| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle
C.W. Nevius
So good it's scary.
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
The creepiest, clammiest, twitchiest squealfest in months. It offers, among its many pleasures, the happiness of safe fear.
|
| 80 |
Dallas Observer
At last Dreamworks has given us the stuff of nightmare.
|
| 80 |
Film Threat
Jim Agnew
Dark, disturbing and original throughout. You know that you’re going to see something a little different than your usual studio crap.
|
| 80 |
Rolling Stone
The pickings are slim for scares this Halloween season (Ghost Ship, Below), so The Ring wins first prize by default.
|
| 80 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
As a marriage of big-budget filmmaking and old-fashioned scare tactics, it easily ranks alongside last year's "The Others."
|
| 80 |
Time
An edgy, watchable film, but one that makes you feel more squeamish than screamish.
|
| 78 |
Austin Chronicle
The less said about The Ring, the better for you, the sooner-to-be-freaked-out.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Tribune
Ends up a few frames short of the perfect horror film, but very few.
|
| 75 |
Entertainment Weekly
The best thing about the movie, which is a very elegantly crafted piece of gothic snuff hokum, is the way it teases and intrigues us with the revelation of what's on that tape.
|
| 75 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The Ring, is going to be this year's version of the "Blair Witch" and "Sixth Sense" phenomenon.
|
| 75 |
Charlotte Observer
If your senses haven't been dulled by slasher films and gorefests, if you're a connoisseur of psychological horror, this is your ticket.
|
| 70 |
TV Guide
A frighteningly good horror movie with enough solid scares to freeze the blood of ardent fans and newcomers alike.
|
| 70 |
Newsweek
This visually stunning movie serves up generous dollops of designer creepiness.
|
| 70 |
Salon.com
A deviously engineered parasite that'll crawl under your skin and live in your nervous system for a while if you give it half a chance.
|
| 63 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
It's a workmanlike, passably engrossing horror flick that copies well from the Japanese original. When it's good, it's not original, and when it's original, it's not so good.
|
| 63 |
USA Today
Too many threads are left dangling and the movie ultimately proves too implausible to put alongside those horror classics.
|
| 63 |
Baltimore Sun
What we have here is a suburban-legend movie stripped of rough edges and cut off from any depth that might have made it insidiously haunting.
|
| 63 |
Miami Herald
It's an understatement to say that The Ring is not your ordinary horror film. And never forget to rewind.
|
| 60 |
Slate
The movie is meant to get into you like a virus, and it does.
|
| 60 |
LA Weekly
In the final reel, the tension dissipates with a flabby hiss, as the film devolves into a banal, conventional ghost story.
|
| 58 |
Portland Oregonian
Never quite catches fire. They take a crackerjack premise and a comely, committed leading lady and turn in a merely OK film.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Sun-Times
The kind of dread dark horror film where you better hope nobody in the audience snickers, because the film teeters right on the edge of the ridiculous.
|
| 50 |
New York Post
A stylish but distressingly generic and not particularly scary American remake of a phenomenally popular Japanese supernatural thriller that spawned two sequels and a TV miniseries.
|
| 50 |
ReelViews
Takes things too far by leaving about 75% of its questions unanswered. This isn't an artistic choice; it's screenwriting sloppiness, and it results in a profoundly dissatisfying experience.
|
| 50 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
A creepy, oozy, dopey remake of the stylish 1998 Japanese thriller, "Ringu."
|
| 50 |
Washington Post
Has its creepy moments, but also its cliches.
|
| 50 |
Los Angeles Times
Certainly acceptable. But no one seeing it is going to feel as spooked as executive producer Roy Lee. To make an audience feel that intensely, you need a different kind of director and a different kind of film.
|
| 50 |
Boston Globe
The unworthy new Hollywood remake of Japan's horror phenomenon, ''Ring,'' has packed on a definite article and a whole lot of hooey.
|
| 50 |
Variety
Comes across in muted fashion, with uninvolving characters and lack of genuine excitement or fright creating a second-rate, second-hand feel.
|
| 40 |
The New York Times
While impressively made, this impassive and cold feature fails, in a spectacular fashion, to deliver the thrills.
|
| 40 |
Film Threat
Watts is extra-watchable and, as I say, the filmmaker does achieve a style and tone the script never comes close to living up to. Otherwise, Verbinski's adaptation of the 1998 Japanese hit "Ringu" misses the mark almost completely.
|
| 38 |
New York Daily News
I hated it, but I grant that it does tap into a vein of technological horror - the fear of the VCR! - that will have young videophiles chatting it up for weeks
|
| 30 |
Village Voice
Requiring an enormous amount of suspended disbelief, the original Rings may be a culture-specific phenom; despite strenuous efforts to Americanize Nakata's field of bad dreams, the preview audience did a lot of cackling.
|
| 30 |
Wall Street Journal
Won't kill you, but it could bore you half to death.
|
| 30 |
Chicago Reader
It's an utter waste of Watts; there's not a trace here of the talent on display in Mulholland Drive, perhaps because the script doesn't bother to give her a character.
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