Name : Michael Nordine / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Stachura turns everything up to 11 almost from the outset, and all escalation from there feels overwrought.

Name : Lisa Schwarzbaum / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It's a giddy reminder of everything that made Scream such a fresh scream in the first place.

Name : Nathan Rabin / Alias : AV Club
Fifteen years in, the series now looks more than ever like a Mobius strip that reflects on itself in a perpetual loop. But meta-arbitrary is still arbitrary.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"Scream 4" finds a way to live up to its gory past while it carves out new terrors in new ways (new media helps).

Name : Mike Hale / Alias : New York Times
Like its predecessors, "Scream 4" replaces the values of storytelling and suspense with the value of being in on the joke. Unfortunately, in the 11 years since "Scream 3," the joke has gotten pretty old.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
The problem is, the movie doesn't really care if we are laughing with it or at it.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
"Scream 4" is a strange concoction, clever and self-knowing in the extreme and yet operating in primal ways that bypass wit. Something about it feels very modern.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Scream's brand of horror, which lampooned the slasher genre while simultaneously embracing it, was fun and breezy in 1996. In 2011, it's about as fresh as the whiff of something stale and rank from a crypt.

Name : Glenn Kenny / Alias : MSN Movies
It's not a disgrace - indeed, it's not bad if you like that sort of thing - while not particularly good, and yet it's one of the better horror films I've seen in a long time.

Name : Laremy Legel / Alias : Film.com
A perfectly acceptable Friday night, Scream 4 delivers plenty of scares without consequences, murder without depth, and a flood of legacy laughs.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Between a diabolically funny start and a surprise climax, Scream 4 offers nothing more than a series of gory deaths that grow tiresome with repetition.

Name : Dennis Harvey / Alias : Variety
Overblown, overlong and overstuffed with genre self-referentialism, yet undercooked in terms of credibility, worthwhile new characters and memorable scares, it's not the razor-sharp reboot fans were hoping for.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
The "Scream 4" (I refuse to write it the other way anymore) drinking game: Take a slug every time someone on-screen remarks how meta it all is.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
On its own terms, Scre4m is pretty good.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
For genre geeks, this can be fun - although nothing in Scream 4 is quite as clever as the filmmakers seem to think it is.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Craven guides us expertly down a series of blind, bloody alleys, a journey that's more pleasurable than frustrating. On account of his steady hand, the last act is as good as could be expected: skillfully conceived and entertaining in its preposterousness.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
This is quite effective as horror filmmaking and more pungent than anything [Craven's] done in a while.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Boston Globe
Craven no longer appears to be directing a cast of characters. Collectively, they're a knife block.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
There is some fun here, but ultimately it's more self-satisfied than anything else.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
"Scream" always made fun of itself even as it was frightening us - and that hasn't changed a bit.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
It's almost really cool, without quite being really cool.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
Relying on obvious cliches doesn't seem ironic anymore, just easy. And though there are several genuine jolts, poor pacing leaves too much time between the silliness and scares.

Name : Lisa Kennedy / Alias : Denver Post
Compared with so many of the rebooted slasher flicks, Scream 4 remains a cut above. No, that is not an intended pun.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Against all odds, Scream 4 proves that sometimes you can go home again.

Name : Nick Pinkerton / Alias : Village Voice
The unengaged and overlong fourth Scream plops its self-awareness on a new generation, who must endure a late-'90s flashback that's aged as well as the Nu-metal songbook.

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : Time Out
It's a professionally polished package - cinematographer Peter Deming frames the carnage beautifully in widescreen - but don't go in expecting scares so much as laughs.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
Bloody entertaining.

Name : Rick Groen / Alias : Globe and Mail
Not even the smug irony endures - it's hard to congratulate yourself for being in on a stale joke.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The filmmakers' subtext - at least in the movie's first quarter - seems to acknowledge that you can't top the original. And they didn't.

Name : Roger Ebert / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
The actors do what they can in a film that doesn't care about human insights. The characters are almost preternatural in their detachment; if you were embedded in events like these, wouldn't you be paralyzed with panic?

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Retaining all the elements introduced in the 1996 original - gut-clenching tension, sharp whodunit plotting, self-aware humor and a sympathetic core cast - it advances the story to a new-media era.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Scream 4 is a total hoot. Assuming you can find the humor in knife stabbings.

Name : Gary Dowell / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Though director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson don't quite generate the lightning-in-a-bottle energy that made their first Scream movie a hit, they manage to awaken a 15-year-old slasher franchise that has been dormant for a decade.

Name : Kevin C. Johnson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
It's funny and scary at the same time, and fans will "Scream" with approval.

Name : David Germain / Alias : Associated Press
Honestly, it's not an unwelcome thing to watch the return of Neve Campbell as the slasher victim who wouldn't die, Courtney Cox as the tabloid hack in bloodlust for a story and David Arquette as the bumbling Barney Fife of fright-flick cops.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
The sardonic laughs are mostly gone in this wheezing cash cow and the cries don't resonate. The greatest shocks are the ones facing the now middle-aged main actors when they look into the mirror.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The film very quickly, and tediously, becomes more of the same old and Craven thing - self-referential film buff gags accompanied by a clockwork killing spree that seriously reduces the population of a small town.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
You'll watch it to see a horror movie that has a sense of humor about itself. For "Scream" franchise fans, or for those who like their horror not too horrific, that's enough.