Like a bad orange, this adaptation of the series-spawning novel by Rick Yancey lacks both juice and flavor.

Depending on what you need from horror like this – shock followed by relief, or a brutalization fix – Martyrs is bait-and-switch, or it’s a drawn-out tease that makes good. Either way, it’s a sop to vile tastes.

This is the sort of film in which we’re told that a certain action is impossible, until it isn’t, or that a certain thing would never happen, and then it does, so even with all those lives on the line, the movie can’t effectively build up stakes or consequences.

It’s cohesive and cathartic enough to make a fourth entry unnecessary, but at the same time, it’s entertaining and gorgeous enough to make the prospect of same something to welcome.

The Masked Saint didn’t screen for critics, but it’s no worse than any other faith-based film, which as a canon tends to sacrifice story for the sermon. A movie that can finally combine the two — now that’d be a miracle worth beholding.

While writer-director Andrew Renzi’s feature narrative debut is problematic whenever Gere isn’t onscreen (and even sometimes when he is), the veteran star exudes a damaged magnetism reminiscent of the character studies that thrilled discerning moviegoers in the ’70s.

Occasionally Norm and everyone around him will break out into a dance, and you have to wonder if these numbers were scheduled as bathroom breaks.

In terms of anything that has to do with characterization, Chuck Hogan‘s script is punishingly rote. But as bombastic, shoot-‘em-up spectacle, 13 Hours is a visceral, well-paced and often beautiful action-thriller.

The film’s most genuinely funny moment involves A.J.’s ringtones, which should perhaps come as no surprise — the stakes, and the laughs, are so small that Ride Along 2 was apparently designed to be watched on your phone.

The accusations of cultural tone-deafness wind up being fairly moot, since The Forest turns out to be so generally inept and non-scary that to boycott it would give the film more attention than it deserves.

One of those rare films so unfathomably ghastly you could write a better one while sitting through its interminable 110 minutes. I’d rather re-watch Elton John's "Gnomeo & Juliet" 110 times.

Most essential to telling this story are Rampling and Courtenay, both of whom convey pages and pages of backstory and emotion with the most fleeting of glances.

The first “Point Break” was absurd and hyper-macho, but the director committed to the story enough to make it, at the very least, vibrantly watchable. This remake offers nothing but the absurdity, along with a handful of impressive stunt sequences that are both its reason for being and a complete distraction from what little story is happening here.

Ferrell and Wahlberg are both game, but the material only sporadically lets them let loose and do something truly creative, while poor Cardellini transitions from naggy to unreliable.

American exceptionalism certainly deserves to be deconstructed, but that can most assuredly be accomplished with a lot more nuance than it is here. As an exercise in liberal self-flagellation, hey, whatever floats your boat. But as a political call-to-arms, I believe in America: We can do better.

It’s that devotion to truth that makes Son of Saul such a difficult watch — and also one of year’s most important masterpieces.

Failing almost entirely at amusement, “The Road Chip” may be most useful as a lesson for children to be more discerning about their movie choices.

Abrams had the benefit of learning what didn’t work in Lucas’ prequels, and he’s gone in the opposite direction. He’s also set an interesting course for moving forward with this engaging cast playing new characters making their way through this beloved universe.

The Hateful Eight may frustrate some of his more literally sanguine supporters, but it’s nonetheless an entertaining piece of dialogue-driven theater — with the occasional rifle-shot to the head.

The Ridiculous 6 is everything wrong with Hollywood for the past two decades: a circle-jerk of imbecilic white-dude humor.

Delicate and restrained, the film offers the messages of redemption and renewal we so often crave from a Christmas movie without wrapping its themes and characters in tinsel.

Even the stray gross-out moments of Sisters register as humane and heartfelt; Fey and Pohler’s comedy comes from a place of warmth and intelligence, and so does the movie.

