The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Rick Groen

In truth, what follows is less disturbing than intriguing – to audiences hip to the mechanics of horror flicks, it's rare fun to be fooled, and this one is pretty damned clever.

USA Today by Claudia Puig

You don't have to believe in far-fetched tales of mysterious beams of light and alien abductions to get caught up in The Fourth Kind.

Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea

A mildly scary, totally meaningless excursion into the realms of psychological horror and alien-abduction conspiracies.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Joe Williams

Technically proficient enough to keep us intrigued; but we shouldn't have to Google a movie to know if we were scared.

Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman

Too often, The Fourth Kind makes the paranormal look disappointingly normal.

Miami Herald by Connie Ogle

While there are some genuinely creepy moments, it never truly ends up as more than an average "X-Files" episode.

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

The result is not entirely uninteresting, but it suffers from some ill-advised decisions. In fact, the film's "hook" may be its greatest detraction.

New York Post by Kyle Smith

The Fourth Kind has a clever gimmick and nothing more.

Portland Oregonian by M. E. Russell

Sporadically clever and chilling.

The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias

Terminally awkward in the way it meshes fake real footage with faker fake footage. It isn’t required to be convincing as fact, but it doesn’t convince as fiction, either.

Variety

Even the most gullible auds will be challenged to buy into the picture, billed as "based on the actual case studies" and, in any case, rendered rather boring by writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi ("The Cavern").

Village Voice

A couple of modestly effective shocks lie in store.

Austin Chronicle by Marc Savlov

This is a strange movie (it feels like a lost episode of the old Leonard Nimoy chestnut In Search of …) about strange people doing strange things.

The Hollywood Reporter by Michael Rechtshaffen

Combines purported raw case study footage with dramatic "recreations" to unsuccessful effect.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

The Fourth Kind is a pseudo-documentary like "Paranormal Activity" and "The Blair Witch Project." But unlike those two, which just forge ahead with their home video cameras, this one encumbers its flow with ceaseless reminders that it is a dramatization of real events.

Chicago Reader

Osunsanmi's big formal innovation tunrs out to be the split-screen pairing of patently bogus "archival" black-and-white video that shows alleged abductees undergoing hypnosis and color "reenactments" of same. Ultimately it's up to you, the viewer, to decide which is more boring.