It's not groundbreaking, but it's very well done.

| Jan 18, 2024

Ethan Hawke continues his spectacular mid-career run in a rare villainous role.

| Jan 3, 2023

The young actors rise above their material, but Hawke is wasted as the killer.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 30, 2022

Much of this feels contrived to distract us from what the film ultimately appears to be about.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 21, 2022

The atmospheric and unnerving horror movie doesn’t just have literal scares, it effectively taps into our primal fears about menacing predators in all forms.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 21, 2022

Derrickson is restrained with his jump scares and succinct with world-building. The Black Phone subverts any number of Spielbergian tropes — not to mention voguish nostalgia — with a grimy, bad-old-days version of the past.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 16, 2022

The effort is appreciated as far as it goes. But it doesn’t matter how enthusiastically you dial if you end up with a bore on the other end of the line.

| Jul 1, 2022

A limited location, a restricted number of characters and a narrative model rooted in sparseness all demand finesse in order to be spun into feature-length cinema, and The Black Phone shows why, for worse more often than for better.

| Jun 30, 2022

This is a movie meant for kids to encounter, enjoy, and hail as a cult classic in 20 years.

| Original Score: B | Jun 29, 2022

Director Scott Derrickson returns to his horror-drama roots with The Black Phone, a solid, spooky period chiller.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 28, 2022

The Black Phone feels like it’s trying to reconcile typical horror elements with the more expressive and tender story Derrickson clearly wants to tell. The reconciliation never really comes, but the cast gets us there anyway.

| Jun 27, 2022

A film set in 1978 that feels like it was made in 1978 in all the best possible ways... There's a raw realism to it in a supernatural setting that I found really compelling.

| Jun 25, 2022

It should be hugely tasteless, and at times it veers perilously close... But it’s saved at every beat by a fearless junior cast and by Derrickson’s commitment to the darker implications of the subject matter.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 24, 2022

The Black Phone manages to preserve everything that made Hill’s short story so creepy and undermine it at the same time.

| Jun 24, 2022

This is a fun, fast-paced little malevolent gem that seductively builds to a slam-bang climax that elicited a bevy of hearty cheers from my preview audience. Better, it deserved them.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 24, 2022

What we're left with is a shallowly dug exploration of murder and mayhem...as if Stranger Danger and Stephen King have taught us nothing but mundane homage.

| Jun 24, 2022

The film’s like the phone. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 24, 2022

This incredibly dark kiddie kidnap horror film hits different with a hard-R rating. It goes for the jugular with a surprising extremity of violence, plus a tone that wobbles between the bleak and the buffoonish.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 24, 2022

[Scott Derrickson] proves he can deliver an effective jumpscare -- slick, and not too telegraphed. But there’s a thematic weight here that elevates The Black Phone above any of his previous work in the genre.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 24, 2022

For such a basic abduction premise, there are a lot of moving parts and details that either don’t go anywhere or lead to a whimper of a payoff.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 24, 2022