Name : Justin Lowe / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Lacks a . sense of originality and urgency, undercut by overly familiar characterizations and dilatory pacing.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
To wait a movie and a half for a big reveal and have it turn out to be a zombie plague is like waiting until March for your Christmas present, and it turning out to be a three-pack of white Hanes T-shirts.

Name : Andrew Parker / Alias : Globe and Mail
The sequel is terrible and all my original criticisms for the first film still stand, but at least it's a more entertaining kind of awful.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
With minimal plot development and far too much running around in dark corridors, The Scorch Trials has a poor story:filler ratio. And much of what happens is poorly thought-out.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : RogerEbert.com
"Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials" crams in more lore, supporting characters, backstories and motivations to the extent that it becomes difficult to get a grasp on anything.

Name : Tasha Robinson / Alias : AV Club
After an hour and a half of mechanical 10-minute action cycles that start with, "Maybe we're safe now, for the moment," and end with "Aaaah! Run!" the pattern gets as wearying as the level of emotional brutality.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
This time around, the kids have been turned into wind-up figures whose only function - taking the title a tad too literally - is to RUN!

Name : James Rocchi / Alias : TheWrap
There's no flare of strangeness or freshness here, just a pile of images and ideas stolen from smarter people's second-hand bin banged into each other for a numbingly dull 132 minutes.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Essentially, The Scorch Trials makes up for the humdrum YApocalypse of its first half by going a little bonkers in its second.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
The material may be cardboard, but the actors do what they can.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
This story was better off back in the maze.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
Maze Runner's action, suspense and twists give movie fans of all ages a chance to embrace their inner on-the-run teenager.

Name : Andrew Barker / Alias : Variety
The latest 'Maze Runner' movie succeeds well enough as derivative survival-horror-action thrillers go, but makes for an unsatisfying, confusing sequel.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Action overflows, some of it neatly staged but none of it telling us anything beyond "Go! Go! Go! Run! Run! Run!" Stay home, stay home.

Name : Kevin P. Sullivan / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The Scorch Trials wanders between YA cliches - there's a Resistance, but it's unclear what they're resisting - and zombie movie tropes, with the obligatory a zombie bit our friend scene.

Name : Michael Sragow / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The first "Maze Runner" film was a wilderness saga refitted with robotic monsters. "The Scorch Trials" is a "Mad Max" film on foot.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
It's exhausting, yet emotionally unengaging.

Name : John Williams / Alias : New York Times
The many chases and ludicrous narrow escapes offer respectable doses of adrenaline.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
The teen dystopian franchise continues to play rough, and now even rougher, with satisfying results.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
If it sounds like there isn't an original thought in The Scorch Trials' scripted head, you're right. But at least you won't be smacking yourself in the head trying to figure out what's going on.

Name : Katharine Pushkar / Alias : New York Daily News
Yes, these "Trials" go on too long. But they're never dull, and the kids are always good company.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
The young leads lack charisma, and the veteran supporting players seem to be phoning it in.

Name : Tom Russo / Alias : Boston Globe
The movie may feel tonally consistent with the first, but it's also overlong and thoroughly routine.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Director Wes Ball's film is a mad dash from one place to the next, with little time in between for rest, recuperation or plot development.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
James Wan proves himself to be moving quickly up the ranks of terror auteurs. The timing, pacing and character movement are outstanding. And it's scary as hell.

Name : William Goss / Alias : Film.com
All the contorting girls and pea-soup vomit in the world can hardly compete with a blood-stained sheet and a well-placed doll.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
The horror sequel is a tough thing to pull off in general, and The Conjuring 2 is most certainly one of the better efforts. But, for better or worse, the first movie was just too good and The Conjuring 2 can't hold a candle to its predecessor.

Name : Bruce Diones / Alias : New Yorker
Wan . builds the many bumps in the night into a small Hitchcockian symphony of terror by way of long, eerie tracking shots, dramatic silences, and sudden scares that are frighteningly immersive.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
Treads familiar territory, but with style.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
The sequel overstays its welcome at a punishing 133 minutes, but the power of director James Wan compels you to scream your bloody head off.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : Village Voice
The streamlined elements of the first have now given way to mind-numbing clutter.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
[Wan's] framing of the scares is artfully managed, and it is the accomplished Wolfe, rather than any monster, who takes true possession of the tale.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
With its forked tongue planted loosely in cheek, this haunted-house flick is enjoyably retro in both style and substance.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
There are some solid scares (Wan is too gifted in the dark art of gotcha manipulation to not make you leap a few times), but there's nothing on par with the first film's brilliant hide-and-clap scene with Lili Taylor.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
If I was to use a single word to describe The Conjuring, it would be "intense."

