Sinister Reviews

Sinister overcomes an iffy script to reel you in with one seriously creepy vibe.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

It owes more than a debt of gratitude to The Shining and The Ring, among others, but Derrickson processes the chilling influences into an eerie experience mindful of the significance of projected images watched alone in the dark.

Full Review | Original Score: B

Is it scary? Creepy is more like it. "Sinister" makes you feel uneasy, lulls you into sleepy mode and then slaps you with a couple of cheap scares.

Full Review | Original Score: C

Hawke is utterly convincing as the driven but dodgy writer and Derrickson has great fun infecting the quivering audience with his hero's creeping paranoia.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

Ethan Hawke creates a believable character who wants to write a best seller, but that is the only thing in this movie that rings true or logical.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10

has the all too rare virtue of being a horror film with a fine gloss of originality and genuine surprise to it

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Scary but contrived... .

Full Review | Original Score: C

Falls short of great horror

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Derrickson is a sharp stylist who knows how to meld dreadful imagery with actual ideas that make his horror films more than just exercises in goose-the-audience manipulation

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Writer/director Scott Derrickson has a touch for using old horror movie tools to create new scares, and he also incorporates several interesting themes into Sinister.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

A most delicious kind of horror movie... gives us a nice adrenaline boost and otherwise doesn't linger.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10

Writer-director Scott Derrickson does absolutely nothing right.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

Sinister isn't perfect, but it easily tops most of its scare-starved competition.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

If we define ["sinister"] as meaning, "ominous, forbidding, portending of doom," the film starts well enough, with suggestions of dark and sinister events to come; but soon other words creep into mind: stolid, sluggish, tedious.

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I'm uh-scared, I'm uh-scared!"

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

The most enthusiastic thing I can say about it is that I've sat through worse -- much worse -- and I'll probably sit through worse again in about a week.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Indebted to some welcome influences, including King ('The Shining') and Antonioni ('Blowup').

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

We begin with old Super 8 footage of a family hanging from a tree which is either a terrible tragedy or a natural outcome of the average Disney vacation.

Full Review | Original Score: D

More stupid than scary, Sinister can't even figure out who its real demon is.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

I never look at Rotten Tomatoes until after I publish my review. My reviews agree with the Tomatometer 77% of the time. While "Sinister" is fresh here based on 100+ reviews, it's only barely so at 63%. That's wrong. This is the best horror film of 2012.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5.0