Mick LaSalle

If you like Oliver’s poems, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World is a documentary to see. If you don’t know Mary Oliver, this is a chance to discover something special.

Young Washington gets credit for attempting the impossible and for succeeding too, at least to the extent of being entertaining.

The Invite, based on Spanish director Cesc Gay’s “The People Upstairs,” is full of surprises and tonal shifts. It deserves to be experienced fresh, because it’s without doubt one of the best movies of the year.

The documentary captures a feeling of living in the epicenter of youth, excitement and creativity.

As war movies go, this one’s different and often exciting, with several memorable scenes.

Something about “Magic Hour” overcomes its lapses. Perhaps its saving grace is as simple as the fact that it’s unmistakably a pure and sincere statement by a filmmaker who really means it.

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.