Sinister

Ahorror movie can be like an old apartment you just moved into. All it needs is a fresh coat of paint. “Sinister” is kind of like that. It basically moves into a house formerly occupied by dozens of cheap little chillers and makes a few small repairs. That tired new-family-in-an-old house routine? Those terrible shots of children, bats, etc. jumping out of nowhere for no reason? The obsession with juvenilia? They’re all still here, but the filmmakers have emptied the genre of most of its recent tics. The clichés are still clichés. They’ve just been renovated.