MSNBC:

“Legally Blonde” scribes Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith try desperately to rekindle the magic of that earlier triumph-of-the-bimbo classic, but “House Bunny” lacks the pop of a smart comedy. Characters completely change at random, misunderstandings are inflated to catastrophic levels, and the sputtering narrative has that feel of a movie that’s been extensively re-edited past the point of all coherence.

No surprise, then, that the director behind this mishmash is one Fred Wolf, who made his behind-the-camera debut with “Strange Wilderness,” which remains as of this writing the very worst film of 2008. There was nowhere to go but up from there, granted, but “House Bunny” doesn’t make the case that this man should be allowed within 25 yards of a movie camera. Watch the trailer on YouTube, and you’re done.

Associated Press:

It's essentially a female remake of Revenge of the Nerds, with a script from Legally Blonde writers Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith. Faris functions as a descendant from a long line of supposedly dumb blondes, but she's so unafraid of going for the big, goofy laugh that she makes this familiar role her own.

USA Today:

The movie gently mocks the Playboy ethos while portraying Hugh Hefner as a defanged old softie and Faris is often charming. She has one hilarious trick that shows how far she will go for a laugh — in a good way.

While Faris' comic fearlessness is a major asset, the movie tries to soften its edges with an obvious message —"be yourself" — that comes across as heartfelt and sincere as a centerfold's list of turn-ons.

The Hollywood Reporter:

It might wear its derivative, "Legally Blonde"-meets-"Mean Girls" trappings like a rhinestone thong, but strip away the second-hand attire, and "The House Bunny" still manages to stand on its own two skyscraper heels thanks to the comic force of nature that is Anna Faris.

Variety:

It's a little stroke of genius: Make a female-empowerment movie and cast it with Playboy Bunnies. Elevated via a strong script by "Legally Blonde" scribes Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah Lutz, "The House Bunny" is a blissfully broad comedy that should catapult Anna Faris into a singular kind of stardom — she's funny, she's sexy, and her movie distinguishes itself grandly from a mostly gore-and-groin-fixated summer comedy season. Titles are sometimes dumped in mid- to late August, but good buzz could help this Fred Wolf-directed laffer break out beyond its young-femme target audience.

The New York Times:

All hail Anna Faris, fake bimbo par excellence, master of the birdbrained double take, our reigning queen of intelligent stupidity. On the sneaker-clad heels of “Smiley Face,” an inspired stoner farce from 2007, come the plastic stiletto shenanigans of “The House Bunny,” a breezy, ditzy comedy about the misadventures of a Playboy bunny exiled from the chinchilla cocoon of Hugh Hefner’s mansion.

The Village Voice:

Directed with little distinction by SNL vet Fred Wolf, The House Bunny operates on a skin-deep level and offers up the predictable inner-beauty message: As Faris turns her fugly charges into superficially gorgeous, judgmental twits, she finds her own slutty charms at a loss to woo the smart, dorky-cute man of her dreams (Colin Hanks). The screenwriting team of Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith are rather shamelessly aping their own Legally Blonde here, but they’ve given Faris some great ditzy one-liners and a few slapstick pratfalls worthy of Olympic gold. The movie basically exists on one plane, while Faris is on another—that exclusive aerie occupied by Judy Holliday, Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball and a few other blissfully original comedy goddesses.

Slate:

I don't want to even think about what all this means as a feminist allegory. Like Grease and The Breakfast Club, The House Bunny all but announces that lip gloss and tarty outfits pave the way to female self-actualization. And unlike those movies, it doesn't make the makeover process look particularly fun (though I did love a mascara-tutorial scene in which Shelley lectures the girls, "Remember, the eyes are the nipples of the face"). The Zetas—played by an odd lineup of newcomers that includes American Idol contestant Katharine McPhee and Rumer Willis, Bruce and Demi's daughter—go from stereotyped losers to stereotyped hotties with logic-defying speed (and making McPhee's character visibly pregnant without providing any back story is a tad disconcerting). But there's real pathos to a scene in which Shelley trots out all her porn-based seduction tricks on a date, only to discover that she's grossed out her man and made a fool of herself. The House Bunny can go only so far in satirizing the Playboy empire though, since it's clearly been approved by Hefner (who plays himself in scenes that take place inside the real mansion). But its founding premise—that the laws of soft porn translate poorly to the real world—is as close to a female empowerment message as you can expect in a movie like this.

'The House Bunny' opens today in wide release.

Related: Interview with Anna Faris in T Magazine [NYT]

Wall Street Journal:

American girls abroad — it's a subject that has provided rich material for writers from Henry James to Edith Wharton, from Louisa May Alcott to Cornelia Otis Skinner to Laurie Colwin. Now, in the beautiful if insubstantial pastel "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," it's Woody Allen's turn as he chronicles the sentimental education of two young women on a summer idyll in Barcelona.

Entertainment Weekly:

I hope it's not too bourgeois of me to point out that for a director who is trying to make a worldly romantic comedy, this is quite a shallow and jejune point of view. (It's why the '60s had to end.) Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a movie of distinct pleasures, a number of them of the travel-and-leisure variety (never mind all that wondrous, dripped-candle Gaudí architecture — what's really fabulous is the long lunches in which people linger over wine). The writing is zippy, the story spins like a top, and Bardem turns out to be the wittiest of leading men, making Juan Antonio a seducer who is almost innocent in his games. As for Hall and Johansson, both of them have lovely presences, yet Vicky and Cristina, as characters, never quite transcend the schematic. They are mind and body, spirit and flesh, strait-laced and free. In Woody Allen's perpetual counterculture, never the twain shall meet.