This is a rare misstep for Russell, who in the past has sold us on all kinds of stories, whether they’re as indescribable as “I Heart Huckabee’s” or as traditional as “The Fighter.” Unlike his indefatigable heroine, however, Russell just can’t seem to close the deal on Joy.

Is the relentlessness too much? At two and a half hours, perhaps, but inventiveness abounds.

Fassbender manages to find the psychological throughline that makes Macbeth’s increasing mental deterioration — a development that can feel overly formalistic, not to mention moralistic — wholly convincing.

The film has a killer case of the cutes that only Smith’s acidity can cut, and only so much.

Though not exactly a punishment, director Michael Dougherty’s tongue-in-cheek monster movie is hardly a celebration, either, despite initial promise that we’d be getting a niftier-than-usual package of subversive comedy and chills to shake up the usual holiday-movie sameness.

If “The Great Beauty” was a heady, humming party you wanted to live inside, Youth — its melancholy and splendor too often at odds — never rises above feeling like a pretty, meandering gallery show.

Lovers of spectacle for spectacle’s sake will come away from the film with many discrete sequences to admire, but there’s not enough of a human element to bridge them together. In terms of its lasting power, In the Heart of the Sea roars in like a great tide, but then just as quickly dissipates.

It’s as punishingly dull as Sunday-school homework — and just as unnecessary.

Whether or not one should tamper in God’s domain remains a matter of opinion, but Victor Frankenstein provides evidence that mere mortals should not mess with what Ms. Shelley hath wrought.

If the film’s pinning much of the world’s problems to sex at times seems excessive, silly or reductive, Lee justifies it with moments of unexpected grace.

Ergüven and her similarly green cast prove to be preternatural talents in delivering a story that’s simultaneously alarming and loads of tart-tongued fun.

#Horror” is fueled by the despairing fear and misanthropy you can only get from reading needlessly malicious Internet comments. But it’s also made with verve, style, and sparing gore by writer-director (and fashion designer) Tara Subkoff.

Both haunting and sweeping, Carol represents another masterwork from one of this generation’s great filmmakers.

Hardy’s virtuosity saves the picture’s artificiality at nearly every turn.

“Secret” contains a passel of interesting ideas and effective scenes that don’t add up to an interesting whole.

Instead of playing like the first of a series of Adonis Creed movies, Creed never rises above being one more by-the-numbers “Rocky” retread.

It’s as if the makers of The Night Before have it in them to make a touching and funny movie but instead throw that chance away by not taking what they’re doing seriously enough.

Abbott (“A Most Violent Year,” HBO’s “Girls”) is a revelation, creating a multidimensional character whose battling, sometimes uncontrollable emotions are clear in his warm and expressive eyes.

First-time helmer Peter Sohn and screenwriter Meg LeFauve (“Inside Out”) have created a fantastic and frequently exhilarating feature that showcases Pixar’s greatest strengths: technical brilliance, emotional texture, crossover appeal, and an impish sense of humor that takes the utmost advantage of the animated form.

This is a movie that is confident in clean living, blinkered righteousness, and manly sentimentality, and it is shamed by some brief footage of the real Freddie at the end, an actual person whose story has been diminished by this slack, dawdling, offensive film.

The vignettes sometimes resonate with the viewer but don’t really connect into a plot, there are too many characters with too many stories and pretty good flashbacks, and some of the jokes are impossible to laugh out loud at unless you’re a highly trained and paid actor.

The film’s compassion for everyday Americans...along with its energetic determination to entertain, enlighten, and infuriate make it a laudable surprise.

Timely but dreary and dramatically inept.

If By the Sea weren’t so aggressively humorless, it might almost qualify as camp, so unsuccessful is its pursuit of weighty drama. Unintentional laughs are hard to come by here; instead, there are yawns aplenty.

Roach and McNamara fall victim to the occasional phony biopic moment or straight-up moment of didacticism, but overall Trumbo is a lively history about the day-in-day-out drudgery of survival during oppressive times. Screenwriters are so rarely taken seriously by the film industry that it’s a nice switch to watch them be the heroes.

