The film, which opens tomorrow, stars Meryl Streep as Jane, the owner of a successful Santa Barbara bakery/restaurant and an absurdly gorgeous home. (Time described the film as a "live-action edition of Martha Stewart Living.) Ten years ago, her husband Jake (Alec Baldwin), left her for Agnes (Lake Bell), a stereotypical younger, bitchy supermodel-type. Jane and Jake have three grown children (Caitlin Fitzgerald, Hunter Parrish, and Zoe Kazan), and when they reunite to celebrate the graduation of their middle child from college they wind up having a drunken tryst that grows into a full-blown affair. Though reviewers said the situation isn't really all that complicated, Jake and Jane's rekindled relationship sparks some fluffy humor when they smoke marijuana together for the first time in years, their daughter's fiancé (John Krazinski) spots them during a hotel rendez-vous, and Jane's sweet but unexciting architect (Steve Martin) begins pursuing her.

Earlier, we addressed the controversy over the "decorator porn" presented in the film, but some critics also accused director/writer Nancy Meyers (who specializes in movie fantasies about rich people who can't seem to get their personal lives together like The Holiday and Something's Gotta Give) of hating women. Jane is a "highly strung, self-pitying, sex-starved nag defined expressly by the men in (or out of) her life, despite her resolve to be an independent woman," and rather than being the charming rogue portrayed in the trailer, Jake is "so odious that the affair makes little sense." The film is funny at times but not hilarious, and you won't find many deep observations about infidelity or middle-age. It may be the film equivalent of flipping through the Williams-Sonoma catalog while watching a Jack-centric episode of 30 Rock, but there are worse ways to spend an evening. Below, the reviews.

Entertainment Weekly

It's Complicated is middle-aged porn, the specialty of Meyers, 
who also set ladies and interior 
 decorators drooling over homes and gardens in 2006's The Holiday. Specifically, the movie is middle-aged femme porn. Not that there's anything wrong with that, au contraire, but let's understand one another: This is a fantasy about a triumphant ex-wife desired all over again by her ex-husband. And for icing on the gâteau, she's admired by a second cute, successful, eligible man, too-played by Steve Martin, no less! This is the stuff of Santa Barbara book-group literature.

Rolling Stone

People over 50 talking about sex and - yikes! - having it! Welcome to It's Complicated, a romcom that qualifies as a waking nightmare for teens and infantile men whose definition of "hot" hovers around jailbait. Screw them.

Time Out New York

The writer-director's rickety portrait of middle-aged loneliness, regret and self-consciousness is propped up by Streep and Baldwin's natural love-hate chemistry and joint refusal to succumb to slapsticky ridiculousness. Nonetheless, a greater focus on off-the-wall humor would have benefited Martin, who's shamefully saddled with being the plot's perfunctory third wheel. More mirth and less tear-streaked schmaltz might have alleviated the tale's dramedy dawdling, as Meyers goes to such unnecessary lengths to craft allegedly complex protagonists that the comedy soon goes down like lead.

Variety

Cute and clever though the plot may be, everything is played out in the broadest possible terms without an iota of nuance or subtlety. Characters rip, snort and holler, or at least make faces, in reaction to the slightest provocation — no one more so than Streep, who guffaws, slaps her hands together and otherwise gesticulates with amazed glee far, far more than called for by events. Charming and wonderful though her character may be, she carries pleasure with herself to an uncomfortable extreme, a trait exacerbated by Jake's pages of dialogue extolling her outright amazingness... So it mostly falls to Baldwin, who, despite all the fawning dialogue, has a blast as the paunchy, graying hound-dog and enthusiastically shares his good times with the audience. More than once, he strips down for action to shamelessly reveal his middle-age bulk (Streep shares these scenes but is more discreet), and the thesp's comic timing is on the money.

The Village Voice

Does Nancy Meyers hate women? The thought ran through my head not very long into It's Complicated, Meyers's biennial stocking-stuffer about the romantic trials and tribulations of obscenely privileged and narcissistic Southern Californians... [Streep's character] is also, like most of the female protagonists in Meyers's films, a highly strung, self-pitying, sex-starved nag defined expressly by the men in (or out of) her life, despite her resolve to be an independent woman. It's complicated, indeed. Not that Meyers-a global brand whose films have surpassed $1 billion at the worldwide box office-is particularly more charitable (or honest) when it comes to her male characters, who are on hand mainly to act like pigs, usually by ignoring radiant women of their own age in favor of hot-to-trot chippies, only to belatedly realize how good they had it in the first place.

Time

Jake, who seems like such a cheery rogue in all the film's trailers, is so odious that the affair makes little sense. It's not Baldwin's fault; he's good at being bad, and Jake's awfulness does lend itself to comedy of the oh-no-he-didn't variety. "Home!" Jake proclaims, as he lies in bed with Jane after their first sexual encounter in a decade. This would be sweet, if he weren't saying it as he's clapping his hand over her groin with all the subtlety of a baseball player adjusting his cup. It's almost as if her womanhood was chattel he mislaid and is now reclaiming. I'd hazard a guess that the last time Jake looked this pleased with himself, he was at his mother's teat.

NPR

But there's something disturbingly passive-aggressive and belittling about Jane's attitude toward Jake. We just love our immature doofuses, don't we, girls, she seems to say, beaming brightly, even when they refuse to grow up? In fact, when it comes to moral confusion Jane is the worst offender. In what passes for wising up, she tells her children that she and Jake "don't fit together any more." Never mind that he's married, with one young child and - fertility clinic willing - another to come.

USA Today

The film makes a few incisive observations about divorce and midlife sexuality, peppered with mildly dark humor. But it stops short of being revelatory and lacks clever banter. With sharp comic talents like Streep, Baldwin and Martin, you would expect something funnier, edgier and smarter. Streep acts flustered, Baldwin's dialogue are variations of "hubba hubba" and Martin is the quintessential nice guy.

The Associated Press

Even with Streep and Baldwin's drunken-debauchery scene, the first half of the movie is deadly dull, lingering scenes of uninteresting chatter, lame coincidental meetings between Jane and Jake, and annoying girl-talk sessions among Jane and her pals (Mary Kay Place, Rita Wilson and Alexandra Wentworth). It's Complicated stutter-steps to life now and then, particularly during Jane and Adam's date on a good marijuana buzz. Mostly, though, Meyers lets her stars mince about to varying effect. In Streep's case, that may be enough on its own to justify the price of a ticket. In Martin's case, it's not so bad seeing him play the nice, normal, low-key guy for a change. In Baldwin's case, it's a tossup. Sometimes he's funny as he jealously stalks Jane, other times he mugs along in a toothless imitation of the overbearing self-absorption he does so well on 30 Rock.

The A.V. Club

Though Meyers soft-pedals the betrayal part of their affair-the scene where Martin discovers the truth is so misconceived, it nearly ruins the film-Streep and Baldwin get the illicit thrill of it just right. There's something old and something new in their time together, a sense of falling into familiar rhythms while also discovering each other for the first time. Baldwin, importing his devilish grin from 30 Rock, proves very persuasive, and Streep, as a sensualist by trade, can't help but be persuaded. Her milquetoast relationship with Martin is less convincing, because what she gains in comfort, she loses in spark. It's Complicated is the sort of "mature" character piece the French do regularly and better (and without the need for quotation marks around "mature"), but the cast at least helps relieve some of the tidiness that belies the title.

Earlier: Is Women's Empowerment All About Buying Shit?

Nine (which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, and everywhere on December 25) was adapted from the 1982 musical of the same name, so the movie is actually a film based on a musical based on a film. All three are set in Italy in the 1960s and follow director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he tries to come up with an idea for his next project and deal with his messy personal life. He reflects on the women in his life, including his wife, (Marion Cotillard), mistress (Penelope Cruz), best friend (Judi Dench), muse (Nicole Kidman), mother (Sophia Loren), a prostitute (Fergie), and (in a role invented for the film) an American Vogue reporter (Kate Hudson).

All the lead actors have won an Oscars (except Kate Hudson, who was nominated), but reviewers say their musical theater abilities are lacking. They criticize the way director Rob Marshall, who previously directed the Oscar-winning musical Chicago, handles the dance numbers, calling the staging unimaginative and that Marshall and his editors use quick cuts meant to obscure the fact that many of the actresses simply cannot dance. Critics also trash the film's pacing: each actress is given a scene or two and a musical number, then it's onto the next star.

Other complaints: The songs, which were written for the musical, aren't particularly catchy, don't move the plot forward, and aren't integrated well into the film's narrative. Fergie and Marion Cotillard escape the critics' wrath for the most part, but Nicole Kidman "looks parched, stretched, and uncomfortable," Penelope Cruz is "alarmingly unsensual," Kate Hudson "may never recover from gyrating her way through the atrocious 'Cinema Italiano,'" and Daniel Day-Lewis "sounds strangely like the Count from Sesame Street" when he sings. The New York Times calls the whole thing a "travesty," and though the basic theme is the same in Nine and Fellini's original, the New Yorker says, "One is forced to ask: who wants to make, or watch, a major Hollywood musical about mental block?" Below, the reviews.

Reel Views

Nine represents director Rob Marshall's second big-screen musical spectacle. His previous effort, Chicago, won an Oscar; although Nine is likely to win its share of praise, it probably won't come close to achieving the same level of acclaim. Although the production numbers are equally impressive, this film is neither as inspired nor as rousing. Part of the problem may be that there are too many high profile actresses vying for the spotlight and each has to be given her moment to shine. Also, despite following its stage inspiration and bringing structure to Fellini's 8 1/2 (the ultimate source material), Nine still suffers at times from a lack of narrative drive and it doesn't have the surreal, dreamlike quality of 8 1/2 to fall back upon.

The New York Daily News

Unfortunately, each interaction feels like the quickest of flings, allowing us a brief flirtation with a superstar before we move on to the next affair. Everybody gets one or two big scenes, interrupted by an awkwardly-inserted musical number. Some of the actresses are more successful than others - Cruz is playfully sexy, Cotillard soulful, and Fergie impressively earthy - but for the most part, neither the songs nor the choreography are especially memorable. And because the music isn't integrated into the drama, the staging often feels not just theatrical but false.

The Wall Street Journal

The film's most remarkable performance is given by Marion Cotillard as Luisa, Guido's long-suffering wife. Her musical number, "My Husband Makes Movies," has more range than any of the others, from coiled calm to unchained ferocity. And Ms. Cotillard's gift for mystery-the art of doing much while seeming to do almost nothing-serves her brilliantly in the movie's best scene, which couples humiliation with insight.

