The only message worth relaying about The Messengers is: Avoid.

| Original Score: C- | Feb 26, 2008

The MessengersI/i> is textbook, and the course it's teaching is HSL: Horror as a Second Language.

| Original Score: C- | May 28, 2007

It's pretty ordinary genre stuff.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 7, 2007

It's like a movie premonition - you've seen it all before.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 6, 2007

Many of the images feel over-familiar, and the shocks a mite too forced.

| Apr 5, 2007

Gaping plot holes, a tacked-on ending and a twist that belongs in a different movie.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 3, 2007

Families who see this film should talk about the importance of trust between parents and children.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Mar 3, 2007

No one says, "Gimme the bat, Wendy," or, "Here's Johnny!" But they come close.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 3, 2007

Feels like a movie you've already seen before but don't quite recall clearly. Given its pedigree (Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert are among the producers) an audience might hope for more.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 17, 2007

The well-amplified scares are so perfunctory as to be laughable. 'What's up with the crows?' bitches Kristen Stewart, clearly not up on her Hitchcock or any Asian thriller of the past ten years.

| Original Score: 1/6 | Feb 10, 2007

The Asian-horror-movie moment feels long since passed, both here and abroad. Let our zombies walk or even sprint again! Give our creepy kids back their pupils!

| Original Score: C | Feb 7, 2007

Sadly, the movie just doesn't deliver chills.

| Feb 7, 2007

The real message to be learned from The Messengers is that audiences need something new to scare them, not the same old ghosts.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Feb 6, 2007

[The film is] hampered by hauntingly lame performances by McDermott and Miller, who phone in their parts, and a screenplay that has the sophistication and complexity of a college dorm message board.

Full Review | Feb 5, 2007

Nicely photographed but slow-moving, dull and utterly predictable.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 5, 2007

If the ghosts were magnets and the Solomons were paperclips, the two parties couldn't be in a bigger rush to collide.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 5, 2007

The plethora of horror movie cliches -- even those still residually effective -- weigh so heavily in The Messengers that whatever moments of terror that might have been had are left positively weightless.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 5, 2007

It's awards season, so we'd like to nominate The Messengers for the yet-to-be-established Tippi Hedren Award for best use of malignant ravens in a motion picture.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 5, 2007

With The Messengers, the Pang brothers devise scenes so scary that they stain the imagination and never scrub out.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 5, 2007

The Messengers isn't a particularly frightening or gory horror movie, but directors Danny and Oxide Pang do have a special talent for torturing the reputations of their actors.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 5, 2007