Love feels deeply, but not complexly. Both Murphy and Noé’s sustained sex scenes understand want and need, but there’s little to invest in emotionally.

This is a film that dares to be about something while still delivering as a piece of straightforward entertainment.

This is sweet, sentimental filmmaking of the old school, but it’s too sincere to get sticky. If “nice” isn’t the kind of adjective to put you off a movie, you’ll probably enjoy Brooklyn, even if you’re occasionally aware of its masterful manipulations.

"Art Addict” may be encyclopedic, but it’s all-too-rarely insightful.

Unflinching yet unburdened, Miss You Already is like the best kind of hug: warm, reassuring, cathartic, and a fleeting but vital reminder that there’s at least as much good in the world as there is bad.

If The Peanuts Movie never quite reaches the melancholy of earlier films like “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” and “Snoopy Come Home,” it nonetheless respects the importance of failure and disappointment that Schulz always included in his storytelling.

Even a better political satire would have a hard time keeping up with the bizarrely eccentric vaudeville currently taking place on cable news, but Our Brand Is Crisis can’t even come close.

Silicon Valley is built on various inequalities, and, frustratingly, CodeGirl isn’t interested enough in delving into those issues — or the girls determined to overcome them.

The whole film becomes as mechanical as the oversized drills in play at the rescue site.

Sheridan proves he can still act the crap out of a movie, even when crap is all the movie has to offer.

The movie’s climactic exorcism jamboree provides some relief from the movie’s overwhelming dullness, and the final segments put the movie’s 3-D to use, but overall, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension feels like the last wheeze of a played-out series.

Silva does manage to introduce discomfort slowly, but the manner in which things go very, very wrong is dealt with superficially.

Spectre is a frustratingly unsatisfying experience.

This new “Jem” might be pure cubic zirconium, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be part of a fun night out.

The women’s movements are routinely and depressingly ignored by the movies. But Suffragette isn’t just a dutiful corrective, a lid to cover up a gap, but a necessarily distressing exploration of how much a political vanguard will push and endure to set things right — and how fiercely and eagerly a society that’s resistant to change will punish them for it.

The cast of old pros (including Bruce Willis as a soldier of fortune) amble through amiably enough, but a few laughs here and there aren’t enough to make this movie come together in a satisfying way.

The Last Witch Hunter aims for pulpy, comic-book fun, but it’s never as fleet, funny, or detailed as it needs to be. And if you’re looking for something above middling in terms of plot, characters, world-building, even action sequences, you’ll need to seek it elsewhere.

Burnt ultimately feels like those sous-vide bags that Adam finds so worthy of mockery: trapped in plastic, with the air sucked out of it.

Hou’s brand of reserve might not be for all audiences, but arthouse admirers of cinematic stillness will find themselves enraptured by this hypnotic tale.

Blanchett, as you’d imagine, is riveting, even when she’s saddled with the movie’s on-the-nose dialogue, not to mention a handful of fairly contrived domestic scenes.

Experimenter is a largely engrossing sit, even during an unfortunate moment when Sarsgaard sings and the film threatens to become a musical. But as interesting as the developments are, they’re too inscrutable to stay with you for very long.

Larson excels at determined despair, simultaneously evincing vulnerability and fearlessness. It’s an exciting, tour-de-force performance by an actress who announces herself as one of the best of her generation. If only the film around her were as bold.

While the digital effects are undeniably contemporary, Crimson Peak is otherwise a period homage that mostly plays like a period film, rarely giving in to contemporary notions of pacing and payoff. When the scares do arrive, however, they’re effectively unsettling.

The documentary is a testament to the human spirit, to unity in times of depravation, to the ability of common individuals to effect change at the highest level.

What’s at play here is how sex and the sexual impulse can unleash destructive forces, and Roth enjoys conveying that destruction visually as he lets the ladies loose all over this bourgeois house.