Rolling Stone

By my score card, Marshall hits more than he misses. Those who hated his music-video editing in Chicago will hate it here. He errs by cutting three great songs ("Getting Tall," "Be On Your Own," "The Bells of St. Sebastian") for three inferior ones. "Cinema Italiano," sung by Hudson, is a tacky, overproduced misfire. He also shortchanges the influence of Catholicism on this man-child, and keeps Guido's nine-year-old alter ego too much in the shadows. Otherwise, his work is visionary and electric. And the script, by Michael Tolkin and the late, much missed Anthony Minghella, is uncommonly witty. Guido begins the film at a press conference telling reporters that to talk about a movie is to spoil its mystery. So I won't intrude except to say that Day-Lewis (who replaced an exhausted Javier Bardem) handles his two songs in high style and acts the role like the maestro he is, even if he looks as Italian as Big Ben.

Salon

Kidman — so appealing in Moulin Rouge, despite her hardly being a perfect fit for musicals — just looks parched, stretched and uncomfortable. There's no sensuousness about her; the best she can muster is a kind of shellacked glamour. Cotillard and Fergie give the finest performances here. Cotillard, done up as an Audrey Hepburn-style minx in bangs, makes demureness sexy, and although her musical number may not be the smoothest of the lot, she still brings the right amount of fire to it. Fergie, on the other hand, practically stops the movie. She's fortunate enough to have the show's finest and catchiest number, Be Italian, and after I watched her slink her way through it, I wished — even though I'm an adamant nonsmoker — there was a bed around so I could flop back on it and have a cigarette. Fergie, who gained some weight for this role, is a voluptuous, purely sexual presence, and a deliciously lethal-looking one: She looks as if she could crush boulders between those thighs. Imagine what she could do to Day-Lewis!

USA Today

The cast members' musical talents are markedly uneven. Day-Lewis' Italian accent works in speech, but when he sings, he sounds strangely like the Count from Sesame Street. The best performers are Cotillard (who won an Oscar portraying Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose) and Stacy Ferguson (aka Fergie ), whose powerful voice works well in a small but distinctive part as sensuous Saraghina. Judi Dench, as Contini's costume designer, sings capably in a French accent in her Folies Bergere-inspired number. Cruz does a steamy song and dance, but her acting is strangely caricatured. Kate Hudson appears in over her head in her extravagant musical sequence, and Sophia Loren talk-sings her role.

The A.V. Club

True, Fellini provides a tough point of comparison for anyone, but maybe Nine should have stayed on the stage, where it could benefit from having a medium all to itself. In Nine, director Rob Marshall, who fared much better with Chicago, does a pretty good job of aping the look and feel of the film's inspiration in the non-musical sequences, but comes up curiously short in the largely imaginative musical numbers. No scene in which Penélope Cruz writhes around in her underwear can be called unsexy, but Cruz's big number remains alarmingly unsensual in spite of all the flesh on display. That Maury Yeston's songs simply aren't that memorable doesn't help.

The New Yorker

To follow in the footsteps of Mastroianni is no enviable task, and Daniel Day-Lewis, adroit as ever, approaches it by changing the steps. Where his predecessor lounged and strolled, or dipped into a clownish stagger, we find Day-Lewis, leaner in physique, forever on the fast and wolfish prowl-hands in pockets, shoulders forward, not pushing his sunglasses cutely up and down his nose, as Mastroianni did, but keeping them on full beam, like the Devil's headlights. He belongs, however, in a more focussed movie; this one feels too sluggish for his predations...

Entertainment Weekly

The women, however, are spirited and sexy. Cruz performs a mock bump-and-grind with real heat, and Fergie, as an oh-so-Fellini-esque beach drifter, turns herself into a wild electric siren. If only the lyrics weren't so awful! Cotillard, a lovely presence, is martyred by having to sing such gems as ''My husband makes movies/To make them he lives a kind of dream/In which his actions aren't always what they seem!'' No wonder Day-Lewis looks like he's having stomach trouble. He spends most of Nine as a haunted spectator, and you want to tell the guy to lighten up. The 
movie Guido is trying to dream doesn't look like much fun, and neither is Nine.

Hollywood Reporter

Nicole Kidman as Guido's "muse" and Kate Hudson as an on-the-make American journalist get to do little. Judi Dench is wonderful and wise as Guido's costume designer-cum-therapist and, fortunately, is not asked to do much in terms of singing and dancing. Fergie is kind of fun as a childhood fantasy of sexuality — in the original film, the whore is fat and slovenly. Cruz and Cotillard get real characters to play, but they're the stuff of bad soap opera. Then there's Day-Lewis. He is an incredibly sexy man and performs all the right moves. The problem is, he keeps performing those same moves over and over, so one experiences not so much artistic angst but a guy trying to sober up from a two-week binge. Sporting a scruffy beard and running a hand through long hair only goes so far.

The Los Angeles Times

And while we're filling the suggestion box. . . . Because Nine is a musical, it would help if your leading man could sing, and I don't mean carry a tune, but actually flex some vocal muscle. Again, love Daniel Day-Lewis, excellent racing shirtless through the forest, but a song-and-dance man he is not.

Nine is one of those films that couldn't look better on paper — so many Oscar, Tony and Grammy winners involved that the production should have literally glittered with all that gold. But in the end, nothing adds up. Perhaps "Zero" would have been a better name.

The Village Voice

Nine might at least have been a guiltily pleasurable burlesque, were Marshall not so intent on turning all his grande dames into vamped-up grotesques. While Fergie emerges relatively unscathed, in part because her role-the feral prostitute Saraghina, from whom the chaste young Guido learns the facts of life-is meant to be a vamped-up grotesque, poor Hudson (as an enterprising Vogue reporter, dumbed down from the play's Cahiers du cinéma film critic) may never recover from gyrating her way through the atrocious "Cinema Italiano," a number that Marshall stages as something like Night of the Living Versace Runway Show. Wisely keeping her distance, Cotillard mostly lurks along the sidelines projecting a wounded visage, before finally stepping into the spotlight for the movie's single moment of emotional sincerity.

The New York Post

Penelope Cruz wriggling around in her underwear - the heavily edited result cannot quite be called dancing - in the best number, "A Call From the Vatican," is about as good as it's going to get in this faux-Fosse eyesore. Maury Yeston's mediocre, imitation-Kander-and-Ebb 1982 Broadway musical has been further edited and updated to suit the vocal limitations of its Weinstein-gerrymandered cast. Or, in the case of Kate Hudson as a journalist for American Vogue who vaguely tries to seduce our hero, the character and her awful number "Cinema Italiano" (in badly lit black-and-white) are interpolations that could be cut without changing the movie one whit.

The New York Times

Stacy Ferguson, known to pop-music fans as Fergie, is Saraghina, the village prostitute who provides the boy Guido with a glimpse of forbidden pleasures. Nice for him. The rest of us watch Ms. Ferguson stomp and gyrate through a number called "Be Italian," which, like so much else in Nine, resembles a spread in a Victoria's Secret catalog, only less tasteful. Ms. Hudson, for her part, struts through an embarrassing hymn to "Cinema Italiano" - with inane lyrics about "hip coffee bars" and Guido's "neo-realism" - that recalls not Visconti or Antonioni (or even the Italian sex farces of the 1970s) but rather those lubricious Berlusconi-esque variety shows that baffle and titillate visitors from other countries who turn on their hotel-room television sets. Those spectacles at least come by their sleaze honestly. "Nine" dresses up its coarseness in bogus prestige, which both kills the fun and exposes an emptiness at the project's heart - a fatal lack of inspiration. The fear of such a void is what animates the Guido character played by Marcello Mastroianni in 8 ½, a man whose vanity, tenderness and narcissism mirrored Fellini's own, and whose anxiety at the prospect of failing as an artist and a man made him a vivid and credible hero. That psychological dimension is missing from Nine, which never finds a way to communicate either the romantic ardor or the artistic passion that would make Mr. Day-Lewis's Guido interesting.

The Lovely Bones is the story of Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), who is murdered in 1973 by her neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), after he lures her into his underground den. After her death, Susie, stuck in "the InBetween," watches as her father (Mark Wahlberg), mother (Rachel Weisz), grandmother (Susan Sarandon), sister (Rose McIver), brother (Christian Thomas Ashdale), and a detective (Michael Imperioli), cope with her death and try to solve her murder.

Reviewers say director Peter Jackson, who wrote the film adaptation along with Lord of the Rings screenwriters Fran Walsh (also Jackson's wife) and Philippa Boyens, doesn't do the book justice. While the novel allows readers to create their own image of the afterlife Susie creates for herself, critics dislike Jackson's tacky, overly-saturated CGI vision of heaven. Most of the performances are strong, especially Ronan's, but frequent interruptions by Jackson's fantasy world and a preachy, "Oprah-esque tone" undermine the emotional story of how each family member deals with their grief.

Though the film tones down the more disturbing aspects of the book by having Susie murdered off screen and only hinting at her rape, critics are still offended by how Susie's story is handled. While Jackson's early horror films and Lord of the Rings' work demonstrated that he's fascinated by gory details and Heavenly Creatures revealed an ability to tell a more delicate story, in The Lovely Bones critics say there is too much fantasy and horror, and Jackson shies away from the heart of his source material. Below, the reviews:

NPR

Sitting through Peter Jackson's film of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is an ordeal. I'm not talking about the subject. The book opens with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl, so even a good adaptation would be an ordeal. But Jackson's adolescent New Age computer-generated fantasyland is an excruciating fusion of the novel's primal trauma and his own sensibility, which is more at home with juvenile, male-dominated Lord of the Rings epics. There isn't a second that rings true - on any level.

Rolling Stone

The novel never flinched, the movie does. But Jackson, who builds jolting suspense when Susie's sister enters the killer's lair, is drawn to a spiritual dimension. He may oversaturate the Claritin-ad colors in Susie's in-between place, but he infuses the film with a sense that what lies beyond may have the power to heal. All this is conveyed in the remarkable performance of Ronan, an Oscar nominee for Atonement. She and Tucci - magnificent as a man of uncontrollable impulses - help Jackson cut a path to a humanity that supersedes life and death.

Time

Tucci plays the killer not with a madman's sneers and cackles but with a quiet malevolence; he's never more ice-shivery than when he's pretending to be normal. Such a performance could have upset the movie's balance if Wahlberg hadn't provided the solid foundation of parental devotion. The center, of course, is Ronan, the Irish teen best remembered as the girl whose lie set lives tumbling in Atonement. As the dead girl hovering over her family like a guardian angel, Ronan makes Susie seem an ordinary child whom catastrophe has made otherworldly-wise. Through Jackson's art and Ronan's magic, the obscenity of child murder has been invested with immense gravity and grace. Like the story of Susie's life after death, that's a miracle.

