With an ending clearly setting up further adventures to come, The Super Mario Bros. is a solid kickoff to a new chapter in this enduring, multi-platform franchise

Thanks to Affleck’s sure-handed, period-piece-perfect direction, a crackling good screenplay by Alex Convery and the lively, funny, warm, passionate performances from the A-list cast, Air is as entertaining and fast-paced as an NBA Finals game that is destined for overtime.

It’s bigger, louder and dumber than the original—filled with cartoon violence, only occasionally funny dialogue and a group of suspects/victims not nearly as intriguing as the bunch from the first film.

It’s like a strange and misguided takeoff on “All That Jazz” as funneled through “Rock of Ages,” and while there’s no denying the heart and effort behind the presentation, that finale is representative of the movie itself in that it has an uncanny way of hitting the wrong notes.

Co-directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, working from a script they penned with Michael Gilio, have struck the right balance between high-stakes action, warm drama and clever comedy in a consistently engaging, mostly family-friendly romp that features some of the most spot-on casting of any film so far this year.

This Apple TV+ original film, directed by Jon S. Baird, doesn’t attempt to replicate the entertainingly addictive block-stacking puzzle game because I don’t know how you’d make a movie out of that; it’s a fictionalized and creatively stylized origins story that plays like a Cold War thriller version of “The Social Network.”

Despite the fine performances, A Good Person starts off on the wrong foot and never finds a solid stride.

Somewhere inside the utterly unnecessary, bloated running time for John Wick IV, there’s a brilliant, stripped-down, 100-minute classic of a drive-in action film, where the admittedly breathtaking action sequences don’t grind on for so long that they actually become borderline tedious.

As we pick up Billy/Shazam’s story about four years later, it quickly becomes apparent this is just going to be a by-the-numbers, second-tier adventure with only a few small chuckles and one or two genuinely touching moments. The rest is just noise.

Yes, Letterman is a big U2 guy (he once had the band on for an entire week’s worth of shows) — but this is one odd albeit sometimes charming duck of a documentary.

Writer-director Ruskin and editor Anne McCabe do a superb job of keeping the story moving, even though much of Loretta’s work involves grinding it out by knocking on doors, researching news clippings, interviewing survivors and relatives, making calls from pay phones, etc., etc.

Now comes the loony, murky and muddled sci-fi action semi-thriller 65, with A-list star Adam Driver and the talented writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (who collaborated with John Krasinski on “A Quiet Place”) taking a detour through B-Movie Lane in a film that isn’t compelling enough to make for silly popcorn entertainment but isn’t terrible enough to be labeled a disaster.

We know we’ll be fed something we’ve consumed many times before, and there’s not a single development that comes as even a mild surprise, and it makes for a comforting, enjoyable and satisfying experience.

Of all the ridiculous and overblown albeit entertainingly grisly “Scream” finales, this might be the most outlandish and spectacularly brutal ending of all.

The awkwardly titled Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is a mixed bag that plays like a cross between a “Mission: Impossible” movie and “Get Shorty,” and there are some moments of hilariously dark humor and a few nifty fight sequences. But the plot is so convoluted it feels as if chunks of different scripts were all fed into some kind of A.I. blender, with the result being an inconsequential serving of empty cinematic calories.

What makes Creed III a consistently engrossing watch is the gritty and violent back story, and the present-day tension between two former best friends whose lives were forever changed by a single confrontation that went sideways and who now have been reunited after nearly 20 years, with one man on top of the world and the other about two degrees from reaching the boiling point as he simmers with rage and resentment.

As the body count piles up and the action gets bigger and bigger, even the great John Luther comes perilously close to being overwhelmed by the spectacle in an increasingly ludicrous storyline that favors admittedly stunning and often gruesome visuals in favor of anything approaching plausibility.

The cast is wonderful, the laughs are frequent, and the ending is truly touching.

This is a genuinely well-crafted horror gem with a winning cast, some nifty twists and a very good bear who betrays its CGI origins maybe 10% of the time but for the most part looks like an actual, cocaine-fueled black bear with lightning-quick reflexes, a big bite and an insatiable appetite for coke on the rocks.

Clocking in a relatively breezy 125 minutes and featuring a dazzling array of VFX and CGI, “Quantumania” manages to tell an intimate family story against an enormously expansive yet subatomic background.

Nobody’s ever going to match Bogart’s iconic work opposite Lauren Bacall in Howard Hawks’ 1946 classic, but Neeson delivers a reliably powerful, world-weary, “I’m too old for this s---!” performance in Neil Jordan’s exquisitely photographed and sometimes convoluted but thoroughly enjoyable period piece.

In some ways, it’s not much, but in the ways that count, it’s more than enough.

An enjoyable and slick little thriller with a brilliant cast of actors clearly having a good time sinking their teeth into the salacious material.

The dance scenes are admittedly well-choreographed and filmed (that Soderbergh kid knows what he’s doing behind the camera), but “Last Dance” isn’t nearly as raw and sexy as the original.

Even though many of the segments are brief, Guevara-Flanagan does a remarkably thorough job in covering such a wide range of areas. The only complaint one might have about Body Parts is it easily could have been twice as long.

While my guess is this will be pulverized by some critics and fans for its big swings and logic-defying premise, I found it to be an admittedly loopy but tightly spun, at times wickedly funny and consistently involving psychological thriller that dares to try something different.

There are a few chuckles sprinkled here and there, but for a movie about football it doesn’t seem to know all that much about football (certain scenes that transpire during the Super Bowl are cartoonishly implausible), and the four primary characters are rather thinly drawn.

I’m not sure there’s much more of an appetite for these inward-looking, COVID-set films anymore, but if you’re up for it, writer-director Cecilia Miniucchi’s “Life Upside Down” is a slight but wryly effective, upper-class social satire with winning performances from a cast including Bob Odenkirk, Radha Mitchell and Danny Huston.