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83It's all done in questionable taste, mucking around in the nasty terrain of snuff films and children in constant peril, but Sinister is smart and well-crafted, and it scarcely gives the audience a moment to breathe.
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80Now this is a scary movie. And, given that it's a horror film, that means it's a good one. [18 Oct 2012]
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Oct 11, 201280Rather than another drearily workaday horror picture, Sinister uses the supernatural to underline its examination of the all-too-human foibles of insecurity and myopic self-centeredness. As the best horror stories so often do, Sinister makes clear that we are our own boogeymen, the worst monsters of all.
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80Hawke's taut performance - lightly parodying his own career doldrums while playing an egotistical hack who's a close cousin of John Cassavetes's self-loathing actor in Rosemary's Baby - is totally credible.
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Sep 22, 201280The scares are not just intense but unyielding in this compelling horror yarn from "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" director Scott Derrickson.
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75It comes together with a gruesome though excellent ending that some will find difficult to shake.
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75Even though the ending is inescapable (and therefore predictable), that does little to diminish its effectiveness.
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75And then there is Vincent D'Onofrio, as a university professor of the occult and mythological, who opens up a line of possibility that eventually saves the ending from being a red herring. Yes, the ending is horrifying, but I don't believe in that stuff. I'm pretty sure I don't.
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75I knew perfectly well, after a while, what Sinister was going to scare me with. But I got scared anyway.
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75The movie makes up for uneven dialogue and pacing issues through sheer horrific imagery.
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70Occasionally stupid (stretching even fright-flick conventions) but scary nonetheless, the picture should please horror fans.
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63The clichés are still clichés. They've just been renovated.
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60Sinister has so much going for it - adult psychology, a great bitchfest of a marital meltdown - that you wince when it finally makes some rather dull choices involving the supernatural.
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60Derrickson bounces back from his insipid redo of "The Day The Earth Stood Still" with an effective chiller that's got a skeleton or two in its closet.
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Sep 28, 201260An enjoyable, if boilerplate, boo-flick that maintains an enviable rate of scares per minute by throwing everything – demons, ghosts, snakes, loud noises – at the screen.
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50Here's the thing: Found footage is scary when - because - it leaves you to fill in a lot of the blanks yourself. But actually watching whole families have terrible things done to them - well, hard-core horror fans may dig it, I guess. I'd call it forced voyeurism of the worst sort.
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50A mixed bag of old-school and contemporary horror tricks that occasionally raises a hair prickle of intrigue.
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50Despite the hype, this horror story can't shake its run-of-the-mill storytelling.
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50The film's sound design is also expertly wrought with a blend of nearly subliminal noises, bumps in the night, and other frights.
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Oct 10, 201250Ellison's fascination with celluloid to solve a crime recalls Antonioni's "Blowup," but Scott Derrickson is unable to conjure an aura that isn't as transparent and weightless as a ghost.
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42Sinister is basically a collection of bogus snuff films linked by standard haunted house tricks - everything creaking and slamming, with the power conveniently shut off.
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40Pros and cons aside, Sinister has the benefit of arriving in the thick of Halloween season, right when movie-goers are most hungry for a few scares. And they'll get them from Derrickson's film, too.
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40A twitchy Mr. Hawke builds a persuasive portrait of desperation with little help from the script and despite playing a character who makes so many mistakes he might as well be on a suicide mission.
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Oct 11, 201240Ridiculous, and never scary, and with the worst ghost makeup in the history of the horror genre, Sinister is enjoyable, even funny at times. Most amusing might be watching Hawke play a character willing to do anything to regain his fame.
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40The movie is full of feints, shocks and scenes of particularly perverse violence, but nothing about it is fresh enough to haunt you in the night. It's predictable.
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40Throughout Sinister, the rooms remain darker than crypts, whether at breakfast or dinnertime, and the sound design causes everything in the house to moan and groan in consort with the hero's worrisome quest. I still can't decide what creaks the most: the floors, the doors, the walls, the dialogue, the acting, or the fatal boughs outside.
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40The snuff-porn aesthetic might suggest a realist drama, but a supernatural dimension is brought into play, making the plot directionless. There isn't an ounce of ingenuity in the way the movie is concluded, but some generic expertise in the way it is put together.
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38The hero of Sinister is almost unaccountably dumb. So, unfortunately, is the movie.
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20Sinister did something I thought would be impossible: It made this lifelong horror freak abhor horror movies.
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Oct 10, 201220Sinister is pretty much everything to hate about modern horror in one mixed bag, a ramshackle teardown of jump-scares and creaky tricks, saw-it-coming "surprises" and the lead-footed thud of inevitability as it tediously places one clumsy foot in front of the other, plodding towards a finale that comes far too late.