The Los Angeles Times

Other elements, including The Lovely Bones' imaginative notion of what Susie's afterlife looks like, are strong, but everything that's good is undermined by an overemphasis on one part of the story that is essential but has been allowed to overflow its boundaries. That would be the film's decision to foreground its weirdest, creepiest, most shocking elements, starting with the decision to give a much more prominent role to murderer George Harvey. Expertly played by Stanley Tucci, so transformed by makeup as to be almost unrecognizable, Harvey is such an unsettling, toxic individual that the actor says he came close to turning down the role. It's not only Harvey that we see in sometimes grotesque detail, it's the bizarre decorations of the underground murder site that we watch him ever so carefully plan and build, as well as the realistic bodies of his previous victims. And there is of course the chilling time the family spends trying to solve Susie's murder.

Entertainment Weekly

Jackson reduces his Lovely Bones, in the end, to the dramatic contrast between the menace of a hateful killer (will he be caught?) and the grief of a loving father (can he avenge his daughter's death?). Sebold's Lovely Bones, on the other hand, is fleshed out with the perilous, irresistible power of sex - the author acknowledges a real world of extramarital sex and sex between young lovers in addition to the heinous rape from which moviegoers are shielded. The filmmaker handled the sexual power of girls beautifully in 1994's Heavenly Creatures. But here he shies from the challenge, shortchanging a story that isn't only about the lightness of souls in heaven but also about the urges of bodies on earth. Jackson forfeits depth for safe, surface loveliness.

The A.V. Club

The Lovely Bones is often moving, almost in spite of itself. Jackson draws excruciating tension out of scenes where the audience knows exactly what's coming but the characters don't, and his dreamlike, allusive handling of Ronan's murder is stunning. The afterlife scenes are gorgeous, even though they often seem to be ultra-glossy updates of sequences he managed with more heart back in 1994 with Heavenly Creatures. And Ronan remains a tender, touching performer, though Wahlberg edges perilously close to his bug-eyed sincerity mode from The Happening. But for all its successes, Bones remains more crafted than sincere, more meant to look achingly pretty on the screen than to resonate in the heart.

The New Yorker

The book was brought off with considerable delicacy-it's really an affectionately detailed portrait of a suburban girl's life. Literalized in the movie, the material is closer to a high-toned ghost story. Jackson intermingles family goings on with Susie's gossamer interventions, and some of the brushed-with-ether imagery verges on the uncanny. Yet Jackson has become an undisciplined fabulist: the movie is redundant and undramatic. Heaven is notoriously harder to make interesting than Hell, but Jackson has outdone other artists in cotton candy-there are luscious hills and dales, and gleaming lakes and fields of waving grain, and sugarplum fairies with music by Brian Eno rather than by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The Lovely Bones has been fashioned as a holiday family movie about murder and grief; it's a thoroughly queasy experience. The lesson that Susie has to learn is that she must "let go" of her past life. Meanwhile, skilled, opportunistic artificers like Alice Sebold and Peter Jackson won't let go of a chance to mingle life and death.

Newsweek

Onscreen, however, The Lovely Bones is a hybrid of unmatching parts-shuffling between thriller, police procedural, family melodrama, and mystical fantasy. There's even a section-when Susie's madcap grandmother (Susan Sarandon) shows up to help the grieving family-during which the movie verges on becoming Auntie Mame. How do you literalize heaven? It's a problem moviemakers have struggled with forever, and Jackson hasn't solved it. Sebold's notion was that everyone creates a heaven to fit her fantasies and wishes. Jackson creates the afterlife of a 14-year-old raised on '70s teen life and pop culture-a kitsch universe of greeting-card imagery and Renaissance Faire clothes. The tackiness, intentional or not, is jarring. Even worse is the vision of Susie and the other murdered girls as a happy, gamboling clan of free spirits. At such moments, the story's willful wish fulfillment seems downright cuckoo.

The New York Times

We all like children, and - at least in our capacity as moviegoers, book-club members and consumers of true-life melodrama - we seem to like them best when they're abused, endangered or dead. Nothing else is quite so potent a symbol of violated innocence, a spur to pious sentiment or a goad to revenge as a child in peril.

[Susie] is, in any case, obsessed with the lives that go on without her, in particular with the ways her siblings and friends and father (Mark Wahlberg, agonized) and mother (Rachel Weisz, narcotized) deal with losing her, something the audience never has to endure. We are always in Susie's company, soothed by her voice-over narration and tickled by her coltish high spirits. This puts a curious distance between us and most of the characters in the film - it makes us, in effect, Susie's fellow ghosts - a detachment that Mr. Jackson's stylish, busy technique makes more acute. His young heroine, played with unnerving self-assurance and winning vivacity by Saoirse Ronan, cares desperately about the poor living souls left in her wake, but it is not clear that Mr. Jackson shares her concern.... the problem with this Lovely Bones is that it dithers over hard choices, unsure of which aspects of Ms. Sebold's densely populated, intricately themed novel should be emphasized and which might be winnowed or condensed.

Slate

The Lovely Bones also exists in the in-between, located somewhere in the interstices between thriller, fantasy, crime procedural (Michael Imperioli, The Sopranos' Christopher, plays the detective who tries to catch Susie's killer), and family-in-dissolution drama. Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz play Susie's grief-addled parents (they also have two younger children, played by Rose McIver and Christian Thomas Ashdale). There are moments that remind you what a master craftsman Jackson can be, like a pulse-pounding suspense scene in which Susie's sister ransacks the killer's house for evidence. But as Susie learns that avenging her death may matter less than giving her family a chance to heal, the movie takes on a weirdly Oprah-esque tone, as if determined to turn child murder into an occasion for personal growth. Scene by scene, the movie alternates between prurient violence and sentimental uplift. If it weren't for the luminous performance of Saoirse Ronan (who, I've said it before and I'll say it again, is going to be a huge star), this would be the kind of movie you'd give up on halfway through.

Variety

With reddish hair, brilliantly alive eyes and a seemingly irrepressible impulse for movement and activity, Ronan represents a heavenly creature indeed, a figure of surging, eager, anticipatory life cut off just as it is budding. Less quicksilver and more solidly built, McIver's Lindsey properly begins in her live-wire sister's shadow only to grow gradually into an impressive figure. Chain-smoking and depleting the liquor cabinet, Sarandon camps it up for a few welcome laughs, while Ritchie seems a likely candidate for teen idolhood. Mainly, it's Wahlberg and Weisz who are shortchanged by the film's divided attention between earthly agony and astral accommodation. Both thesps are OK as far as things go, but that's not nearly far enough.

The Wall Street Journal

And at this point in his working life he can use the prodigious digital resources of Weta, his production facility, to conjure up infinite worlds of special effects. Which, heaven help us, is exactly what he's done to visualize the Inbetween. The result is dumbfounding and ludicrous in equal measure, a too-muchness that makes the excesses of What Dreams May Come seem downright spartan. If Reader's Digest did music videos they might look like this. The screen pulses with bathos and swirls with surreal images, some of them shamelessly intercut with the life of Susie's bereaved family on earth-giant ships in giant bottles, fields of daisies, butterflies, cute dogs, cherry blossoms, baobab trees out of The Little Prince, a hot-air balloon, ice sculptures, snow-covered mountains, a gazebo in a lake, the same gazebo in a corn field, the same field lighted by a lighthouse. By the time Susie finally ascended to the highest realm, I was not only aghast but so exhausted by her surfeit of experience that I heard, as if touched by magic myself, those deathless lyrics from Talking Heads: "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens...."

The Village Voice

In Jackson's hands, The Lovely Bones is doubly appalling. Part Disney's Alice in Wonderland, part Fritz Lang's M, the movie is horrific yet cloying, alternately distended and abrupt, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous... As the novel suggests a form of talk therapy, Jackson's adaptation is a misguided tribute to the magic of the movies-which have always specialized in reanimating the dead. But there is something to be said for representing the actual world and there are some things that can only be visualized in the mind's eye. What heaven could have been more radiant than a child's view of her suburban neighborhood-what spectacle more divine than Susan Sarandon's wig?

Salon

The Lovely Bones is a fiercely delicate and often funny piece of writing, a work of fantasy with a solid footing in reality, and it wouldn't be an easy book for any filmmaker to adapt. Jackson (aided and abetted by frequent collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, who co-wrote the screenplay with him) has reinvented Sebold's story in the most facile and heedless way imaginable: He's turned it into a supernatural thriller.

The Lovely Bones is a perfect storm of a movie disaster: You've got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material. David Byrne once sang, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." There's way too much going on in Peter Jackson's heaven — and yet it isn't nearly enough.

The film, opening today, is very similar to writer and director Susan Bier's 2004 film Brodre, but critics say that in its American adaptation screenwriter David Benioff (who wrote 25th Hour... and X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and director Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father, In America), fail to capture the psychological intensity of the original. Both films focus on what happens to a soldier's family when they are mistakenly told he died in combat. (Sadly, the war in Afghanistan has gone on for so long that five years later, the new version didn't even have to change the war the main character is fighting in.)

In Brothers, Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire), a Captain in the Marines, returns to Afghanistan for his fourth tour of duty and is presumed dead when his Black Hawk helicopter is shot down. While Sam got good grades in high school, married Grace (Natalie Portman), his cheerleader girlfriend after high school, and had two adorable daughters (Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare), his brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) has always been the black sheep of the family. When the film begins, Tommy has just been released from a three year prison sentence for armed bank robbery; his Vietnam vet father Hank (Sam Shepard) makes it clear that he wishes Tommy could be more like his older brother and, when the family gets the news that Sam is dead, Tommy tries to become a better man and take care of his brother's family. His acts of kindness, unfortunately, backfire: Sam's a different man when he returns from being tortured by the Taliban, and he begins to suspect that Grace and Tommy had an affair while he was gone.

The reviews for the film are mixed. While one critic calls it "the most successful remake of a foreign film since Martin Scorsese reworked Infernal Affairs into The Departed," others say the story takes too long to set up and never really comes together. Natalie Portman manages to create a nuanced character, even though her role as the stereotypical grieving wife is underwritten. Like many recent films about Iraq and Afghanistan, the movie doesn't take a political stance on armed conflict, hoping to simply focus on the impact that war has on soldiers and their families. Brothers however, may not be complex or compelling enough to accomplish that task. Below, the reviews:

Reel Views

Brothersis arguably the most successful remake of a foreign film since Martin Scorsese reworked Infernal Affairs into The Departed and won the Oscar. By remaining rigorously faithful to Susanne Bier's 2004 Danish feature, Brodre, screenwriter David Benioff and director Jim Sheridan manage to retain the themes and psychological nuances of the original while opening it up to a wider English-speaking audience. Subtle differences in the way the actors interpret the characters and small omissions, additions, and changes allow Brothersto stand on its own. This is a powerful, disturbing film that explores common cinematic territory - the ability of war to destroy the individual - without seeming clichéd or familiar.

