Owen Gleiberman

There may be a lot more going on “Blood and Honey 2,” but let’s not kid ourselves. It’s mostly a shambles.

Sleeping Dogs, starring Russell Crowe as a retired cop with Alzheimer’s disease, is a half-rusted scrap heap of a detective mystery. It’s patchy, it’s badly lit, it’s glum, it’s overloaded with suspects, and it’s almost proud of its contrivances. Yet in its logy, booby-trapped way, it keeps you watching.

You might say that “Frozen Empire” has to work even harder to invent a reason for itself to exist. Yet it’s a livelier movie than “Afterlife.”

In “Shirley,” John Ridley’s sharp and lively inside-political docudrama, Regina King plays Shirley Chisholm with a quiet force you can’t look away from.

The first-time director, Sam Yates, working from a utilitarian script by Tom Bateman, slathers on mood, yet there’s a primitive charge to the film’s no-frills staging.

As a rom-com, Irish Wish is more than willing to kiss the Blarney Stone. Yet the chemistry of Lohan and Speleers makes it watchable enough to get by.

“Stormy” shows you what the scandal looks like from inside the sensationalist bubble of fame, and by the end of the film you may be a little bit ashamed of us all.

The movie has three extended action sequences, and I would have been happier if it had eight of them — that is, if it had less pretensions and, like the “Wick” films, was more willing to wear its pulp on its sleeve.

It’s not that the two parts of the movie don’t go together. It’s that the last hour of it, the cheeky dystopian alien-tech horror farce, simply isn’t very good.

The action in Road House is beyond brutal; at moments, it’s vicious. Yet if the movie is far more violent than your average action film, in its slightly crackpot bare-knuckle way it’s also more humane.

Imaginary, despite a few creepy moments, is starved for scenes that make the fear it’s showing you relatable.

Po goes through the motions, but I’m sorry, the kick is gone.

The film’s attitude seems to be: Come for the pierogis and goulash, stay for the humanitarian valor. Fair enough, but I wish the movie had drawn a deeper connection between the taste of freedom and the taste of Veselka.

Spaceman, it’s my duty to report, is a glum and meandering science-fiction fairy tale of a movie.

Drive-Away Dolls is 84 minutes long, and it’s styled to be an easy-to-watch caper, but it’s most definitely a trifle.

The film devotes itself entirely to a celebration and exhaustive analysis of Morricone’s music — it’s a portrait of the artist as virtuoso soundtrack renegade.

The point of the new biopic mode was to reveal totemic figures in a more complex way. “One Love” flirts with complexity but slides into the banality of hero worship.

Lisa Frankenstein, while neither scary nor funny (the way Zelda Williams has directed it, it sits in some corkscrew zone that feels more like “overly complicated SNL sketch”), skims off the top of a dozen once-cool sources.

On its own unvarnished, metaphoric, diary-of-destruction-and-renewal terms, The Outrun is competent and even stylishly made, yet I have to confess: I found the movie overwhelmingly drab.

The film’s exhilaration is that it shows you, through its dangling-from-a-steel-beam footage, what love really is: scaling the heights of devotion, no matter how perilous, without a net.

"Devo,” in its way, preserves the playfulness of Devo by not getting too serious about any of this. Instead, the film traces the rocky road on which this unlikeliest of hit bands became a success.

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is a moving, wrenching, compellingly well-made documentary about Reeve’s life that inevitably ends up centering on his accident and its aftermath.

The appeal of “Eno” — like the appeal of Brian Eno himself — is that the film conjures a wholehearted and accessible experience within an experimental veneer.

Exhibiting Forgiveness sends you out on a note of hope, but it’s not exactly a feel-good movie. It’s a feel-the-reality movie, a drama willing to scald. That’s its quiet power.

A Real Pain is an easy watch, a buddy movie rooted in the existential fun of verbal sparring. Yet it has an emotional kick that sneaks up on you.

Love Lies Bleeding turns consciously wild and garish, and you may think that the film is losing control, yet Rose Glass is fiercely in control of what she’s doing. She’s made a midnight noir that shoots over the top of our expectations but lands where it should, at a place where even valorous people have to go to extremes.

The sly beauty of The American Society of Magical Negroes is that it’s a wicked satire of white people that’s also an empathetic satire of Black people.

You want the movie to add up to something, but what it adds up to is another half-diverting, half-satisfying Soderbergh bauble, only this time he’s the ghost in the machine.