This uneven but funny and engrossing drama is less about Victoria than about time itself: how it slows down in the bleary middle of the night, how it speeds up relationships between strangers when no one else is around, how capacious it is in containing the most unexpected of swerves and stumbles.

A movie that feels like a series of beautifully and meticulously crafted tiles in a half-finished mosaic; you can admire the pieces but still come away feeling like you’ve been deprived of the whole.

Goofily self-aware and wholesomely boisterous, it’s a children’s picture whose sense of spooky fun readily diverts from its quibble-worthy messaging.

If you can overlook the three or four endings of Bridge of Spies, each more overdone than the last, there’s a lot to like here.

While it’s an undeniably powerful film, it also seemingly feels the need to tread carefully.

Grace and poise are certainly embedded in Yousafzai’s DNA, but there’s frustratingly little of her vulnerability or interiority in the film.

The laughs are mild, but at least some exist.

Perhaps most importantly, not only does the film stress the importance of using math and physics and botany and chemistry to solve problems, but it also makes a plot based on scientific inquiry and audacity just as exciting and even more unpredictable as the movies’ usual brand of problem-solving, the kind that involves punching everyone and then blowing everything up.

Mississippi Grind winds up being that rare beast: the buddy comedy where you’re not tired of the buddies well before the credits roll.

The Walk is that rare movie that might please practically everyone, from viewers just looking for a thrill to those who might enjoy a story that sounds like a tall tale but winds up being discreetly poignant.

At best, The Green Inferno is a reliable shock and disgust-delivery system. At worst — and it certainly veers toward the worst — it’s a racially reprehensible work that exploits one of the world’s most powerless peoples. And no number of movie-geek references to “Cannibal Holocaust” is going to change that.

Brand: A Second Coming is messy, muddled and occasionally maddening; it’s also a strong and stirring portrait of a funnyman who’s realized that some things just aren’t that funny.

Whereas the jokes in the “Grown Ups” series feel reactionary and bullying, the family-friendly Hotel Transylvania gags (in the script by Sandler and Robert Smigel) instead come off as clever and humane, even when they’re making fun of helicopter moms and lawsuit-sensitive summer camps.

Stonewall somehow manages to be simultaneously bloated and anemic, overstuffed and underpopulated.

The Internship delivers what it promises, no more and no less, and faulting it for not being a rougher, tougher, smarter film about how much we all seem to live our lives through our work today would be like yelling at a spoon for not being a knife.

A thoroughly unpleasant experience.

The film’s so inflated with moral importance that it becomes ridiculous, a Lifetime movie shoved into a cage and fattened with sermons and platitudes until it is ready to be served up cold and bland.

Sicario calls to mind the films of the 1970s — not necessarily the ones we think of as capital-I Important, but the seamy, sweaty thrillers that subtly slipped in anti-establishmentarian messages amid the violence. It mixes arthouse and grindhouse into a most satisfying cocktail.

The New Girlfriend is a delicate figurine: too quaint to feel necessary in the current climate of ever-bolder representations of trans lives, and yet rescued from disposability by its delicate beauty.

When an infidel makes a film about traveling to an Islamic country that doesn’t accept his way of life, you expect a little more tension.

If you think man-crack is the apex of hilarity, A Walk in the Woods just might be the movie for you. It’s all right there in the trailers: slapstick, womp-womp one-liners, the premise of old buddies going on an adventure.

"90 Minutes" is one of the better faith-based films out there.

It’s a lush and intriguing experience that works so well for so long that it can’t be undone by a few flaws.

You don’t have to love De Palma’s movies to find De Palma a fascinating look at a vital period of American film history, through the eyes of a controversial artist.

Pawn Sacrifice is intelligent, absorbing, never boring, and skillfully tense when it should be.

Even if you think you’ve seen this movie before, Headland’s gift for outrageous dialogue... and Sudeikis and Brie’s comic chemistry make Sleeping with Other People a treat from start to finish.