Reel Views

Brothershas no political axe to grind and, unlike many films that have used the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a backdrop, it has no agenda to pursue beyond the basic one of depicting the dehumanizing consequences of conflict (any conflict, not just today's). The film is antiwar in a general sense, not because it disagrees with the underlying reasons for the war but because it sees a human toll that often goes unreported and unnoticed. News reports would see Sam's story as miraculous - a brave hero originally thought dead being recovered and returned to the bosom of his loving wife and daughters. The reality is grim. Sam's psyche has been shredded; nowhere is this more profoundly obvious than when he finds himself unable to reconnect with Isabelle and Maggie and haunted by a belief that Grace and Tommy are having an affair. He is a broken, dangerous man - the kind of person who has been shaped into a weapon but no longer has a clear focus. By rising above politics and simplistic notions about whether the current war is "right" or "wrong," Brothersis able to offer honest, compelling drama. The film is not unremittingly bleak; in fact, impulses of love and caring define all of the characters in one way or another. The situation is heartbreaking but Sheridan does not flinch in depicting the events that break and remake Sam from the loving man he was into the cold shell who returns. The film ends not mired in bleakness but on a well-earned note of hope.

The New York Times

Reviewing Ms. Bier's Brothers in this newspaper, Stephen Holden referred to the ideas of the psychoanalyst R. D. Laing, who studied shifting roles and identities within family systems. The difference between that film and the remake may be that while Ms. Bier's movie evokes psychological theories, Mr. Sheridan's seems to be applying them... Mr. Gyllenhaal and Ms. Portman, whose role is frustratingly if unsurprisingly underwritten, draw nuances out of the charged air between them. But the characters in Brothers are more shadows and ideas than flesh and blood. They lack specific gravity, a sense of rootedness in family and social reality that would give ballast to the film's intense emotions.

New York Magazine

At times, Brothersis like a less-mythical (and -pretentious) The Deer Hunter, with Maguire even managing to suggest something of Robert De Niro when he was young and thin and wired-when you could see his every cell react. As to the other two leads, Sheridan has gotten the best performances of their young lives. As much as I like Gyllenhaal, I've often found him fuzzy, as if he's wary of losing control. Is that why he's so affecting here? The dissolute Tommy turns out to be as tightly wound as his older brother, only too scared to focus. He looks pitifully vulnerable as he the supposedly dead Sam's family and becomes protective. Portman has the kind of role that turns actresses into dullards: the wife who stands and looks stricken at her man (or men) in paroxysms of rage and grief. But she's so grounded that as the others carry on, your eyes keep drifting to her. Yes, she's almost unbearably pretty, but it's her immediacy that keeps you glued to her face.

The Chicago Sun-Times

Sheridan and his screenplay sources make Brothers much more than a drama about war and marriage. It is about what we can forgive ourselves for - and that, too, has been a theme running through Sheridan's films. As an Irish Catholic of 60, he was raised to feel a great deal about guilt. This becomes Tobey Maguire's film to dominate, and I've never seen these dark depths in him before. Actors possess a great gift to surprise us, if they find the right material in their hands.

USA Today

Maguire reveals a coiled ferocity and a convincingly unhinged, haunted quality. It's a little tougher to buy Gyllenhaal's sweet-natured Tommy as an armed robber. His transformation into a responsible good guy happens swiftly. Still, the two actors bear a resemblance, and their chemistry is evident. Portman is subdued and reactive in a part that doesn't call for her to do much else.

Salon

Of the three leads, Gyllenhaal gives the finest performance. He's jittery and charismatic — his eyes shift uncomfortably, as if he were constantly looking for escape... When [Sam] Shepard and Gyllenhaal appear in a scene together, the air around them is charged — it's as if the searching, vulnerable quality in Tommy's eyes registers as a taunt in the manly-man world of his father. The chemistry is a lot less charged, unfortunately, between Gyllenhaal and Portman... She holds back too much here, as if she has more invested in playing a dutiful wife and mother than she does in playing a human, sexual being. That may not be wholly her fault. My biggest reservation about Brothers is the way it downplays, and too readily smooths over, the sexual attraction between Tommy and Grace. I'm not suggesting that this Hollywood version of Brothers needs graphic sex. (The original didn't have that, either.) But I worry that Sheridan, intentionally or otherwise, may have muted the characters' attraction to one another out of fear that American audiences expect more virtuous behavior from their war-torn families.

The Hollywood Reporter

In a parallel story, the film shows the appalling experiences of Sam and a fellow soldier (Patrick Flueger), who survived the crash but fell into the hands of the Taliban. Unfortunately, this is the weakest section of the film. Bier depicted the real horror in Sam's mental and physical challenges as well as his subtle relationship with his fellow soldier, so you believe the officer would snap and commit a soul-killing act in order to survive. This event is never convincing in the remake.

Variety

Portman has rarely been more movingly subdued as a wife and mother who refuses to let grief overpower her sense of responsibility, while Gyllenhaal is effortlessly believable as a drifter who finds, to his delight and ours, that fatherhood suits him well. Sheridan's empathetic touch with tyke actresses, so evident in 2003's In America, pays off beautifully in his work with young Madison, who's heartbreaking as the older and wiser of the two Cahill girls. With his crew cut and stiff posture (in contrast to Gyllenhaal's looser stance), Maguire is downright scary as a guy who seems to be headed the way of Pvt. Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. But he still looks a tad boyish for the part (Ulrich Thomsen was in his 40s when he played the role for Bier), and his decision to go explosively over-the-top at moments only exposes Sam as a psychological construct — more walking antiwar statement than full-blooded human being.

Time Out New York

So much of the preceding is goo-laden with mopey guitars and adorable kid shots, Jim Sheridan's dual faults as a director. Still, shouldn't we expect fireworks when an emaciated, paranoid Sam confronts the family he can no longer connect to? There's an unwillingness to deliver the payoff; Brothers feels less like the Oscar-bait cinema we expect this time of year as much as an ersatz version that requires you to fill in the gaps. (The nearness of the recent The Messenger doesn't help.) We're supposed to creep up to the idea that war can steal more from a person than life and limb. That can't be conveyed in a few simple scenes of kitchen histrionics. Sheridan brings on U2's chords of healing way too soon.

The A.V. Club

With all these elements in place - brother against brother, intimations of adultery, and post-traumatic stress disorder at the top, not to mention alcoholism, crushing guilt, a cruel father, and assorted other crises - Brothersseems like a powder keg ready to go off. And though someone clearly lit the fuse on the normally mild-mannered Maguire, the film takes a leisurely hour to get to its dramatic core, with scenes from Afghanistan on loan from The Deer Hunter. Still, the intrinsically powerful material occasionally pierces through, with Gyllenhaal especially strong as a reformed yahoo who suddenly takes on more responsibility than he seems capable of handling. Brotherssupplies him and the other actors with a slew of big dramatic moments, but the emotions ring louder than any truths.

The New York Post

Having seen the trailer for Brothers and now the finished film, I feel as though I just watched the trailer twice. A thin script written by David Benioff and directed by Jim Sheridan (who based his film on a Danish one) is merely a promising first draft, a vague drama that is sort of a soapy love triangle ("I thought you were dead!" etc.) and sort of an inquiry into the post-battle trauma afflicting a Marine captain burdened by a gruesome secret about his captivity in Afghanistan... The movie is reasonably compelling and decently acted, but at no point is it convincing. It skips past essential plot points (why would the military report the Marine dead instead of MIA if his body was never found?), as well as deeper emotional quandaries.

The Washington Post

Is it a movie you'll enjoy? Not enjoy, so much as appreciate. Or maybe recognize. Adapted by writer David Benioff and director Jim Sheridan from a 2004 Danish film of the same name, Brothers is depressing as hell. And, like most war movies these days, it ends on a note that's far from hopeful. But it's good, and wise, and it feels true. Meaning, it hurts... Though the term post-traumatic stress disorder is never mentioned, the film is one harrowing case study in PTSD, with a long, lingering emphasis on the P. As Sam notes, in voice-over, at the film's bleak and wrenching conclusion, "only the dead have seen the end of war."

The buzz surrounding the movie has been building for months. Not only is this the first hand-drawn Disney movie in five years, it's also the debut of the entertainment behemoth's very first African-American heroine. Long before the movie hit theaters, there was already a good deal of criticism circulating, which centered on the possibility that P&F would feature some familiar and none-too-progressive stereotypes, including a potentially Mammy-ish character. Both Dodai and Latoya (writing for Racialicious) took on the task of exploring the potential for racism in the film, which is set in the 1920s in New Orleans, and includes a voodoo princess and a (sadly) light-skinned prince. Probably the most bothersome part is the fact that the two main characters - Tiana and Prince Naveen - spend a good portion of the movie as frogs. When Disney has waited this long to introduce a Black princess, couldn't they give her a little more screen time?

However, it seems that critics are, at least for the most part, still charmed by Tiana (feelings for Naveen are a little more divided). Unlike some of Disney's other princesses, Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose) isn't a passive damsel in distress, relying on fairy godmothers and magical kisses to do all the hard work for her. Instead, she's a 19-year-old hardworking waitress, with dreams to own a restaurant of her own. Things are going well until she meets the racially-ambiguous Prince Naveen (Nip/Tuck's Bruno Campos), who comes from some fictional country and is looking for a wealthy southern gal to pay for his lavish lifestyle. A local voodoo-peddler turns Naveen into a frog, and through a complicated-sounding plot twist, convinces Tiana to kiss him. Since she's not a princess, she turns into a frog, and the two spend the rest of the film trying to figure out how to change back. Their frog-status allows them to get to know each other without looks playing a factor, which apparently helps ground the whole "skin-deep" message. However, race seems to play a very minor role - which is either fitting for a children's film, or a real shame, depending on who you ask. While it sounds like there are still some issues with the film (Naveen's one-dimensionality being a frequently mentioned problem), most critics enjoyed the music and magic. There is some disagreement as to whether it measures up to Aladdin or The Little Mermaid, but it sounds like The Princess and the Frog could become a Disney classic.

