country star Reba McEntire and Family Ties alum Michael Gross — who’s gone on to star in all those sequels — I’d be lying if I didn’t say that Tremors inspired me to always be on the lookout for cryptids in my own backyard, one of the half-dozen or so that saw this flick in the theater upon its original release.

Of course, I never found any … but I haven’t stopped looking. —Louis Fowler

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For Wonder Woman 1984, the sequel to the 2017 phenomenon, director and co-writer Patty Jenkins really leans in to the date of the title. After a flashback prologue showing a feisty young Diana Prince (a returning Lilly Aspell) competing as a kid in her island home’s version of American Ninja Warrior, Jenkins splashes the screen with a colorful, bubbly, all-American look at our nation’s capital in ways it never really was in the Reagan era, which is to say looking not dissimilar to Back to the Future Part II’s living-cartoon idea of 2015.

All the rainbow neon and big hair aside, this Washington, D.C.-set intro works well and with a winking vibe, no doubt influenced by Richard Donner’s vision of Metropolis in Superman as a veritable domino line of pratfalls. The Mack Sennett-style chaos snakes indoors to a mall jewelry store robbery foiled by the arrival of — yep, you guessed it — Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot). One of the swiped pieces is a mysterious chunk of, well, no one knows, so the FBI enlists the Smithsonian to help ID it. That’s where the plainclothes Diana works, as does the socially awkward Barbara Minerva (Bridesmaids’ Kristen Wiig).

The artifact of unknown origin is revealed to be a wishing rock, in that when someone holds it and speaks their desire aloud, a wisp of wind blows their bangs askew and the wish is immediately granted. Such a powerful object attracts the greedy hands of failing oilman Max Lord (an über-hammy Pedro Pascal, Kingsman: The Golden Circle), who seduces Barbara to gain access; she herself uses it to undergo one for those overnight movie makeovers from meek nerd to foxy mama.

Diana unknowingly leverages its powers, too, allowing Jenkins and her fellow scripters Geoff Johns (Aquaman) and Dave Callaham (2014’s Godzilla) to bring back love interest Steve Trevor (Chris Pine, Hell or High Water). Having perished in the first film’s end, Steve is resurrected in perhaps the laziest way possible: via the silly science of comic-book plotting. However, the arrival of Trevor, a World War I pilot, into a baffling, parachute-panted future livens WW84 tremendously, thanks to Pine’s unwavering commitment to not minding looking goofy. His comic performance is the MVP of the sequel, bar none.

What takes the air out of WW84 is the common archenemy of superhero cinema: third-act bloat. Given its 2.5-hour running time, one could make the case for fourth-act bloat as well. By then, Max Lord’s quest for world domination has been run into the ground with nowhere else to go but run further into the ground, to the point of subterranean. Barbara’s own transformation from human hottie to a CGI cheetah woman is needless, especially as the character resembles an The Island of Dr. Moreau abomination filtered through the costume department of Cats.

Still, a lot remains to like about Wonder Woman 1984. Even when saddled with hokey dialogue in the de rigueur showdown, Gadot believably embodies goodwill and decency. She shines as a straight-and-serious heroine, too, never better than in Jenkins’ big action set piece in the middle — and in the Middle East — which recalls one that put Indiana Jones through the peak-Spielberg paces of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The movie benefits from more humor and less world-building than its predecessor, before giving in to the subgenre’s worst tendencies of epically reaching to out-epic the most recent fantasy epic, to less-than-epic effect. —Rod Lott

Over the past couple of decades, I think we can all agree two of the best cinematic examples of total mind-fucks have been The Matrix and Inception, right? At least that’s what Entertainment Weekly told me recently.

That being said, I’m pretty sure the Ethiopian flick Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway has them both beat and beaten badly with intense imagination and general weirdness that puts those multimillion tentpoles to increasing shame with each subsequent viewing.

In the far future of a retro world, Special Agent Gagano (deformed actor Daniel Tadesse) is assigned to virtually enter the Psychobook — this universe’s version of the Internet — and try to stop the destructive computer virus called the Soviet Union. After a double-cross or two, Gagano finds himself trapped in the dusty mainframe.

Traveling through the virtual world of New Ethiopia, the pizza-loving Gagano continually tries to wake up and find his way back to his wife, a blonde giantess, to keep his promise of helping her open a kickboxing academy. As an Irish-accented Stalin and corrupt hero Batfro try at every turn to stop him, once he realizes the power of the world he’s in, he becomes unstoppable, with the help of the titular Jesus.

I think.

Expat director Miguel Llanso, cherry-picking from the best (worst?) of 1970s pop culture, from Filipino kung-fu to dystopic Philip K. Dick novels, has crafted a beautifully tacky world for his cast to play in, with the enigmatic Tadesse doing most of the surreal heavy lifting. Jesus is Afro-futurism sci-fi at its best, a future awash in the flotsam of the past and the jetsam of an unpredictable psyche. —Louis Fowler

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