Norm Macdonald could make kindness a punchline..

Netflix’s terrific “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald” reminds us how much intelligence that required.

Judd Apatow’s documentary began streaming October 16, alongside the theatrical release of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary, “You Can See Everything.” Anyone seeking another encounter with a master of misdirection can skip the ticket line.

Macdonald was an accessible Andy Kaufman. Just as brilliant. Perhaps more so.

Kaufman could turn bewilderment into an endurance test. Macdonald made it feel like company. You wanted to stay with him even when he seemed determined to lose you.

Drawing on archival footage and home videos, Apatow lets us experience the peculiar pleasure of watching an audience struggle to catch up. Macdonald’s confidence could make everyone else look nervous.

Consider Comedy Central’s 2008 roast of Bob Saget. The format rewards aggression. Each comedian must find something more appalling to say than the last. Macdonald recognized how predictable that supposedly outrageous ritual had become.

So he brought dad jokes. His father had given him a book of retirement-party jokes when he started in comedy. Macdonald later told Marc Maron he used it for the roast. A producer instructed him to be shocking.

So he was anything but. The gags creaked. Macdonald lingered over them. You could feel the uncertainty: Had he lost his touch? Had he misunderstood the assignment?

Watching now, the performance is hilarious. He turned the roast’s appetite for humiliation back on the roast. The room had prepared for cruelty; sincerity left it defenseless.

His affection for Saget gave the joke its force. He could make fun of the occasion while honoring the friend.

Television kept giving Macdonald shows, though his best work often came from taking over somebody else’s. He could make a host’s loss of control the evening’s chief pleasure. His own vehicles, from ABC’s “The Norm Show” to Netflix’s “Norm Macdonald Has a Show,” faced the problem of containing a performer whose appeal lay in escaping containment.

His 2016 book, “Based on a True Story,” extended the mischief: offer readers a memoir, then let them wonder how much of the author they could believe.

Twitter accommodated the same wandering intelligence. His account of “Saturday Night Live’s” 40th-anniversary special ran to 110 tweets. Readers followed because he made the detours worth taking.

Macdonald died September 14, 2021, at 61, after keeping cancer private for nine years. Producing partner Lori Jo Hoekstra said he wanted audiences and loved ones to keep seeing him as they always had.

The roast preceded his illness. The book and later shows came during treatment.

Kaufman sought a cancer cure in the Philippines through purported psychic surgery before his death in 1984. Macdonald kept his struggle largely beyond public view.

It gives the later performances an ache. Apatow trusts the comedy to bear it.

Macdonald spent his career making us wonder what he meant. He left us knowing how much he mattered.

Hollywood spent years trying to build movies nobody could resist, and audiences started falling for the ones nobody could explain.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has earned more than $1 billion overseas and nearly $600 million in North America. It is cinema built at the scale of Homer. Stars, monsters, armies, oceans and IMAX screens tall enough to give Zeus vertigo.

The blockbuster lives.

Yet the year’s stranger story belongs to the little creatures running between its feet.

Obsession cost $750,000 and has earned more than $400 million worldwide. Curry Barker, its 26-year-old writer and director, built his audience making comedy sketches and horror shorts for YouTube. He shot the movie in 20 days.

Kane Parsons was 20 when he directed Backrooms, adapted from the internet horror series he began as a teenager. The feature cost about $10 million and has earned more than $394 million. Parsons became the youngest director to open a movie at No. 1. (apnews.com⁠, peacocktv.com⁠, vanityfair.com⁠)

Now comes You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s three-hour documentary about Elizabeth Holmes.

That sentence barely describes it.

Holmes invited the filmmakers into her home 34 days before she entered federal prison. What began as an intimate documentary grew into a three-year collision among truth, performance and delusion. Early audiences at Telluride called it shocking, hilarious and among the best films of the year. The film reportedly includes elaborate reenactments and an unnamed Hollywood actress portraying Holmes, then slipping between the role and herself. (elle.com⁠, businessinsider.com⁠, thedailybeast.com⁠)

These films share little on paper. One concerns a wish that turns romantic longing into terror. Another traps people inside an endless maze of yellow rooms. The third places a convicted fraudster across from the one comedian uniquely equipped to stare into her machinery.

They share something more important.

They feel discovered.

For decades, Hollywood sold films through familiarity. A known character. A familiar franchise. A trailer that explained the premise, conflict, explosions and best joke before the lights dimmed.

These movies offer a door.

People enter because somebody online says, “You have to see this,” followed by, “I cannot tell you why.”

That mystery has become rare. Every celebrity shares breakfast. Every trailer receives a trailer. Every franchise arrives with a release calendar extending through the next presidential administration. The culture explains everything until nothing feels worth discovering.

Obsession and Backrooms grew from the internet, yet they resist its demand for instant clarity. They use its language of fragments, hidden passages and shared mythology. Their young audiences arrive already trained to investigate. Watching becomes part of a larger game. The movie continues through theories, reaction videos and arguments afterward.

You Can See Everything exploits a darker version of the same instinct. Holmes has spent her adult life manufacturing Elizabeth Holmes. Fielder has spent his career manufacturing Nathan Fielder. Each understands the camera as both witness and accomplice.

The audience must decide who is performing, who believes the performance and whether a difference remains. It’s telling that if you read the Holmes title top to bottom, it reads You Can See Everything. Left to right, however, it’s Everything You Can See.

That question belongs to this moment.

We live among curated selves, synthetic images and algorithms capable of imitating human voices. Our politicians perform sincerity. Our billionaires perform victimhood. Ordinary people perform their lives for strangers.

The culture has become smooth, branded and false.

These films arrive rough around the edges. They feel personal. They carry the exhilarating possibility that somebody might lose control of them. Even their flaws resemble fingerprints.

The Odyssey proves audiences still want to see the biggest ship Hollywood can build.

The weird little movies prove we also want to slip through a crack in the hull and find something alive inside.