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
After 'Insidious' and 'The Conjuring', James Wan has his method down.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It's a ramshackle ghost story that Stephen King would throw at his trash can.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
"The Conjuring 2" satisfies more than it disappoints.

Name : Peter Hartlaub / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
This isn't just a good horror film. It's a good film, which just happens to fall in the horror genre.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Another year, another mix of "The Amityville Horror" and "The Exorcist." Solid acting and an emotional back story set this one slightly apart.

Name : Ian Buckwalter / Alias : The Atlantic
.there were moments where it seemed the entire theater was holding its breath. We were united in one feeling: terror.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
With big success comes big expectations, and "The Conjuring 2" is loaded with them. It doesn't live up to them, quite, but it's still scary and worth seeing.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
This saga of demonic possession deploys the full audio firepower of modern multiplexes, and does so with brain-battering frequency, like a ghostbusting version of a Japanese Taiko drum ensemble.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
"The Conjuring" wants Dan and Lorraine to seem like Indiana Jones-style hunters of the supernatural, but in this basic jolt-provider, they're as fascinating as the Jersey Devil.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
James Wan's haunted-house saga is well-crafted, convincingly acted, surprisingly restrained and scary as hell.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
This is a horror film where a pair of suddenly clapping hands gives you the heebie-jeebies, and Wan doesn't cheat with his jump scares.

Name : Phil Brown / Alias : Globe and Mail
The Conjuring uses every stock scare in the horror movie playbook for a dumb, yet charmingly traditional haunted house picture that manages to feel more retro than rehashed.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Hey! It's Great Moments in Haunted House Movies, collected in a double album set called "The Conjuring 2."

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
An "Amityville Horror" for a new century (and a far better movie than that 1979 hit), yet firmly rooted, without being slavish or self-conscious, in the visual language of 1970s filmmaking.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
"The Conjuring'' depends more on its excellent cast and atmospheric direction than cheap gimmicks to raise hairs on the back of your neck. Which it does, quite frequently.

Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Much longer, more elaborate, more dramatic, and more packed with chilling moments and hair-raising visuals than one could anticipate, even from Wan.

Name : Edward Douglas / Alias : New York Daily News
The ghost busters of The Conjuring 2 are scary good.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
There are only so many times a slamming door will get an audience to jump.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
The Conjuring doesn't try to reinvent the tropes of horror movies, whether it's ghosts or demons or exorcisms, but Fred Astaire didn't invent tap-dancing, either.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Wan masterfully tightens the vise on the audience's nerves, using mood and sound effects for shocks that never feel cheap (the harmless kids' game of hide-and-clap has never been so bloodcurdling).

Name : Mark Daniell / Alias : Toronto Sun
You always get the sense that the Hodgsons are being targeted by something that is truly out of their control, and that's the biggest scare of all.

Name : Michael Sragow / Alias : Orange County Register
[Wan] cuts The Conjuring into two halves - an exhilarating haunted-house thriller and a grueling post-Exorcist horror film - but they don't come back together in a living, breathing whole.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
Wan builds mounting dread with silence and suspense, lingering the camera unsettlingly long here, creaking a door there.

Name : Sheri Linden / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Taut and effective edge-of-the-seat horror, delivered with style and an especially haunting performance by Vera Farmiga.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : MTV
Wan can't resist throwing in everything from a demonic nun to an evil kinetoscope to a shape-shifting dog. But when building suspense, more means less.

