Ring, The

San Francisco Chronicle C.W. Nevius

So good it's scary.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

The creepiest, clammiest, twitchiest squealfest in months. It offers, among its many pleasures, the happiness of safe fear.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

At last Dreamworks has given us the stuff of nightmare.

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.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The pickings are slim for scares this Halloween season (Ghost Ship, Below), so The Ring wins first prize by default.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

As a marriage of big-budget filmmaking and old-fashioned scare tactics, it easily ranks alongside last year's "The Others."

Time Richard Schickel

An edgy, watchable film, but one that makes you feel more squeamish than screamish.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

The less said about The Ring, the better for you, the sooner-to-be-freaked-out.

Chicago Tribune Robert K. Elder

Ends up a few frames short of the perfect horror film, but very few.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

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.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The Ring, is going to be this year's version of the "Blair Witch" and "Sixth Sense" phenomenon.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

If your senses haven't been dulled by slasher films and gorefests, if you're a connoisseur of psychological horror, this is your ticket.

TV Guide Ken Fox

A frighteningly good horror movie with enough solid scares to freeze the blood of ardent fans and newcomers alike.

Newsweek David Ansen

This visually stunning movie serves up generous dollops of designer creepiness.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

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.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

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.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Too many threads are left dangling and the movie ultimately proves too implausible to put alongside those horror classics.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

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.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It's an understatement to say that The Ring is not your ordinary horror film. And never forget to rewind.

Slate David Edelstein

The movie is meant to get into you like a virus, and it does.

LA Weekly David Chute

In the final reel, the tension dissipates with a flabby hiss, as the film devolves into a banal, conventional ghost story.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Never quite catches fire. They take a crackerjack premise and a comely, committed leading lady and turn in a merely OK film.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

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.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

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.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

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.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

A creepy, oozy, dopey remake of the stylish 1998 Japanese thriller, "Ringu."

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Has its creepy moments, but also its cliches.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

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.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

The unworthy new Hollywood remake of Japan's horror phenomenon, ''Ring,'' has packed on a definite article and a whole lot of hooey.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Comes across in muted fashion, with uninvolving characters and lack of genuine excitement or fright creating a second-rate, second-hand feel.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

While impressively made, this impassive and cold feature fails, in a spectacular fashion, to deliver the thrills.

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

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.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

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

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

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.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Won't kill you, but it could bore you half to death.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

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.