Arthur the King (in theaters)

If you like dogs, you’re going to want to check out “Arthur the King.”

The movie is named after the dog, who ends up being the most gripping part. It’s hard not to get emotional over the adventures of a loyal, intrepid street dog who just wants a home. The sections with the adventure racing team have their satisfying moments as well, including all the team bonding moments the genre requires. You’ll enjoy yourself if you like inspirational sports movies, but in the end even the creative team knows we’re all really there for the dog.

The movie follows Mark Wahlburg as a frustrated adventure racer desperate to get out there one more time. His last race ended badly because he wouldn’t listen to his team, so he gambles everything on one last chance. When he and his team bond with a stray dog on the trail, though, his priorities start to shift away from the prize to discover what’s really important.

Though it claims to be based on a true story, it’s different enough from what actually happened to more accurately count as “inspired by.” It also takes too long to get started, with things not really picking up until they get to the jungle. Some buildup is necessary, but it could be a solid 15 minutes shorter. Wahlburg is fine, but the movie is better when he has Simu Liu, Ali Suliman, and Nathalie Emmanuel to play off of.

In the end, though, the real heart of the movie is the dog.

Grade: Two and a half stars

Damsel (Netflix) 

If you wait long enough, “Damsel” turns into a surprisingly satisfying film.

After a slow start, the movie starts developing the classic princess-sacrificed-to-dragon story into something much more interesting. Rather than simply go the “girl power” route, the creative team turned it into a face-off between two deadly enemies with equally valid reasons to fight. On top of that, they added strong survival movie elements, an excellent ending, and fantastic performances from Millie Bobby Brown, Angela Bassett, and Shohreh Aghdashloo. Once it all comes together, the results are deeply satisfying.

In the movie, a princess from a poorer kingdom (Brown) is married off to a distant, rich prince. Though he seems nice enough at first, she’s soon sacrificed to a dragon in order to stave off her new husband’s family curse. Can our damsel survive, save her family, and right some centuries-old wrongs, or will she end up as dragon dinner?

The real problem with the movie is the first half hour. It’s an extremely slow build as we realize that her new groom’s family are not what they seem, and in a movie with an entirely different ad campaign it might have been effective. But the fact that she’s going to be sacrificed to the dragon is the movie’s entire ad campaign, up to and including its basic description. You cannot hear about this movie without knowing this key plot point, which means that the amount of time they build up to that point comes across as horribly dull. If they’d trimmed 15-20 minutes out of that section, we could have experienced the part they did well that much faster.

Grade: Two and a half stars

Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Utah Film Critics Association. Find her on Twitter at @wardellwriter or drop her a line at [email protected].