Name : Sheri Linden / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Wan's expert deployment of genre jolts is no less in evidence this time around, but as he takes his time - perhaps even a bit too much of it - interweaving the Warrens' story with that of the Hodgsons. he crafts a deep dive into dread.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
"The Conjuring 2," it seems, is itself possessed - by the ghosts of other, better movies.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
An uncommonly intense and frightening experience.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
A supernatural winner bound to make some noise at the box office and worthy of loud applause.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Another virtuosic exercise in mobile camerawork and moldering production design, tethered to a story that handles its characters and their working-class milieu with an unexpectedly grounded, sensitive touch.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Variety
Wan has a gift that most slam-bang horror directors today do not: a sense of the audience - of their rhythm and pulse, of how to manipulate a moment so that he's practically controlling your breathing.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
The damned thing works you so well that you may even consider leaving halfway through, for fear you'll have a heart attack.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
It's just a shame the end of the movie wasn't lurking around the corner far sooner than when it finally turned up, by which time a considerable amount of my emotional investment in the film had been exhausted.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
A mostly satisfying follow-up that brings back the excellent Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as Ed and Lorraine Warren, the real-life paranormal experts most famous for investigating "The Amityville Horror'' house.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
The Conjuring is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
It takes a retro-fashioned winner like The Conjuring to remind us that if the creaky, old house ain't broke, don't fix it.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
One of the scarier haunted house/demon possession movies in recent years, it brings to mind '70s supernatural horror films such as The Exorcist with its stillness, steady build of suspense and handsome cinematography.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
It's generic and lazy as storytelling, but this time there's almost enough playful camerawork to distract from the feeble conception.

Name : Charlie McCollum / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
Working with cinematographer John R. Leonetti and editor Kirk Morri, Wan carefully crafts each setpiece so that each visual punch has maximum impact to a nerve-shredding musical soundtrack from composer Joseph Bihara.

Name : Kate Erbland / Alias : MSN Movies
. it surpasses the hallmarks of its genre with an actually dramatic storyline and all-around solid acting. Just don't think you can go see it alone.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
As "The Conjuring" progresses, the scares don't register beyond standard issue horror gotchas. They're as telegraphed as the musical cues alerting you something spooky is about to happen.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
What saves the movie is a surprisingly fine cast and deft direction from James Wan, the horror veteran who gave us "Saw."

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
A sensationally entertaining old-school freakout and one of the smartest, most viscerally effective thrillers in recent memory.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Frightening rarely strikes twice in the same place, despite the efforts of so many horror sequels, but even if The Conjuring 2 doesn't deliver the delightful jolts of its predecessor, it maintains a consistent chill throughout.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
As an exercise in classical scare tactics, delivered through an escalating series of primo setpieces, The Conjuring is often supremely effective.

Name : Peter Hartlaub / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
The horror movie is artfully crafted from the first scares to the closing credits, with a bold retro vibe.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
It scared the living crap out of me. Only at the movies is that a compliment. So kudos to The Conjuring for putting fresh fire into the overworked haunted-house genre.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
Horror buffs will find [it] a highly satisfying, well-crafted film in a classical mode, with plenty of scares and very little gore.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
Every hand that reaches into a wardrobe, every nervous trip into that basement just gets on your nerves. Satan needs to get over himself.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Without recourse to the gruesome S&M excesses of his "Saw" franchise, Wan conjures the chill of a demon breathing down your neck.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The Conjuring 2 proves that, with a sufficient investment of time and energy, sequels don't have to be unsatisfying cash-grabs.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
A freakier follow-up featuring creepy kids, villains who'll keep you up at night and camerawork that puts moviegoers in a state of impending dread.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
A trim, effective haunted-house spook show, "The Conjuring" is both a throwback to early-'70s real estate shriekers like "The Amityville Horror" and a big-studio response to the "Paranormal Activity" found-footage genre.

Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Unexpectedly fresh, alive, and vibrant - and wonderfully traumatizing.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
In The Conjuring, the scary casts out the spirit of the silly, permanently, and with a vengeance.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
Damned if director James Wan, the auteur of Saw's rusted-edge cruelty, isn't an ace with enjoyable spookhouse trap-springing.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Despite all the children in all that peril, Wan is a humane sort of sadist. His latest offers little that's new, but the movie's finesse is something even non-horror fans can appreciate.

Name : Katie Rife / Alias : AV Club
When The Conjuring 2 focuses its efforts on scaring the audience, it succeeds, wildly. And why wouldn't it?

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
The dread gathers and surges while the blood scarcely trickles in "The Conjuring," a fantastically effective haunted-house movie.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
[Wan's] entire film is possessed - by other films.

Name : Neil Genzlinger / Alias : New York Times
"The Conjuring 2" does everything you want a sequel to do. It's as well made as the original, but the location and the story are different enough that it's not just the same thing all over again.