Metacritic reviews

Even with all this sparkle, the film staggers through its third act. By then, the script has rubbed the rough edges off the villains and made whatever point it was going to make several times over.

No amount of self-referential jokes can make up for a lack of heart and spirit. Thankfully, Annie lacks neither.

Little girls will love it. I used to be a little girl once, too. I didn’t care much for the Top 40 glossy coat slathered over every song, but this heart will never harden to a spunky kid who’s certain the sun’ll come out tomorrow.

Unfortunately, the longer this Annie goes on, the more steam it loses.

Perhaps the most hypercurrent thing about Gluck’s film is how it espouses the value of family while actually celebrating products as the only true form of modern connection.

It presumes that children care a great deal about cellphone towers, political campaigns, and Twitter. Still, Quvenzhané Wallis, as Annie, is raw, charismatic, alive, and unpredictable.

The film replaces choreography with metronomic editing, while one-note overstatement drowns out character development.

Aside from an unintentional homage to "Zoolander" that is so tone-deaf it'll make you guffaw, Annie goes out of its way to make viewing it a hard-knock life...for us.

Putting aside the grating performances, the clumsy direction, the visual ugliness and the haphazard development of story, character and relationships, the movie is hobbled by its intrinsic unsuitability for contemporary retelling.

2014: Annie's America makes director John Huston's elephantine, synthetically charismatic 1982 adaptation look like a Minnelliesque model of focus and concision.