Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl sprouts tentacles. Oh, well.

Relax — that’s not a true spoiler. Only if you went into Spring thinking it to be a romantic drama would you be surprised by its turn toward the fantastical, yet with the word “MONSTER” appearing on the poster and box art, the movie marks its route with GPS-confident clarity. Besides, Drafthouse Films doesn’t actively recruit viewers of three-hanky weepies; Nicholas Sparks can take care of that bunch.

Spring isn’t really about alien appendages as much as it is about atmosphere — particularly the kind in which Italy is soaked, like crusty bread drizzled with olive oil and vinegar at your neighborhood Johnny Carino’s. The boot-shaped European republic is where Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci, 2013’s Evil Dead remake) flees after his mother dies and he loses his job, all in short order. Certainly aimless and close to hopeless, he is in sad-sack shape when he meets local woman Louise (German actress Nadia Hilker), stunning to the point of seemingly unattainable.

Yet she is up for grabs — for deliberate chunks of time, anyway; she’s just adamant about not getting serious. Evan can’t help but be smitten, of course, so it’s too late when he learns her reasons for staying unattached. The revelation gives Spring its biggest scene — one with practical effects so realistic-looking, one is reminded of the groundbreaking (and Oscar-winning) transformation of David Naughton into An American Werewolf in London.

Fresh from contributing the liveliest segment to the V/H/S: Viral anthology, co-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead give Spring the same sober treatment as their 2012 feature debut, Resolution, which is to say imagination trumps energy. These guys thrive on digging into the details — not just those inherent in the Italian countryside, but the mundane unrestricted by geographic boundaries, from a lizard poised motionless on a wall to a spider rolling a fly into its next meal. This they do very well, lifting their plainspoken stories into a realm that doesn’t ask for your attention, but rewards you for ceding it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

As funny and charming as they come, Paul Rudd (Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues) is, as expected, the best thing about Ant-Man. Give Marvel Studios that much: From Robert Downey Jr. to Chris Pratt, their casting instincts are so reliably solid, they’re uncanny. Their storytelling prowess? We’ll get to that.

Rudd’s Scott Lang is the “good” kind of criminal: a well-intentioned, modern-day Robin Hood who redistributes wealth from a bullying corporation and earns a prison sentence for it. Once out, his felonious exploits also earn him a freelance gig of sorts, carrying the torch of scientist Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas, Haywire) by succeeding the disgraced genius as the superhero Ant-Man. Decades before, Pym developed the technology — and accompanying helmet and suit — that allowed him to shrink to the size of … wait for it … an insect, and gain in muscle what he loses in mass.

Pym long ago abandoned his avenging ways because he was afraid of his invention falling into the wrong hands. One such pair of greedy mitts belongs to his former protégé, portrayed by Corey Stoll (Non-Stop). So ineffectual and thinly drawn is Stoll’s villain that if the chrome-domed actor were capable of growing hair on his head, a mustache for him to twirl would not be out of place. It is not the fault of Stoll that until the more inventive second half, Ant-Man tends to slow and sputter when director Peyton Reed (The Break-Up) pays attention to this master-vs.-pupil portion of the narrative; from the sidelines, Rudd can do only so much to keep the film loose and lively.

Call it the curse of the origin story: So much of the movie is spent setting itself up that once it really gets going, half of it has passed. Scenes like Ant-Man’s sparring with The Falcon (Anthony Mackie, last glimpsed in Avengers: Age of Ultron) and the final one involving Pym and his daughter (Evangeline Lilly, Real Steel) are what make one excited by the closing credits’ promise that “ANT-MAN WILL RETURN.” —Rod Lott

You cannot trust an old and filthy-rich white guy. After being responsible for the deaths of several people in his employ — and quite nearly his two adorable grandchildren — John Hammond sure had learned his DNA-manipulating lesson by the end of 1993’s Jurassic Park.

Said lesson just didn’t stick, because now, while Hammond is dead (R.I.P. Richard Attenborough), his reanimated dream of a live-dinosaur theme park is very much alive — and predictably fatal — with Jurassic World, the belated third sequel in the series, seemingly extinct since 2001.

Nary a Sam Neill nor a Jeff Goldblum can be found in this fine, flashy edition. In their place is Guardians of the Galaxy star Chris Pratt as Owen, a stoic raptor whisperer; serving as the imitation Laura Dern is Bryce Dallas Howard (Spider-Man 3) as Claire, the park’s harried, workaholic Jill of all trades. Her character also functions as stand-in of sorts for Hammond, in that her nephews (Insidious’ Ty Simpkins and The Kings of Summer’s Nick Robinson) happen to be enjoying a VIP day at Jurassic World when its latest genetically modified attraction decides to free herself from her pen.

