Owen Gleiberman

In its dry deliberate way, Paint skewers something all too real: a certain kind of toxic self-deluding male myopia.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie gives you a wholesome prankish druggy chameleonic video-game buzz; it’s also a nice, sweet confection for 6-year-olds.

Sandler and Aniston mesh; they made you believe in Nick and Audrey’s cantankerous marriage, and in the love percolating just beneath the fighting. If what Nora Ephron devised was a clever Xerox of the rom-com, “Murder Mystery 2” is a Xerox of the Xerox, powered by a whodunit plot that’s a cheesy light parody of itself played just straight enough to work.

Searchingly directed by John Scheinfeld (“The U.S. vs. John Lennon”), What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? is a tasty and urgent piece of rock history, but in a strange way the film never comes close to answering its own question.

The Thief Collector is a nimble and entertaining dissection of a crime. It’s also a portrait of art and obsession. But by the time it makes you say “Oh. My. God.,” it’s a movie that has used art to touch something essential about how strangers — or maybe I should just say the downright strange — walk among us.

“Money Shot,” with a no-fuss journalistic evenhandedness, makes the case that the reaction against the site, though most of it came from an unassailable moral place, may have been out of balance — that it wound up hurting sex workers without actually doing anything tangible to help the victims of trafficking.

Every so often, you’ll see a portrait-of-the-artist documentary that’s so beautifully made, about a figure of such unique fascination, whose art is so perfectly showcased by the documentary format, that when it’s over you can’t believe the film hadn’t existed until now. It feels, in its way, essential. Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV is like that.

It’s an addiction drama that has scenes you can bicker with, a few contrivances, and other peccadilloes. Yet beneath the middlebrow situational conventionality, there’s a core of raw feeling and truth to it.

The documentary captures how Shatner, as he began to make a career out of performing his public legend, merged his very identity with that of the hambone thespian inside him.

The origin story was the charm, but the sequel is hobbled by a less buoyant hero and bland villains.

The movie is conceived as a knowingly overstuffed gift to “John Wick” fans, and on that level it succeeds.

Bottoms is unlike any high-school comedy you’ve ever seen. It’s a satire of victimization, a satire of violence, and a satire of itself. It walks a tightrope between sensitivity and insanity (with a knowing bit of inanity), and it’s full of moments that are defiantly what we once used to call incorrect.

It’s at once cheesy and charming, synthetic and spectacular, cozily derivative and rambunctiously inventive, a processed piece of junk-culture joy that, by the end, may bring a tear to your eye.

Laura Poitras’s 2017 documentary “Risk” was a close-up portrait of Assange, shot during his early years of infamy and as fascinating, in a squirmy way, as Assange himself. “Ithaka” is less about the man than the cause — how the continued prosecution of Assange fits into the issue of free speech. It’s a more morally clean-cut watch. But it’s a lot less dramatic.

Scream VI, while it goes on for too long, is a pretty good thriller. It’s a homicidal shell game that‘s clever in all the right ways, staged and shot more forcefully than the previous film, eager to take advantage of its more sprawling but enclosed cosmopolitan setting.

Ritchie, working from a script he cowrote with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, has taken all of this and transformed it into a movie that’s so clever and airy yet grounded, so sparkling with devil-may-care bravado, so poised right where you want it to be ­— a step ahead of the audience but also leading us right along — that it gives off the charge of a great screwball comedy.

Like a virus that keeps coming back but growing weaker each time, Children of the Corn is now a horror movie that lacks the strength to infect you with even a speck of fear.

Creed III is a sports drama that feels like a thriller with an urgent conscience.

Cocaine Bear is less formulaic than a slasher film and more stylishly made. It’s a true oddball, one that mixes yocks and mock desperation and disembodied limbs. So when it’s over you can say, “Well, we definitely saw that.”

Golda is a good drama about Israel. But it will take a great drama about Israel to dig into the nation’s long-simmering moral ambiguities.

We’re invited to laugh at what we’re seeing, yet Miller works in such a heartfelt and unassuming way that we’re never standing outside the quirks.

“Quantumania” is fun, as well as bedazzling, relentless and numbing, then fun again just when you think you’ve had enough; all of that gets mashed together.

In Consecration Jena Malone doesn’t just sport a casually impeccable British accent. She becomes British — her mood and manners, the way she rocks the sweaters and bangs and debonair politeness. She creates a compelling character, only to see the film’s director, Christopher Smith, swallow her up in all the ecclesiastical gothic malarkey.

Your Place or Mine is an outrageously benign movie, which may not sound like much of a criticism. But it’s so benign it’s innocuous. There’s no tension, no comedy with any bite (except for the dry one-liners of Tig Notaro as the best friend who’s there to give advice), no romantic friction.

Pathaan has a stop-and-go rhythm, and a strung-together structure, that grows wearying. (Two-and-a-half hours of frenetic derivative pulp is a lot of pulp.)

What we’ve forgotten about, for too long, is the North Korean people. For years, their misery has existed under a blackout. Beyond Utopia looks behind the wall and shines a light.

It’s catchy and touching, it weaves the music into the story with a spontaneity that can leave you laughing with pleasure, and it navigates an honest path from despair to belief, which is Carney’s disarmingly sweet calling card.

You Hurt My Feelings stays true to the droll casualness of its title. It’s not a major Holofcener movie; it’s closer to a lively and digressive short story. Yet it’s compelling to see Holofcener merge the fates of all her characters through a grand tweak of the piety of positivity.