Though the film has the solid production design, cinematography and score that one can typically expect from The Conjuring Universe, the story and its characters are dull, lifeless, and generic.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 29, 2023

“Annabelle” often teases us with what it potentially could have been. It lays out a promising premise but it never goes beyond the routine run-of-the-mill horror flick that we have seen over and over.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 19, 2022

A tired procession of supernatural horror clichés.

| Original Score: 0.5/4 | Jul 18, 2022

The doll from The Conjuring is as wooden as the scares in James Wan's lacklustre horror

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 26, 2021

The actors may be milquetoasty, but the movie's low key eerie atmosphere isn't.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 2, 2021

The first half hour of Annabelle is interesting, until it makes sure to hit every horror film cliché on the nose.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 31, 2021

The only way Annabelle can really affect you is if you've never seen a horror film before.

| Original Score: C- | Jul 17, 2020

If you think making a feature-length movie out of the backstory of a sinister doll might be stretching the concept a bit thin, you are correct.

| Original Score: C- | Jul 7, 2020

With no time wasted on comic relief as it takes itself surprisingly seriously, Leonetti leaves most of the heavy lifting to our own familiarity with the basic material and our lowered expectations with carbon copy.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 6, 2019

Annabelle is a dire effort from all involved: thoughtless, wholly uninspired and utterly unnecessary.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Apr 3, 2019

Nothing more than a case of a studio trying to cash in on the previous film. It's dull, predictable and really dumb.

| Original Score: D | Jan 25, 2019

Annabelle will likely make seasoned horror fans giggle occasionally, but it fulfills its basic genre duty -- for much of its running time, it's scary.

| Jan 10, 2019

What could have been a companion piece to The Conjuring is instead a yawn-inducing show.

| Oct 10, 2018

The film has a good sprinkling of campy-awareness, but never chooses the laugh over the scare.

| Aug 21, 2018

The best performance in the film comes from a two-year-old baby

| Original Score: 1/5 | Dec 2, 2017

It will give you your money's worth, while not really serving you anything too memorable (or scary) as some of the other, more sinister horror films we've seen in the last few years.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 14, 2017

An outline of a horror film rather than the full embodiment, guided by general exercises instead of ambitiously-choreographed routines.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 30, 2017

I will say that Annabelle offered some good scares. Nothing astonishingly new or unique, but effective - which is surprisingly hard to do, it seems.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | May 9, 2017

In the hands of a better creative team, an all-Annabelle film might have been a grand slam. Here it's a bloop single, narrowly avoiding a tag out on the basepaths.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 8, 2016

Annabelle, at its heart, feels like it should be part of an anthology collection, clocking in at twenty or thirty minutes, instead of at feature length.

| Original Score: C | Feb 26, 2016