With Happy Go Lucky, British writer/director Mike Leigh seems to have discovered the lighter side to the realistically dark life depicted in his past efforts, such as Secrets and Lies and Vera Drake. While all of his films certainly have a sense of humor and some measure of lightness, I believe Happy Go Lucky is the first to feature a relentlessly positive character who always looks on the bright side of life—even at the expense of practicality and common sense. But I really don’t think that Leigh is interested in heaping praise upon Poppy. A great many viewers may end up with reactions similar to her driving instructor’s: incensed at Poppy for drawing us in, leading us on, and letting us down.

Veteran director Mark Herman does a fine, fine job with the urban settings that stand in for Berlin. He establishes the story with a solid sense of place and time, and with the deft use of myriad reflections—the image of a Nazi a flag in puddle, fleeting images on glass tabletops, hands moving above polished spoons, a grandmother’s gaze into a ballroom mirror—he reminds us that what are seeing is at best an impressionistic memory of horrors past, neither a historical treatise nor a cinema verite document. But because the film does such a fine job in its early going of establishing a full-bodied sense of reality, the convenience and almost mind-numbing improbability of the story’s central conceit comes close to killing the narrative entirely.

One of the surprises of Molly Hartley is that it actually takes seriously—within the scope of the story—the notion that demons are living amongst us and must be dealt with in some fashion. In this respect, it’s a worthy descendant of The Exorcist or The Omen, or even the recent The Exorcism of Emily Rose, the tone of which is a nice match for Hartley. Unlike Emily Rose, however, Molly’s fate is more metaphysical than physical. Screening this film back-to-back with Bill Paxton’s 2001 directorial effort Frailty would sure yield some provocative discussions. This is a surprisingly good—and chaste—little movie. If psychological thrillers are your thing, you could do lots, lots worse.

Director Tom Cappello, whose body of work includes short documentaries for The History Channel and National Geographic Explorer, subtly and sumptuously weaves a three-stranded tale of oppression, organization, and victory. The premise behind A Powerful Noise is that women can be a dynamic, positive force in the world by constructively raising their voices in their communities, and the film makes the general case not by argumentation but by highlighting three specific instances of such constructive activism. So I’m telling you, guys: impress the heck out of your wife, and do her a huge favor. Even though times are tough, hire a babysitter, buy a couple of tickets, and take her to participate in A Powerful Noise Live at a theater near you on March 5.