Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
The transparent title character from 2012's "The Woman in Black" is resurrected in this sequel, which abandons atmosphere for cheap scares.

Name : Ben Kenigsberg / Alias : New York Times
The director, Tom Harper, seems less interested in allegory than in monotonous, conventional goosing, the kind that involves flickering lights and a creaky rocking chair.

Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death is an improvement on its predecessor. That said, the new installment is, at best, a serviceable creep show, one with far more chills than thrills.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
It's mostly deadly dull, and when it does liven up a tad, the haunted house tale offers only wan shock tactics.

Name : Kyle Anderson / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The Woman may be back for another fright, but Angel of Death doesn't haunt like it should.

Name : Bruce Demara / Alias : Toronto Star
She's back, the Woman in Black, and it does give one pause to wonder if it's for no better reason than to scare up some more box office lucre.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Director Tom Harper and screenwriter Jon Croker offer up plenty of atmosphere, but every good idea this sequel has to offer winds up taking a backseat to the most obvious cat-in-the-closet "BOO!" moments imaginable.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
It's a dour, drab, dark movie, enlivened by some moderately effective chills in the first half but ultimately undone by its downbeat aimlessness.

Name : Simon Abrams / Alias : Village Voice
Flawed but genuinely creepy ghost story The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death is disappointing, but only because it comes close to greatness.

Name : Justin Lowe / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The material feels stale from nearly the first scene featuring the threatening old manse.

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
Redundancy is about all it offers, despite an entirely new set of characters and a story set 40 years after the early 20th-century original.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
A handsomely made but dramatically inert and not very scary sequel to 2012's surprise-hit ($127 million worldwide) Edwardian chiller.

Name : Jordan Hoffman / Alias : New York Daily News
The 1940s setting gives the film's first half some unearned gravity, but by the end the jump-scares and rote plot frightens away the good will.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
Predictable shock tactics, drippy wartime romance and scenes in which the characters leaf tremulously through Victorian photo albums and spout exposition.

Name : Stephen Farber / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
No movie with such a limp ending can be fully satisfying, and the beginning also falters. But the long middle section is a rousing good show.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
"Exodus" is an exercise in visual trickery that reaches for nothing beyond the obvious.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
"Exodus" turns out to be part of a time-honored tradition: the old-fashioned, super-spectacular Hollywood bomb.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Admirably cogent, even colloquial, Exodus plows through its stages efficiently, methodically and without much Old Testament passion.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Exodus: Gods and Kings is as uneven as Ridley Scott's career; at times, it seems to be a journey through the director's greatest strengths and weaknesses. The good news is that his strengths eventually win out .

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
Director Ridley Scott ticks the visual "epic" box with Exodus: Gods and Kings, but leaves emotion in the dust by trading spectacle for a compelling story.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
For all of the care and imagination that have been lavished on the production. the film's impact is best expressed by frequent aerial shots that are visually impressive and emotionally remote.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
'Exodus: Gods and Kings' is spectacular.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
It's understandable that people were angry about the whitewashing of Egypt. But no aspiring actor of color should think of this as an opportunity missed so much as a bullet dodged.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
You'll leave humming the plagues.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
We have no idea. What's the point of a Moses movie without a message from the mountaintop? Scott has broken the second commandment of a Bible movie: Have something to say and someone majestic to say it.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Its grandiose set pieces feel empty and imitative (Scott pulled off this kind of thing much more successfully in "Gladiator"), and the whole picture feels glitzy and hollow at the core.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Ridley Scott can't decide if making rivers run with blood is heroic or horrific - you sense he'd rather make Gladiator II: Attack of the Frogs.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The screenplay (credited to four screenwriters) is a mess, the pacing is uneven, the acting is inconsistent, and the experience as a whole is a letdown.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
This is the first portrayal of God I've ever encountered who looked like he could use a good spanking.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Bland, overly long and otherwise forgettable.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
For an epic, there are, at best, only two clearly seen characters in Exodus.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
The result feels less like a straightforward retread of the biblical narrative than an amped-up commentary on it: This "Exodus" comes at you in a heady and violent onrush of incident .

Name : Mark Jenkins / Alias : NPR
Crowd-wowing CGI spectacle and the inevitable if inconsequential 3-D effects make Exodus look like pure product, without any defining vision.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
"Exodus: Gods and Kings" does a fair job of giving us what might be called The Second-Greatest Story Ever Told. What it never convinces us of is why.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
A mish-mash - part half-committed melodrama, part half-thought-out political provocation.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
While the pale skin tones (bronzer is selectively applied) and haphazard mix of American and British accents is distracting, it barely scratches the surface of Exodus's ungainly artificiality.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
The movie works well as big-budget spectacle despite a ho-hum script.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
An even better special effect would have been having a main cast that actually reflects the Mediterranean/North African desert environment.There are darker-skinned actors on the screen, though they just happen to be all slaves, servants and soldiers.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
This is spectacular entertainment, practically a theme park ride, that could have used more spirituality and soul.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
"Exodus" is ludicrous only by accident, which isn't much fun and is the surest sign of what we might call a New Testament sensibility at work. But the movie isn't successfully serious, either.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Momentous conversations periodically grind any retelling of the Moses story to a halt, but Scott keeps his head down, plows through and then gets out of the way while visual effects supervisor Peter Chiang and his slave army take it on home.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
An utterly clueless, relentlessly grim and rambling action epic guaranteed to displease devout Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, amuse atheists - and generally bore everyone.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
After a strong opening and a sagging middle, "Exodus: Gods and Kings" regains its stride and surpasses itself in the last third, when the God of Abraham unleashes a series of calamities on Egypt and the royal household.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : RogerEbert.com
A numbing and soulless spectacle of 3-D, computer-generated imagery run amok, Ridley Scott's "Exodus: Gods and Kings" presents an enduring tale by pummeling us over the head with it.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Computer-generated imaging has advanced spectacularly over the decades, but moviegoers, and gamers, have been there every step of the way. Miracles aren't as impressive as they used to be.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Scott departs from Scripture enough to raise hackles. For example, this Moses sees God in the person of an insolent schoolboy (Isaac Andrews).

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Before you're able to get too distracted by Exodus' flaws, Scott reaches back into his bag of pixie dust and whips up another grand illusion.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
What this 3-D extravaganza gets spectacularly right is in putting the epic back into the biblical epic.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
This eye-rollingly bad movie is silly, sluggish and miscast.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
"Exodus: Gods and Kings" has drawn fire for casting White actors in the major roles, but don't get too bogged down in that. Really, that's hardly the only reason to not like it.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Scott is nothing if not a master orchestrator of chaos, and, both intentionally and otherwise, "Exodus: Gods and Kings" offers plenty of that.

Name : David Ehrlich / Alias : Time Out New York
The ultimate takeaway is that if you can't finance a $140 million epic about ancient Egypt with racially appropriate actors, maybe you shouldn't make a $140 million epic about ancient Egypt.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Moses is imagined as if Scott met him on an awkward first date.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
At least DeMille knew how to put on a show; the best this offers are a few bursts of Old Testament camp .