Salon

Fairy-tale princesses, especially those in the Disney pantheon, have always been a product of their times. Generations ago, it was enough for them to be hardworking and docile, to accept suffering with grace and fall into deep sleeps when the plot required it. It was revolutionary when "Beauty and the Beast's" Belle came along in 1991, with her love of books and her disdain for the handsomest guy in town. Tiana takes the princess role a step further — she's not just Disney's first African-American to wear the crown, she's the first one with a regular job. (Unless you count Mulan's gig as a warrior.) She also, like "Ratatouille's" Remy, makes the case for great food as a social leveler and the cornerstone of a good life. Tiana knows that food "brings people together" with more reliable results than even voodoo.

Time

Every Disney princess has to find two things: independence and love. Tiana, a culinary prodigy, dreams of turning an abandoned building into her own restaurant. Tiana entertains the attentions of the dashing playboy Naveen, but he's fallen under the spell of the black-magical Dr. Facilier (Keith David). The fateful kiss sends Tiana and Naveen, now frogs, into the bayou for refuge and retransformation. Among the Jungle Book-type denizens they meet there are Louis (Michael-Leon Wooley), a friendly, trumpet-playing alligator; Ray (Jim Cummings), a Cajun firefly; and the 197-year-old blind seer Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis), among whose gifts may be the power to restore Tiana and Naveen to humanity.

And we're just short-listing the creatures that Musker and Clements toss into this savory gumbo. It's as if, in the dozen years since Hercules, their last comedy feature, the pair had stockpiled so many funny characters that a few drop in, get their laughs and are whisked off-stage. You'll be tickled by Charlotte (Breanna Brooke as a child, Jennifer Cody as an adult), the adorably addled rich girl whom Eudora babysits, and by her father Big Daddy La Bouff (John Goodman in full bluster mode), who certifies his connection to Tennessee Williams's riper alpha-males with a booming, "Hey, Stella!" In any animated comedy, the funny supporting figures threaten to overwhelm the leads; but Tiana has the class and grit, and Naveen the immature charm, to carry the story. Their cozying up while mincing mushroom for a bayou stew is one of the film's emotional highlights.

New York Post

The songs by Randy Newman — working in the jazz, blues, gospel, zydeco, Dixieland and Broadway idioms — are very catchy, belted out in style by a great voice cast. I especially liked Dr. Facilier's big spooky number "Friends on the Other Side" and Mama Odie's showstopper, "Dig a Little Deeper."

Overall, the film is not quite up to "Aladdin" and "The Little Mermaid" from the same directing team of Ron Clements and John Musker, not to mention the recent string of masterpieces from Pixar.

New York Times

The prince, disappointingly if not surprisingly, becomes not only Tiana's salvation but also that of the movie, largely by bringing some slapstick comedy and a touch of suspense into the proceedings, along with the expected romance. Though he catches Tiana's eye (and she his), Naveen is soon set upon by both Charlotte, who's angling for a match, and Dr. Facilier (a terrific Keith David), a villain who, as is true of many movies, easily steals the show. As thin as an exclamation mark and just as excited, Dr. Facilier wears spats and a top hat emblazoned with a skull and bones. Long, inky shadows follow his every step, sprouting around him like dark thoughts, as in the bravura musical number "Friends on the Other Side."

LA Times

The filmmakers have brewed up a delicious roots story in every sense of the word. "The Princess and the Frog" is set in the 1920s jazz age in the New Orleans heart of it all.It's the studio's return to the lush, fluid beauty of hand-drawn animation. It's an old-fashioned fairy tale, even though they've had some fun with the story. And it's set to music in the grand tradition of "Beauty and the Beast," which is to say the neoclassic '90s brand of Disney animation.

That might make "The Princess and the Frog" seem like a creature of ancient times, particularly since kids these days are raised on 3-D flash. The effect, though, is the opposite. After being bombarded by so much computer-generated, motion-captured high-and-higher jinks, the film feels fresh — a discovery, or a rediscovery, depending on your age.

MSNBC

"Princess and the Frog" mostly ignores the racial divides of the times. Tiana's a poor black girl, her best friend's a rich, spoiled white girl. How often did that happen in 1920s New Orleans?

But this isn't "Roots," it's a Disney family affair. In her favor, Tiana joins a list of ethnically diverse Disney heroines - Pocahantas, Mulan, Lilo - that show how far things have come from the days when a pasty-faced princess hung out with seven little white dudes.

Variety

Unlike most tales of its type, in which the heroine spends the whole movie in pursuit of Prince Charming, "The Princess and the Frog" follows the modern romantic-comedy template, granting its amphibious duo plenty of shared screen time and making them polar opposites — he's cocky and lazy, she's uptight and bossy — who initially can't stand each other... All of this is delivered in the usual riotous explosion of color and song. From the mansions of the city's upscale Garden District and the cast-iron balcony railings of the French Quarter, New Orleans clearly offered the animators no shortage of visual inspiration and architectural variety.

New York Daily News

Part of the problem with "P&F" is that Tiana and Naveen's connection feels superficial. Plus, unlike some of his modern princess-courting brethren - the Beast, Aladdin, even John Smith in "Pocahontas" - Naveen's inner change from shallow to decent seems as perfunctory as his physical one from man to amphibian.

Other elements work better, including the jazz-age setting and Randy Newman's zydeco-tinged music. And while Dr. Facilier's scary shadow monsters may be too intense for young kids, they're effective nightmare-makers in the classic Disney tradition.

Village Voice

They say it ain't easy bein' green, but it's certainly a hell of a lot easier than being black. So writer-directors Ron Clements and John Musker (whose 1992 Aladdin proffered a sinister, ear-cutting Middle East) send newly anthropomorphic Tiana and Naveen hopping off into the bayou rather than continuing to dodge ol' Jim Crow on the streets of the Big Easy. There, Princess's rampant a-historicism gives way to a veritable Mardi Gras parade of risible stereotypes: an Acadian firefly with the most exaggerated Cajun dialect this side of celebrity chef Justin Wilson, I gua-ran-tee; a 197-year-old voodoo priestess named Mama Odie; and, lest no Deep South caricature remain unturned, a trio of toothless hillbillies.

USA Today

The movie captures the traditional Disney aesthetic, with some up-to-date spins. Tiana is African-American, while Naveen's ethnic origins are less evident. The film embraces diversity in a natural way. The film's ethos is summed up by voodoo priestess Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis) in her native patois: "Only thing important is what's under the skin."

Where Pinocchio was about wishing on a star, The Princess and the Frog emphasizes backing up wishes with hard work. That proviso is a thoughtful message for young moviegoers.

The Star-Ledger

So Disney has, naturally, been nervous, wanting to serve a broader audience but knowing that no good deed goes unpunished - or, at least, goes without being heavily, politically analyzed.

"The Princess and the Frog" will be, too - and there are things here to annoy all sorts of people. The white characters are all, at best, buffoons; rural whites are portrayed as vicious and deformed; and even in the depths of the bayou, every African-American character has "good" hair.

Entertainment Weekly

But while little kids laugh at the froggy humor (summed up in the excellent, repeated punchline ''that's not slime you are secreting - it's mucus!''), the firefly antics, and the cute sight of a fat alligator wailing on his trumpet like Louis Armstrong, adult viewers are rewarded with something more moving - a Proustian remembrance of the durable 
 power of Disney at its old-school best. The filmmakers trust in story over special effects, and character over celebrity voices (there are almost none here, save for a brief cameo by queen-of-all-she-surveys Oprah Winfrey as Tiana's saintly mother, Eudora). They steep the movie in colloquial American culture. They offer a sophisticated musical experience (ragtime, zydeco, gospel, Tin Pan Alley) 
 accessible even to the youngest ears. And in doing so, the creative team behind The Princess and the Frog upholds the great tradition of classic Disney animation.

Most critics didn't directly insult Twilight fans, but they clearly resentd the fact that they'll flock to the film regardless of what the reviews say. The Twilight Saga: New Moon was already a box office success before the reviews below were written, with fans camping out to see midnight screenings and Movietickets.com announcing earlier this week that the film had already broke Star Wars — Episode III: Revenge of the Sith's record to become the top advance ticket seller of all-time.

The film may have suffered because Stephenie Meyer's second novel isn't the strongest of the series. In New Moon, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is celebrating her 18th birthday with her sparkly vampire boyfriend Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and his family, when she cuts her finger and the scent of her blood makes his brother nearly kill her. Edward breaks up with Bella so that (as the AP puts it) "he doesn't complicate their relationship by giving her a fatal hickey." For the next few months Bella mopes and hangs out with her werewolf friend Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) and his overly-developed torso (which "should be given its own credit line.") Bella starts putting her life in danger in an effort to reconnect with Edward, and eventually they both wind up in Italy. There they meet the Volturi, a group of red-eyed vampire royalty that includes Aro (Michael Sheen) and Jane (Dakota Fanning).

Chris Weitz, who previously directed About A Boy and The Golden Compass, took over for Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke, who some critics say understood her teenage characters better. Reviewers say that Weitz "paid no attention to pacing" and was more focused on ticket sales than artful direction. The leads don't fare much better. One reviewer writes: "I can't comment on the acting because I didn't catch Pattinson, Stewart and Lautner doing any." Several critics report that their melodramatic acting, as well as several slow-motion shots of Pattinson, result in "unintentional laughs that lighten the movie's relentless gloom." Twilight fans, brace yourselves.

The Los Angeles Times

Constrained by the plot of the novel, the film keeps the two lovers apart for quite a spell, robbing the project of the crazy-in-love energy that made Twilight, the first entry in the series, such a guilty pleasure. New Moon... marks the franchise's entrance into the self-protective, don't rock the boat phase of its existence, which is inevitable but a bit of a shame... A smooth professional whose credits include such adaptations as The Golden Compass and About a Boy, [Chris] Weitz makes the vampire trains of Melissa Rosenberg's capable script run on time, but he almost seems too rational a director for this kind of project. This lack of animating madness combined with the novel's demands give much of New Moon a marking time quality.

The New York Post

New Moon is supposed to be an exciting love story plus monster action. So where's the excitement? Where's the action? Bella (Kristen Stewart) and vampire boyfriend Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) stare longingly past each other (Pattinson, who keeps entering in hilarious slo-mo, is so intent on smoldering at the camera that he seems to forget there's another person around) and swap excruciating love-chat: "You can't (long pause) protect me (longer pause) from everything." Bad dialogue, like bad news, doesn't get better with age. This movie moves like the line at the post office.

USA Today

Pattinson is not given as much to do in this installment since he removes himself from Bella for her own protection. Bella spends an inordinate amount of time pining away. Unless it's a Ingmar Bergman film, watching an expressionless person stare out a window or trudge around alone in the woods is simply a drag.

