Sometimes a creepy-looking doll is just a creepy-looking doll and no amount of repetition can make the sweet old song You Are My Sunshine even the slightest bit scary.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 18, 2017

The film exists simply to get us somewhere we've already been, and so the level of invention in the storytelling declines right when it should be ramping up.

| Aug 17, 2017

For the first two acts, while Annabelle: Creation concerns itself with little girls checking under beds and investigating things that go bump in the night, it's equal to James Wan's Conjuring films.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 15, 2017

Taken set-piece by set-piece, this one's far more effective at giving you the kind of goose-bumpy working-over the creators are going for.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 13, 2017

If you can get past the utter, utter stupidity of pretty much everything every character does when faced with spooky peril, there are some effective scares here.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 13, 2017

The set-up is promising, and it offers some decent early jump scares. But eventually the thinness of the material becomes overwhelmingly obvious.

| Original Score: C | Aug 13, 2017

Annabelle: Creation works. The performances are universally solid, and in the case of Bateman and Wilson so terrific they're both worthy of individual praise.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 11, 2017

It might not be another Conjuring, but [Annabelle: Creation] manages to channel the appeal of the franchise well enough to keep its blood flowing until the next installment.

| Original Score: B- | Aug 11, 2017

Has echoes of the original film, and works more with mood and less with cheap scares than either Annabelle or The Conjuring 2, resulting in a truly effective genre flick.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 11, 2017

While the original Annabelle was a rather decent, well-crafted chiller, this one seems a bit more ham-fisted and less satisfying.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 11, 2017

It's proof that slower doesn't always mean better in horror.

| Aug 11, 2017

Sandberg does nothing to update his horror film from some of the genre's more damaging stereotypes.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 11, 2017

The clumsy script has difficulty establishing the rules of what the doll and the daughter can do, so you're never really sure of what the characters are up against.

| Original Score: C | Aug 11, 2017

The fourth, and strongest, film in the Conjuring franchise, Annabelle: Creation is an exercise in pitch-perfect, nerve-jangling, modern horror film-making.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 10, 2017

In tangling with this group of feisty girls, Annabelle has become a true horror icon.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 10, 2017

Sandberg manages to squeeze out more than a few jolts armed only with an isolated setting, a doll and some mood lighting.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 10, 2017

As with last year's "Lights Out," [Mr. Sandberg] proves a master of the flash-scare, a nifty choreographer of precipitous timing and striptease visuals. But he's also adroit with more leisurely horrors

| Aug 10, 2017

When you find yourself anxiously scanning every background for suspicious activity, or wondering how a house full of people can suddenly seem so ominously quiet and emptied-out, you know the filmmaker knows what he's doing.

| Aug 10, 2017

There will be plenty who will take a masochistic pleasure in seeing [Annabelle] return as soon as possible.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 10, 2017

Horror doesn't get much more paint-by-numbers.

| Aug 10, 2017