New York Times:

Maria Elena and Juan Antonio give the film such a twinned jolt of energy that you may wish it would head off into Almodóvar country, but that wouldn’t be true to Mr. Allen, for whom desire remains an agony. Still, he’s enough of an entertainer to give the audience its pleasures, which partly accounts for Ms. Johansson. She isn’t much of an actress, but it doesn’t terribly matter in his films: She gives him succulent youth, and he cushions her with enough laughs to distract you from her lack of skill. The appealing Ms. Hall, whose jaw line and brittle delivery evoke Katharine Hepburn, furnishes an actual performance, one that, tinged with sadness, makes evident that this is as much a tragedy as a comedy.

USA Today:

A witty, engrossing and well-crafted musing on the capricious nature of love, the film also is a valentine to the city, which is almost an additional character. Its visual splendors are displayed in a sun-dappled light with special regard for its striking art and architecture, particularly the work of Antoni Gaudi. Allen seems to have been reinvigorated since he began filming in Europe.

Washington Post:

"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is different because it's really about Vicky and Cristina, and Juan Antonio and Maria Elena. This time Allen's philosophical musings emerge subtly from the interaction of these characters and their choices instead of through trademark dialogue. Though he relies too much on the curt observations of an omniscient narrator, the movie still feels more casual, more painterly, more about great characters than the invocation of Freud or Balzac or Ernest Becker. Through these characters and the natural performances, and without worrying about landing punch lines or wringing hands, Allen lets the movie unfurl toward a sublime conclusion and final shot, the kind that makes you sigh with gratitude (or relief) that he's in firm control of this phase of his career.

New York Sun:

Despite an awkward, third-party narration in an academic male voice (belonging to Christopher Evan Welch) that analyzes the characters as if they were test subjects in an anthropology experiment, the film may be the least abstract of Mr. Allen's more recent efforts, and the least yoked to the filmmaker's signature affectations. Perhaps, in all its talky inconclusiveness and postcard vistas, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is not very different from one of the more trivial Eric Rohmer comedies, all about the eye candy and some vaguely risqué business regarding the rules of attraction. But in its best moments, when Mr. Bardem and Ms. Cruz lay siege to the screen, reveling in their fever-bed chemistry, it's as if Mr. Allen has stumbled into an alternate universe — one where his movies are actually worth watching again.

NPR:

No matter what you end up thinking about Vicky Cristina Barcelona, it's hard not be entertained by the Oscar-winning Bardem, who eats this role up like it's a hot fudge sundae. In fact, Bardem and Penelope Cruz, who plays his ex-wife, are so good they make the film seem better than it is.

The problem is that Vicky Cristina Barcelona is too intent on being taken seriously to end up being more than mildly diverting. Allen himself has said in interviews that this was a film about relationships, not a comedy — and he's right.

The New York Observer:

There are no easy answers for either Vicky or Cristina even in voluptuous Barcelona; the city serves extensively as the film’s fourth muse, making for delectable summer entertainment in time-honored travelogue fashion. But there is much more as well in the seriocomic intensity with which Woody contemplates his three contrasting goddesses of desire, and their assorted womanly impasses and vulnerabilities. I hope this film will confound his army of naysayers by becoming a huge commercial success. It is already an artistic triumph of heroic dimensions, considering that it has come much closer to the end of a career than its beginning. The magnificent acting ensemble alone is worth the price of admission.

Time:

Whenever Bardem or Cruz are on screen, VCB finds its heart. It sees them as fully in tune with their feelings: totally willing, and why not?, to act on impulses they've learned to trust. The Americans are children by comparison, a little stiff, so conditioned to overanalyzing every attraction that they would lose the moment — if only there weren't a Don Juan Antonio to send seismic shivers up their consciences.

Village Voice:

A whirling vortex of jealousy, passion, and lust, spewing her words in a melodic rush of English and Spanish, Maria Elena is at once too much to handle and the closest Vicky Cristina Barcelona comes to offering up its vision of the ideal woman. (And yes—ironically or not—she's also the one most likely to put a knife in you.) Surely, this will prompt the cultural guardians who remain unwilling to parse Allen the filmmaker from Allen the public figure to condemn Vicky Cristina Barcelona as an untenable defense of loose morals and male piggishness. But I for one found something oddly elating in the movie's conviction that it is better to have made passionate love and maybe almost died at the hands of a jealous mistress than never to have loved at all. To quote Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians: "Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think."

The New Yorker:

The way the women play against Bardem is fascinating. Rebecca Hall, a twenty-six-year-old English actress from a theatrical family (her father is the director Peter Hall), is tall, with a long face and a wide smile—she can look radiant one minute and neurotic, tense, and gloomy the next, as if she were channelling Allen’s stumbling anxieties (a common reaction in actors working with him for the first time). With Bardem, Hall goes back and forth between desire and panic, and she’s touching as none of Allen’s other female characters have been recently. Scarlett Johansson, who is still only twenty-three, has appeared in an amazing number of movies. There’s no mystery why: she’s charming and also pliant and openly sexual in a way that obviously pleases male directors. She’s at a stage in which her sensuality is more developed than anything else in her personality, but that configuration works for her this time. Going to bed with an attractive man is not going to tell Cristina all that she needs to know about herself. Allen has successfully captured a spirit of restless indeterminacy. Does Cristina have any artistic gifts? Before the summer is over, she begins to stir.

PS: For all you Allen-fiends out there, check out this short documentary about Woody Allen by Jean-Luc Godard. [via Videogum]

'Vicky Cristina Barcelona' opens today in wide release.