The lovelorn Bella has little to recommend her as a heroine. She's sullen, self-absorbed and stubborn. That such a bland and passive character elicits the amorous devotion of both Edward and Jacob is rather mystifying. Almost as incomprehensible is the huge appeal of this series, beyond the obvious timeworn fascination with vampires and werewolves.

Associated Press

The soap-opera melodrama of Stewart, Pattinson and Lautner's performances provides some unintentional laughs that lighten the movie's relentless gloom. Yet Stewart is on screen almost all the time, and her Bella is just a drag to be around. With her flat speech and listless presence, it's unfathomable how two different sets of monsters could fixate so completely on her. All three lovers are so joyless, it's hard to imagine why any of them would want to spend eternity together. They're here for two more movies, though. And that sounds like a real eternity.

Variety

Stewart is the heart and soul of the film, and not only because her Bella is surrounded by characters who literally have neither one nor the other. She gives both weight and depth to dialogue ("You're just warm. You're like your own sun") that would sound like typical chick-lit blather in the mouth of a less engaging actress, and she makes Bella's psychological wounds seem like the real deal.

Time Out New York

At one point, a character wearily deconstructs zombie-cinema symbolism while bemoaning the lack of hot guys. Is this sequel defending its fan base and preempting criticism about its transparent agenda? This is a soap opera, folks-and acceptable escapism for those old enough to see it yet still young enough to shriek at undead dreamboats.

The Chicago Sun-Times

The Twilight Saga: New Moon takes the tepid achievement of Twilight, guts it, and leaves it for undead. You know you're in trouble with a sequel when the word of mouth advises you to see the first movie twice instead. Obviously the characters all have. Long opening stretches of this film make utterly no sense unless you walk in knowing the first film, and hopefully both Stephanie Meyer novels, by heart. Edward and Bella spend murky moments glowering at each other and thinking, So, here we are again.

New York Daily News

While I don't want to upset anyone here, [Lautner and Stewart] share a genuine spark that's missing between Stewart and Pattinson. Still, we all know where Bella's heart really lies. A cynical adult might note that it's easy enough to see where Weitz's heart lies, too. His job is to sell as many tickets as possible, which means hitting all the right notes. He does that well enough, despite some difficulty juggling every subplot. A trip to Italy, in which Bella and Edward face a vampire council... feels particularly squeezed in. And while Stewart has deepened her portrayal of Bella, Pattinson has little to do but brood. Then again, if you've come to this movie looking for fancy filmmaking or an original voice (other than Meyer's), well, Weitz frankly doesn't care. You're not his audience. He's got a franchise to keep running, and he does that with workmanlike precision and minimal intrusion. Which, most likely, is just how fans will want it.

Rolling Stone

Catherine Hardwicke, who directed the first film, better caught the virginal yearning in Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), the high school girl torn between both monsters. Chris Weitz, the director of New Moon, pumps up the action as Jacob turns into an unconvincing digital wolf. I can't comment on the acting because I didn't catch Pattinson, Stewart and Lautner doing any. They basically primp and pose through the same humdrum motions they did before.

The New York Times

There's more - the book is another doorstopper - crammed between the weeping and dolorous gazes, including a pack of snarling, not terribly effective CGI wolves. They're amusing if not as diverting as either Dakota Fanning or Michael Sheen, who pop up in a late-act detour to Italy, where the vampires, unlike their puritanical American cousins, still like to drink. (In a rare moment of narrative wit, Bella flies Virgin.) Mr. Sheen, who's carved out a twinned specialty playing Tony Blair (in three movies) and vampires (four), preens with plausible menace. But it's Ms. Fanning, with the cruel eyes and sleekly upswept hair suggestive of an underage dominatrix, who shows real bite. Mr. Weitz doesn't know what to do with her, but when she smiles, you finally see the darker side of desire.

Salon

Bella's eyes pop when she gets a load of [Jacob's] chest, and she gets to see a lot of it, as we do. Forget that wan Victorian valentine Edward — the movie only wants to hammer on the notion that women feel conflicted between sensitive, skinny pale guys who'll protect them with their mad vampire skilz and brawny bruisers who'll protect them with muscle, either the wolf or the human kind. In the New Moon world, there's no in between. These movies, and the books they're based on, are all about veiled sexuality, with all its thrills and threats: There's no sex in these pictures, only the vague, gauzy promise of it — predicated on the way young girls often dream of being swept off their feet by a handsome, laconic hunk but don't want to think about what might come after. But the problem isn't that New Moon takes an uncomplicated view of sex; it's that it doesn't even bother to take a romantic view of romance. Weitz appears to have paid no attention to pacing here: The movie is essentially a string of brooding speeches, often delivered in the woods, with very little interesting connective tissue in between. The dialogue consists of numerous variations on two lines, the first being "I love you, but I'm a vampire, and I can't protect you," the second, "I love you, but I'm a werewolf, and I can't protect you."

Time

As Edward, Pattinson is all pale passion and tortured restraint; his eyebrows, like muskrats determined to mate, hunch together in the middle of his sunken face; the few times he smiles, it looks as if it hurts, and he still seems reluctant to move his mouth when he talks... Where Pattinson's Edward is cold, bloodless and trapped in his head, Taylor Lautner's Jacob is warm, tawny, genial and able to get Kristen Stewart's shrink-wrapped Bella to stretch out and relax a little onscreen. It's as though the sun can come back out once Edward leaves; there are genuinely funny moments in their scenes together, not to mention sexual tension. Expect an eruption in the theater during the scene in which a thrill-seeking Bella wrecks the motorcycle Jacob rebuilt for her and he strips off his T-shirt to tend her bleeding head. From that point on, his torso remains so central a character it should be given its own credit line.

The Boston Globe

In most other respects, the movie's a drag - paced like a dirge and cursed with dialogue and a goopy musical score (Alexandre Desplat, how could you?) that bring out the book's worst daytime soap tendencies. But what can you expect from an installment that keeps the central duo of human Bella and vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) apart for an extended 500-page sulk? Even my impromptu focus group (two adolescent daughters and one friend) voted New Moon the least involving of the four books.

The A.V. Club

Lautner helps break up Stewart and Pattinson's overwhelming dourness, as do New Moon's occasional attempts at humor. However, while Lautner is the only one of the three principals who can smile without looking exceedingly uncomfortable, his wooden carriage and delivery add up to all the onscreen appeal of a Ken doll, and the film still turns in more unintentional, forehead-slapping laughs than scripted ones, particularly for audiences who haven't been inoculated by the books. New Moon was clearly made with its disturbingly loyal fans in mind, and while its cheesy, melodramatic charm is unlikely to win any new converts to the series, it succeeds in giving its intended audience exactly what it wants.

Slate

Mopey, draggy, and absurdly self-important, the movie nonetheless twangs at some resonant affective chord. This viewer, at least, was catapulted back to that moment of adolescence when being mopey, draggy, and absurdly self-important felt like a passionate act of liberation. The Twilight movies are schlock, but they're elegantly appointed, luxuriously enjoyable schlock, and the world they take place in-the densely forested, perpetually overcast, vampire-and-werewolf-ridden town of Forks, Washington - feels like a real, if fantastical, place. It's as specific and evocative a location as the fictional Washington town of Twin Peaks. It's this sense of place that elevates the Twilight films above the best-selling books by Stephenie Meyer, made up of impenetrable blocks of descriptive yet curiously featureless prose.

Twilight was a pleasant surprise, a dish of cream-heavy teen romance that had at least been made with a guiding sensibility behind it. New Moon, on the other hand, merely follows a dictated formula. It's a cheap, shoddy piece of work, one that banks on moviegoers' anticipation without even bothering to craft a satisfying experience for them. Its pandering is an insult. New Moon moons its audience, and makes them pay for the so-called privilege.

Movie Talk: New Moon Already Setting Ticket Sales Record [Yahoo]

Fantastic Mr. Fox, which opens today, is the first animated film by Anderson, who is known for directing the quirky and distinctive films Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. Critics weren't as fond of his most recent film The Darjeeling Limited because they felt Anderson was so preoccupied with the film's offbeat style that it stifled the actors. It was a risk for him to take on Roald Dahl's classic children's story because in addition to filming it in old-fashioned stop motion rather than CGI, he directed the film from Paris through a video link to London, where it was filmed.

Anderson wrote the screenplay with Noah Baumbach (who also wrote The Squid and the Whale and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou). Mr. Fox (George Clooney) and Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) start out poaching chickens together, but when their son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) is born, she convinces him to take a more legitimate job. Twelve years later, he's writing a newspaper column no one reads, but when the family moves, he can't resist his wild urge to steal from his human neighbors. Three farmers led by Mr. Bean (Michael Gambon) wage war on the animal kingdom and Mr. Fox, along with his lawyer Badger (Bill Murray) and his sidekick Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky), have to outwit them.

Though at times the plot is jumpy, critics uniformly praise the film, saying it "reanimates" Anderson's career. Though it seems odd to imagine George Clooney's very-recognizable voice coming out of a fox, several critics say he gives one of his best performances ever. The exquisite hand-crafted miniatures give the movie a depth that reviewers said many computer animated films (particularly Jim Carrey's A Christmas Carol) fail to capture. Below, the reviews.

The Village Voice

For the reportedly painstaking labor it took to create, the film is a marvel to behold-with wonderful shifts in perspective, an intensely tactile design, and an intentional herky-jerkiness of motion that only enriches the make-believe atmosphere. Clooney (speaking as if everything were a self-conscious aside) and Streep (resplendent as a former wildcat turned Earth mother) do some of the best work of their illustrious careers. Among the movie's many virtues, they render an unusually convincing portrait of a marriage, a reminder that the most unexpected thing about Anderson's film may be-underneath all the carefully affixed, wind-sensitive whiskers and fur-how deeply human it is.

Salon

There should be something incongruous about the sound of George Clooney's cashmere-flannel voice coming from the mouth of a somewhat rangy-looking fox in a country gent's corduroy suit: Why should a matinee idol suffer the indignity of being trapped in a puppet's body? But from the first minute of the Wes Anderson stop-motion-animated feature Fantastic Mr. Fox, Clooney isthat creature, the genuinely fantastic Mr. Fox of the title, a rapscallion charmer who wears many hats: husband, father, newspaperman, chicken thief. It's one thing for an actor to feel comfortable in his own skin; it's another for him to feel completely at home in the body of a fake-fur and metal-armature vulpus vulpus. And yet Clooney's naturalism is of a piece with the joyous, marvelously detailed movie around him, adapted from Roald Dahl's novel with adventurousness and seemingly boundless love .

