Mick LaSalle

Though it’s not any better than most romantic comedies, Voicemails for Isabelle has aspects that are genuinely interesting. It touches on ideas and suggests nuances of psychology that feel serious, even though the movie itself does not.

It has all the excitement of a movie about crime, but if you took all the crime out of it, it would still work as a love story. Director Adam Rehmeier and screenwriter Tom Dean are not trying to create something mythic here, but something small-scale and affecting.

Propeller One-Way Night Coach tells a simple story, but with such detail and nuance that we come away feeling that we really understand these people and their times.

Most of the liberties taken with the real history in “Pressure” only serve to enhance the drama, in a film where the built-in dramatic takes are already incalculable.

The weakness of “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” aside from the fact that at 136 minutes it’s a little too long, is that it follows the less interesting character of Baranov. But this isn’t Dano’s fault. He can’t make this fictional fellow more interesting than Putin.

If “Remarkably Bright Creatures” only had that magnificent octopus going for it, it would be halfway to a good movie. But the human characters are interesting, as well, showing the stresses of the different stages of life.

It’s a good film, very unlike most “disease of the week” pictures, in that it’s often quite funny, and it tells a fascinating story about something that remains mysterious to most people.

Instead of settling for a tour de force from McKellen, Soderbergh goes for something better — a fascinating give and take from start to finish.

Jonah Hill has directed and co-written an impressive little movie with “Outcome.” It could be called a Hollywood satire, but what’s striking about it — and audacious and unexpected — is that it’s dramatic and heartfelt. Here and there, it even comes close to being sentimental.

Cast adrift in this aimless movie, Ahmed seems lost. His performance is one in an unfortunate tradition of weepy Hamlets, and his problems are compounded by the fact that his weepiness is unconvincing. Each time he teared up while delivering a soliloquy, I felt that he was trying to sell me a used car.