It’s a movie that works a lot better when it sticks to its star running, jumping, dodging, ducking and, eventually, fighting back. That’s more of a comfort zone for Spanish filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who specializes in horror films that involve pursuit and tight spots (28 Weeks Later, Intruders).

As a dig at generational dissatisfaction and/or a lament about the migrant’s blues, the film is good enough. As a portrait of a diva on the verge of a meltdown that could take out a metropolis, it’s a next-level nightmare.

You’re left enduring a bumpy ride on a road to nowhere, in other words, and neither the film’s wane familiarity nor its welcome, pro-smut good intentions can make the journey worthwhile.

The French-Canadian filmmaker has delivered an expansion and a deepening of the world built off of Herbert’s prose, a YA romance blown up to Biblical-epic proportions, a Shakespearean tragedy about power and corruption, and a visually sumptuous second act that makes its impressive, immersive predecessor look like a mere proof-of-concept. Villeneuve has outdone himself.

This is frankly the kind of thing Netflix could and should do more of. It looks inexpensive but sharp, it doesn’t reek of sensationalism, and it doesn‘t feel like a cobbled together romp through history. It has a point and a vision worthy of its subject.

Erivo is not the only reason to see Drift. But the actor most certainly is the reason to see it ASAP.

A genuine Chernobyl-level disaster that seems to get exponentially more radioactive as it goes along, this detour to one of the dustier corners of Marvel’s content farm is a dead-end from start to finish.

As with other movies that capture the joys of cooking and the carnal thrill of eating, this French romantic drama is as much an ode to regional bonne bouches as it is an epic tale of two epicures.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard) does his duty by delivering eureka moments, a few greatest-hits sequences, some personal drama. The result is a perfectly functional look at a legend, one that will definitely make you want to put Exodus back into heavy playlist rotation. It’s still not enough.

There is real joy in how this man lives perpetually in the moment, embracing the small, unassuming pleasures of the present.

The only time sparks fly are when that restorative tanning bed crackles and sputters.

The fact that it adds an ode to intergenerational storytelling, a parody of time-travel narratives, some oddball left-turns, and a near-transcendent coda that feels very much in line with Kaufman’s body of work — all while still giving the kids what they want — makes this more than a cut above your average rainy-afternoon distraction. It’s really a low-key blast.

The Promised Land is, if nothing else, a nod to both its nation’s and the movies’ past. The feudal warring over unclaimed Jutland territory may be strictly Danish, but the excitement, romance, and awe-inspiring visual spectacle of this melodrama is vintage Hollywood.

There’s a deadening feeling you get watching all of this, as if Argylle’s real revelation is: We’ve cracked the code on how to take a handful of your favorite actors and a surefire ha-ha-bang-bang storyline and leech every single thing out that you usually like about these kinds of things.

That Walker knows how to handle such things without being sensationalistic, as well as tenderly sketching the tension and sensitivity that characterize female friendships at that age, is what keeps the film from being a boozy, sunburnt tragedy.

Tótem is one of those films about death that overflows with life, and it’s a testament to filmmaker Lila Avilés that this gentle drama never collapses under its own weight or lets sorrow fully take the wheel.

It’s a juicy subject, and it might be too big for this particular storytelling approach.

What Will & Harper is, at its heart, is a portrait of a friendship and how the fundamentals of a deep and lasting bond doesn’t change even when the people within it do. That alone makes it worth the trip.

It was a singular experience, impossible to replicate and uninterested in being definitive on anything, much the gent at the center of it all.

Kicking off with a barrage of kitschy imagery and an abundance of irony and ecstasy, Devo lets you know that it’s the definitive portrait of an art project by mimicking its subject’s Dada-meets-deadpan-humor aesthetic.

Love Lies Bleeding doesn’t have time for a slow burn. It’s a movie that comes in hot and leaves in a molten blaze of glory.

The first-person passion is genuine. The form its being presented in feels slightly secondhand.

While the dizzying, dazzling cinematography, self-shot under his usual D.P. pseudonym Peter Andrews, demands you pay attention to the technical virtuosity, that gambit (or gimmick — your call) is merely setting the table for something else.

This is a movie that pays tribute to searching for conclusions rather than finding them once and for all, for thinking outside of categories and boxes in search of something more profound.

Samuel has made a movie that imagines a good-hearted sinner slouching toward salvation one desperate measure at a time. But he’s also made a mirror designed to let folks see themselves in this scenario for once.

By the time a final showdown snaps your suspension of disbelief and suggests there are bigger hornet’s nests to kick, The Beekeeper has crept out of the realm of pulpy B-movie thrills and falls just short of being a Bee movie dabbling in deep-state paranoia-mongering.

Most of the student body quivers in Regina’s presence, and the movie seems to tremble in awe of Rapp’s ability to make you think she’s not a Queen Bee but the Queen Bee. Her limits don’t exist. You wish the rest of Mean Girls rose to meet her.

Night Swim eventually runs out of places to go, but not before it weds some sneaky character development to a few good, solid jump moments. It might not find an audience, but it deserves one.