Entertainment Weekly

I'm not a big fan of Anderson's work. What I now understand, though, is that in essence, he's alwaysbeen making cartoons; he just confused the issue by putting real live actors in them. Before, he twisted reality into a permanent ironic pose. Now, in the infectiously primitive talking-animal world of Fantastic Mr. Fox, he's become an ironic realist.

Slate

The experience of Fantastic Mr. Fox... is like being magically shrunk down to 1:12 scale and set loose for 90 minutes in an exquisite, handcrafted, dizzyingly well-stocked dollhouse. If, like me, you're a lifelong aficionado of miniatures-someone who still presses their nose to toy-store windows filled with cunningly crafted furniture and tiny kitchen supplies-this movie will seduce you on tactile terms alone. The animal characters' real, shiny fur, gently moving in the wind! The infinitely detailed sets and props: acorn-patterned wallpaper, cutlery made from deer hooves, bespoke corduroy jackets with tiny stalks of wheat in place of pocket squares! You don't want to watch this movie, you want to climb inside it and play.

New York Magazine

There's no way the disparate elements of this movie should jell, yet here they sit, side by side, in the bric-a-brac of [Anderson's] brain. Frames in the foxes' den have a depth of field that evokes Velázquez paintings in the Prado. Then a bunch of characters dash down a tunnel to escape the farmers' bulldozers, looking in long shot like a child's plastic toy soldiers. A confrontation with an elongated hepcat security-guard rat (with the stabbing voice of Willem Dafoe) is scored and staged like a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western. Not even Quentin Tarantino would have the audacity to assemble a soundtrack in which the Beach Boys' "Heroes and Villains" is followed by Burl Ives, Mozart, Jarvis Cocker (as a farmhand) singing and picking a banjo, the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man," and-believe it or not-"Ol' Man River."

The Los Angeles Times

[Fanstastic Mr. Fox] reanimates filmmaker Wes Anderson's career... Not since the memorable days of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore has it made sense to apply those words to Anderson. Though the director never lost his hard-core fans, his work had gotten hermetic, even stifling. With Fantastic Mr. Fox he's managed to be himself and still let some air into the room.

The Hollywood Reporter

The screenplay sometimes overdoes the winking asides, and the film doesn't so much flow as jump from one set piece to the next. But with animation director Mark Gustafson, DP Tristan Oliver and production designer Nelson Lowry, Anderson has created a world as stylized and inventive as anything he's done. From the fox-red glow of a morning idyll to the noirish gutter scene where one character meets his end to the icy fluorescent glare of the film's closing scene — happy but not without compromise — Fox is a visual delight.

The New York Times

At times this adaptation of Roald Dahl's slender anti-fable - truer to the spirit than to the letter of the source - does not even look like a movie. In spite of the pedigreed voices... it feels more like an extended episode of what progressive educators call imaginative play. The sets might just as well have been built out of available household stuff, the stiff figurines animated and ventriloquized on a classroom or bedroom floor by precocious children.

Is it is a movie for children? This inevitable question depends on the assumption that children have uniform tastes and expectations. How can that be? And besides, the point of everything Mr. Anderson has ever done is that truth and beauty reside in the odd, the mismatched, the idiosyncratic. He makes that point in ways that are sometimes touching, sometimes annoying, but usually worth arguing about. Not everyone will like Fantastic Mr. Fox; and if everyone did, it would not be nearly as interesting as it is. There are some children - some people - who will embrace it with a special, strange intensity, as if it had been made for them alone.

Official trailer:

Precious, which opens today in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta, is based on the novel Push by Sapphire and executive-produced by Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, who came on board after its screening at Sundance. The film is set in late 80s Harlem, where 16-year-old Claireece Precious Jones (Gabourey "Gabby" Sidibe) is facing more hardships than it seems one person should ever endure. Her mother Mary (Mo'Nique) physically and emotionally abuses her and she's pregnant by her drug addict father for the second time. She's illiterate and mostly quiet (at first), but has an elaborate inner life the film portrays in fantasy sequences. When Precious is threatened with expulsion because she's pregnant she's offered the chance to transfer to an alternative school. Her new teacher, Blu Rain (Paula Patton), and Mrs. Weiss (Mariah Carey), a social worker, help Precious begin to deal with the abuse she's suffering.

While a less elegantly done movie could have fallen into several syrupy clichés about underprivileged kids learning to love themselves with the help of an attentive mentor, critics say the film avoids these pitfalls. The story is inspirational and (as Latoya writes) surprisingly hopeful, but it doesn't gloss over the ugliness of Precious' life and she doesn't overcome a lifetime of abuse in two hours.

Critics mention all the main leads as Oscar contenders, particularly Sidibe and Mo'Nique. Happily, most of the reviews focus on Sidibe's incredible performance rather than her size, with the notable exception of David Edelstein's New York Magazine review, which some found infuriating. A few critics question why all of the positive protagnoists are portrayed by light-skinned actors and Slate's review calls the depiction of Precious' reality "poverty porn". A roundup, below.

The Wall Street Journal

Precious is genuinely and irresistibly inspirational. If the filmmaking weren't so skillful and the acting weren't so consistently brilliant, you might mistake this production for a raw slice of life from a Third World country where movies can still be instruments of moral instruction and social change. If Ms. Sidibe weren't playing the title role, it's hard to imagine what Precious would be. She doesn't play it, she invades and conquers it with concentrated energy and blithe humor.

The Chicago Sun-Times

Sidibe is heartbreaking as Precious, that poor girl. Three other actresses [Mo'Nique, Paula Patton, and Mariah Carey] perform so powerfully in the film that academy voters will be hard-pressed to choose among them... This casting looks almost cynical on paper, as if reflecting old Hollywood days when stars were slipped into "character roles" with a wink. But Lee Daniels, the director, didn't cast them for their names, and actually doesn't use any of their star qualities. He requires them to act. Somehow he was able to see beneath the surface and trust that they had within the emotional resources to play these women, and he was right... The film is a tribute to Sidibe's ability to engage our empathy. Her work is still another demonstration of the mystery of some actors, who evoke feelings in ways beyond words and techniques. She so completely creates the Precious character that you rather wonder if she's very much like her.

Salon

What Daniels seems to recognize, perhaps even unconsciously, is that even though this is supposed to be Precious' story, for most of it she's a passive, if sensitive, receptor: The forces swirling around her provide most of the drama's dynamics. And within that context, Sidibe's performance is understated but alert. It's not her line delivery that gets to you, but the cautious curve of her smile, a smile in which she indulges only occasionally. When we see her going off to her first day of school, the blue plastic beads she wears around her neck are a dash of visual confidence, offsetting the shyness of her lumbering carriage.

New York Magazine

I'm not judging girls who look like Sidibe in life, but her image onscreen is jarring to the point of being transgressive, its only equivalent to be seen in John Waters's pointedly outrageous carnivals. Her head is a balloon on the body of a zeppelin, her cheeks so inflated they squash her eyes into slits. Her expression is either surly or unreadable. Even with her voice-over narration, you're meant to stare at her ebony face and see nothing. The movie is saying that she's not an object, but the way that Sidibe is directed she becomes one. It's only in a couple of heavy-handed fantasy sequences (she emerges from a theater in a bright-red gown to popping flashbulbs) that her eyes are windows to the soul.

Entertainment Weekly

In her first dramatic role, the comedian Mo'Nique acts with such force that she burns a hole in the screen. Her Mary is raging and defeated, a woman who treats Precious as a slave - and I don't use the word lightly, since part of the film's power is its perception that these two are living out patterns of cruelty that go back for generations. Their agony has roots. What's terrifying about the abuse here is how casually it's accepted as a fact of life, by both perpetrator and victim.

The New York Times

Mary, brimming with rage, thwarted love and plain meanness, is a character bound to provoke discomfort. Even otherwise misogynistic hip-hop artists will pay tribute to the heroism of African-American mothers, and to see that piety so thoroughly dispensed with is downright shocking. Other provocations are more subtle but no less pointed. There are virtually no men in this movie. Precious's father is glimpsed briefly in flashbacks of his assaults on her, and in the fantasy sequences that provide escape from her pain Precious hobnobs with handsome boys, but otherwise the only male character of significance is a hospital worker played by Lenny Kravitz. Otherwise, Precious's cosmos, for better and for worse, is a universe of women: the social worker (Mariah Carey scrubbed of any vestige of divahood); the teacher, Ms. Rain; her co-worker in the remedial education program, played by the comedian and talk show host Sherri Shepherd; and Precious's fellow students. These characters all can be seen as surrogate mothers, aunts and sisters, who together provide Precious with a more functional family (to say the least) than what she has at home. But their love is also enabled by institutions and government policies. An unstated but self-evident moral of Precious, set during Ronald Reagan's presidency and based on a book published in the year of Bill Clinton's welfare reform, is that government can provide not only a safety net, but also, in small and consequential ways, a lifeline.

The Los Angeles Times

Like the book, the dialogue is graphic and politically incorrect. Precious' first child, a daughter, is called Little Mongo, because of her Down syndrome. When the teenager finds one of her teachers is a "straight-up lesbian," she says so before going on to list all the things homosexuals haven't done to her. With Mary, meanwhile, it's not so much the words themselves that shock, though it sometimes seems her vocabulary doesn't extend beyond four-letter words, but the molten lava underneath them.

Reel Views

Precious ... manages the task of being both heartbreaking and heart-warming, all without resorting to the kind of manipulation so often evident in dramas about underprivileged kids trying to improve themselves. There are pitfalls inherent in this kind of story, but indie director Lee Daniels sidesteps them, crafting a feature that is both emotionally honest and stirring. Precious spends time in the urban trenches that are often used as a colorful backdrop for other less true films; here, they are integral to the essence of the characters, places where acts of supreme horror are dismissed matter-of-factly. Ultimately, Precious is a story of one young woman's embrace of self-worth in these circumstances, but that discovery does not come without a price.

Rolling Stone

When I tell people how good this movie is - and I can't shut up about it - they flash me the stink eye. As in "Yeah, right, like I need to sink into a depression coma for two hours watching a fat, illiterate, HIV-positive Harlem girl get knocked up (twice) by her daddy, brutally battered by her mother and laughed at by a world eager to pound abuse on her 16-year-old ass." Won't you dickheads be surprised. Precious ... tunnels inside your head, leaves you moved like no film in years and then lifts you up in ways you don't see coming. Despite the pain at the story's core, the movie has a spirit that soars.