Jurassic Park was a phenomenon because audiences enjoyed seeing phenomenally lifelike dinosaurs on a rampage. The anemic 1997 The Lost World: Jurassic Park and 2001’s underrated Jurassic Park III also delivered the still-novel spectacle of the prehistoric creatures putting humans in their place on the food chain, which is to say putting them six feet under … provided any identifiable scraps were left behind for proper burial. New not just to the franchise, but big-budget studio films, Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow more than understands this, thus keeping the core of Steven Spielberg’s (and novelist Michael Crichton’s) original concept intact — you don’t muck with 65 million years of history, you know — but makes it just different enough to avoid a brainless retread.

The title of Trevorrow’s previous work, the oddball dramedy Safety Not Guaranteed, could double as Jurassic World’s tagline; for instance, when the pterodactyls escape the aviary to make snacks of the tourists, the movie plays for keeps as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds — an obvious visual influence — did in ’63. (Translation: Innocents die!) I love that Universal Pictures has entrusted a guy from the indie ranks to take on this behemoth tale of anything-for-a-billion-bucks corporate greed; Trevorrow rises to the challenge with an injection of subversion that lurks one hair below the surface. Both sides will be laughing their way to the bank for decades to come.

That the fourth Jurassic adventure doesn’t suck would be good enough; that it’s admittedly kinda great is — apologies in advance, kids — dino-mite. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

No sane person can dispute the incredible craftsmanship of 1933’s King Kong … just as no sane person can hold its sequel, The Son of Kong, at any point near that level.

Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack (later to helm the 1949 Kong imitator Mighty Joe Young, this brief, lame, poorly acted follow-up seems incredibly rushed, which may explain the sheer amount of padding in the front half. The flimsy story has Denham (Robert Armstrong, 1932’s The Most Dangerous Game), now penniless due to that whole Empire State Building fiasco, being suckered in to a return expedition to Kong Island. Along the way, he picks up a banjo-strummin’ carnival hussy (Helen Mack, 1935’s She), who is a poor substitute for Fay Wray.

As soon as they set foot on the island, the crew comes across some ooga-booga natives, a giant bear, a couple of dinosaurs and ultimately a hungry sea serpent. Oh, and of course, Son of Kong, whose white fur makes him look like the first cousin of the Abominable Snowman in that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer cartoon. He’s well-animated, but needlessly comical.

This Kong is friendly from the get-go, posing no threat to the humans, but the stereotypical Chinese cook — in fact, that’s the character’s name: Chinese cook! — carries a kitchen machete just in case. Lil’ Kong protects the gang and shows them some treasure before drowning in a flood. Ain’t life a bitch? —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Part three of The Fly saga, The Curse of the Fly is miles away in tone and subject matter from the beloved 1958 original and its low-rent sequel the following year, but highly effective in its sober, British quality. Imagine the stiff-upper-lip style of any given Avengers episode (I’m talking Emma Peel, not Iron Man) done scientific and straight-faced, and you have this rather cool, compelling sci-fi gem, as underrated as it is underseen.

As the black-and-white film begins, we’re treated to slow-motion shots of a comely brunette (Carole Gray, Devils of Darkness) escaping from a loony bin while wearing only her bra and panties. On the run, she comes across Henri Delambre (Brian Donlevy, 1947’s Kiss of Death), one of those dapper young men of the family whose ancestors pioneered experimentation in human teleportation — a project he himself is involved heavily in perfecting.

I say “perfecting,” because all the kinks of disintegration and reintegration of the human body’s molecules aren’t all worked out. And damned if the Delambres don’t have a mess of caged mutants out back to prove it! Included in the menagerie is Henri’s ex-wife, who — although now scaly-faced — still plays a mean piano!

These unethical laboratory shenanigans lead to a mutant revolt and a perverse, genuinely disturbing twist I won’t reveal. I found Curse to be an incredibly unique take on the Fly concept as created in George Langelaan’s 1957 short story; uncommon for the B-programmer era, director Don Sharp (Psychomania) found a way to expand on the source material’s mythology without just doing a simple rehash, although the studio — and especially tightwad producer Robert L. Lippert (The Last Man on Earth) — gladly would have settled for that. It would have been interesting to see where the franchise went from here, but 20th Century Fox gave it up until David Cronenberg’s brilliant reinvention in 1986. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.