Doctor Sleep Movie Review Roundup: What Do The Critics Think?

Doctor Sleep arrives in theaters today. The latest horror movie based on a Stephen King novel is actually a sequel to The Shining. The first critic reviews for the movie are in, and you can see below if Doctor Sleep is worth your time and money.

The upcoming film is directed by Mike Flanagan who is known for his recent horror hits Gerald's Game, Hush, and The Haunting of Hill House. In the years after the events of The Shining, Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) is now an adult and comes across a young girl with the same powers as him. Torrance has to protect her from a cult who hunts down children with these powers in order to keep them immortal.

Currently, The Shining has 43 reviews on GameSpot's sister site Metacritic, coming in at 60 out of 100. Below, you'll find excerpts from selected reviews highlighting both the good and bad about the upcoming movie.

Gamespot - 8/10

"[Director Mike] Flanagan finds ways to evoke the ambiance and tone of the Kubrick film that never overstay their welcome with cleverly matched shots, sound design, and character cameos. Even the handful of early flashbacks to Dan's childhood manage to feel tasteful and appropriate. It's in the final 45 minutes or so that the balancing act starts to feel precarious, but by that time, the characters themselves will have you so hooked that you'll be willing to forgive the less-than-subtle nostalgia overload." - Meg Downey [Full Review]

A/V Club - C+

"The dirty trick of Doctor Sleep is that it’s just another nostalgic franchise extension, turning one character’s therapeutic journey into a convenient excuse to play the hits. Whether audiences will be willing to trudge through a slightly dopey, marginally similar fantasy yarn to reach the entrance of that old hotel is a question for the shiners." - A.A. Dowd [Full Review]

Entertainment Weekly - C+

"Doctor Sleep aims for redemption — it’s Feel-Good Horror — but the scary hotel is just a scary hotel now. And not even so scary, when you’ve seen it all before." - Darren Franich [Full Review]

Time Out - 2/5

"For all of its supernatural majesty, The Shining, both on the page and onscreen, was about writer’s block and the secret fear of being discovered as a fraud. Doctor Sleep is unwittingly about that as well; it digitally re-creates the snowy Overlook Hotel as a site for a boring telekinetic showdown, not realizing that it has constructed a tombstone to itself." - Joshua Rothkopf [Full Review]

USA Today - 3/4

"Flanagan's "Doctor Sleep" respects both King's and Kubrick's visions while letting a rising horror master go his own way, too." - Brian Truitt [Full Review]

IGN - 8.5/10

"When it's focusing on the new things it brings to the table, Doctor Sleep is consistently terrifying, visually impressive, and soulful in equal measure. Though it may get a little heavy-handed and tonally confused in its reverence for Stanley Kubrick's Shining in the homestretch, the vast majority of the film succeeds in using the Torrance family’s pain to tell a story of coming to terms with the past." - Tom Jorgensen [Full Review]

Screen Crush - 7/10

"Doctor Sleep may be based on a book and a movie and a book that was a sequel to the first book, but much of it feels like it was ripped right out of Mike Flanagan's soul. Like HBO's new Watchmen series, Flanagan's Doctor Sleep doesn’t simply rehash its source material, and instead uses its characters, setting, and themes in smart and novel ways." - Matt Singer [Full Review]

Doctor Sleep arrives on November 8.