The Village Voice

Hothouse melodrama one moment, kitchen-sink (and frying-pan-to-the-head) realism the next, with eruptions of incongruous slapstick throughout, this may be Daniels's stab at finding a cinematic analog for the novel's inventive, naïf-art language-a film style, like Precious's writing style, seemingly being made up as it goes along. Yet even when the movie is at its most schizoid, Precious still packs a wallop. What Daniels lacks as a craftsman, he makes up for in his willingness to put the lives of abused and defeated black women on the screen with brute-force candor and a lack of sentimentality... Precious is less about overcoming adversity than about survival-a battle the movie does not begin to pretend can be won in two hours of screen time.

The Hollywood Reporter

Damien Paul's edgy and effervescent screenplay propels us into the inner recesses of primitive survival. It's a magnificent distillation, both succinct and eruptive. Director Lee Daniels sagely navigates the story from Precious' cavernous inner world through her synaptic flashes of fantasy that momentarily allow her to transcend her personal hell. As Precious, Sidibe is superb, allowing us to see the inner warmth and beauty of a young woman who, to her world's cruel eyes, might seem monstrous. As Precious' hideous mother, Mo'Nique is cruelty incarnate. It's an astonishingly powerful performance.

The New Yorker

Blu Rain['s] powers of uplift feel like make-believe. She is a vision of tolerant gentleness, who wears a new set of soft fabrics every day and plays Scrabble in the evening with her equally lovely lesbian partner. "They talk like TV stations I don't watch," Precious says, but that tart line is not borne out by the film, which drinks in Ms. Rain without demur. The same goes for the fantasy sequences-hugely ill-advised dream clips, showing a richly clad Precious at a movie première or slow-dancing with a hunk. One of them even finds a slender white girl gazing back at her from the bedroom mirror. What we have here is a fouled-up fairy tale of oppression and empowerment, and it's hard not to be ensnared by its mixture of rank maleficence and easy reverie. The gap between being genuinely stirred and having your arm twisted, however, is narrower than we care to admit.

Slate

It's not that there isn't anything to like about Precious, which at its best resembles its heroine: observant, large-spirited, and brave. The director, Lee Daniels puts on his hip boots and wades into grimmer territory than any recent film I can think of, and his fearless leading ladies, Mo'Nique and Sidibe, wade right in with him. But Daniels' methodical commitment to abjection, his need to shove the reality of Precious' life in our faces and wave it around till we acknowledge its awfulness, winds up robbing the audience (and, to some extent, the actors) of all agency. Daniels is not above cutting from an image of incestuous rape to a shot of greasy pork sizzling on the stove: Her father treats her like meat, get it? In its eagerness to drag us through the lower depths of human experience, Precious leaves no space for the audience to breathe or to draw our own conclusions. For a film about empowerment and self-actualization, it wields an awfully large cudgel... Daniels and Fletcher no doubt intended for their film to lend a voice to the kind of protagonist too often excluded from American movie screens: a poor, black, overweight single mother from the inner city. But in offering up their heroine's misery for the audience's delectation, they've created something uncomfortably close to poverty porn.

Women & Hollywood

Precious challenges and assaults every nerve ending. It pushes the viewer to see people that are mostly invisible in the culture (and onscreen) and humanizes them. But Precious is by far not a perfect film. The script by first time screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher is really far fetched and paints a picture that is only there black and white (not talking about color here) and full of stereotypes. For example, the women who brutalize Precious are dark skinned while the women who help her are lighter skinned. What does that mean? Is it intentional? What if anything is he trying to say? What is most missing from the film is nuance and gray areas and that is clearly the directing choice of Lee Daniels. He wants you to think in extremes because Precious' world is extreme.

Ain't It Cool News

Precious is an achievement that will take a long time for me to shake. Even if I didn't like what I saw or heard at times, I'm glad someone like Daniels is out there making movies that move me to such a degree and remind me that there are people and things in the world that can still shock me into feeling something about a character and a film as deeply as this film did. This is a story of a survivor that doesn't fall back on big speeches, swelling music, angels and kittens; there's very little about this movie that would qualify as "feel good." But I did feel something after seeing it, and that's a rarity these days.

Earlier: Long Day's Journey Into Night: Reading Push, watching Precious
Precious Reactions Interesting, Infuriating
Push Comes To Shove: Precious Pushback
What We Talk About When We Talk About Precious

Reviews of This Is It, which was released today, are surprisingly unified, and follow an almost formulaic move from eulogy into gentle critique. Most marvel at Jackson's apparent health, his vitality and good humor. By all accounts, This Is It shows Jackson at his best; he is surprisingly springy at 50, and does not reveal in his voice or motion the coming tragedy. Viewers hoping for a glimpse into the causes behind Jackson's sudden death may well be disappointed, although there is a certain amount of pathos for the most schadenfreude-starved among us. As in life, critics oscillate between praising his talents and falling into the inevitable discussion of his strange physical appearance. But it seems that this friction, the weirdness of watching a dead man who exudes life, yet looks so totally spent, is part of what drives the film.

However, die-hard fans will find a lot to love in director Kenny Ortega's film, which, viewers are informed at the beginning, was never intended for public viewing. The clips were all shot for Jackson's personal use, to document the behind-the-scenes action as he prepared to launch his 50-concert series. While it may not exactly reveal the real MJ, there are moments that offer valuable insight into Jackson's technique. Hollywood insiders who were lucky enough to view the film Monday had good things to say about its contents. "It is the single most brilliant piece of filmmaking I have ever seen," wrote Elizabeth Taylor on Twitter. "It cements forever Michael's genius in every aspect of creativity." Jackson's brothers had even higher praise: "It was closure for me," said Marlon Jackson. "And it was a moment where I just felt his spirit inside of me. And that made me feel good."

USA Today

Even when just marking his movements, Jackson shows signs of the physical and vocal fluidity and sheer charisma that he retained. Watching him work with his band and backup singers and dancers, one senses the excitement and joy that talented performers can bring to the often grueling process of assembling a show.

Jackson's creative team and crew emerge as engaging personalities in rehearsal and interview segments that are surprisingly funny or moving. (Jackson himself reveals a sense of humor that mitigates his more eccentric traits.)

The Guardian

The big fear, though, was that fulsome homages to the man and his talent would smother This Is It in a coating of treacle; thankfully, Ortega limits it to the occasional sobbing outburst from the dancers or choreographers. We are instead offered genuinely interesting tidbits of Jackson's stagecraft, in the shape of intense discussion of cues, cherry-pickers and trapdoors – presumably to demonstrate how hands-on he was.

Yahoo

Even though Jackson's looks - with his weirdly delicate face and his stick-thin frame - still makes one squirm with discomfort, once he starts to perform, that discomfort gives way to amazement. At 50, Jackson was still an amazingly gifted dancer with moves that leave your mouth agape. Though we only see him do the moonwalk once, and just fleetingly, his stop-on-a-dime spins, deft footwork and body jerks recall the Jackson the world fell in love with 25 years earlier with "Thriller." And Jackson's voice still dazzles - even when he's trying to play it down.

Time

Ortega and Jackson had some Berkeley-size production numbers in mind. A version of "Smooth Criminal" interpolates Michael into antique movie clips with Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. "They Don't Care About Us" sends 1,100 CGI soldiers marching down a kind of Champs Elysees whose Arc de Triomphe is bent into an M for Michael. "Thriller" was to boast 3-D effects. And "Earth Song," the rainforest message number, has a dewy child (a girl, if you're wondering) facing down a bulldozer, which was then to motor toward the front of the stage, ready to devour the star. 'Save Michael, he seemed to be saying, and save the planet.

But the coolest moments show Jackson unadorned and unplugged. He sings "Human Nature" nearly a capella, blending vocal virtuosity and a choirboy's clarity; there's nothing false about his falsetto. His terpsichore leads viewers through how-the-hell-does-he-do-that? astonishment into a mute appreciation of Jackson's ability to channel Fred Astaire's nonchalant elegance and fit it to the percussive drive of R&B. He gives dancing class and sex.

Telegraph

The film (produced in association with the Michael Jackson Company) carries the dedication: "For the fans." Quite so: non-believers will find little of interest here. Would Jackson would have completed all 50 strenuous London shows had he lived? On this evidence, the jury's out.

AP

The film captures Jackson dressed with customary flamboyance, his fashion flourishes including military epaulets, sequins and gold-spangled pants.

Jackson backup dancer Misha Gabriel said the film is "such an honest and raw look at the creative process that at times it makes me think that maybe he wouldn't want people to see so much of the creative process before it was finalized. But I think that's the beauty of the film."

"It's Michael becoming great, perfecting his perfection, if that makes sense," said fellow dancer Nick Bass.

The Wrap

We say goodbye to both Michaels, now. We take all that weird but mostly sad baggage. And we dump it. We don't think about the cardiac arrest, the reports of propofol, lorazepam and midazolam (he went from creating chemistry to becoming it), and charges of homicide.

We dump it all, because death asks our forbearance. Death forces us to say goodbye to what was good. Watching Jackson in rehearsal, it's hardly a stretch. To watch him in this movie is to see — and yet never quite fully capture, and that's the mystique of it — what all the fuss has always been about.

L.A. Times

Jackson's total lack of engagement with the cameras adds to the unreal mood. He's always performing, but for the imagined masses, not for the filmgoer.

Not reaching those masses was the final tragedy of Jackson's life. Occasionally, he's shown offering creative direction to his collaborators, and the steel in his voice reveals how much the world he was creating onstage meant to him. Everything, really: enough to push himself to the edge of human endurance.

Amelia, which opens today, was directed by Mira Nair and adapted from two Earhart biographies, Susan Butler's East to the Dawn and Mary S. Lovell's The Sound of Wings. But according to critics, it seems the screenwriters went to great lengths to purge the film of many of the more interesting aspects of her unusual life, and instead focused on her marriage to publishing magnate George P. Putnam (Richard Gere). The film cuts back and forth between Earhart (Hilary Swank) in the cockpit during her doomed final flight, and the decade preceding it, during which she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic and an international celebrity.

Critics say that while Swank captures Earhart's physicality, she isn't given very good dialogue to work with. The script smooths over the many controversies surrounding her life, including her open marriage to Putnam, her rumored bisexuality, and whether or not she was a spy. Though the film delves into the love triangle between Earhart, Putnam and Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), her affair with Vidal only amounts to one fairly chaste kiss in an elevator. As one critic puts it, the film is less exciting than a History Channel documentary.

NPR

The movie is imprisoned in safety. The script by Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan makes gestures in the right direction. It touches on the most modern aspect of Earhart's story: that from the get-go the image of this would-be free spirit was marketed like crazy. Putnam functioned as Earhart's Madison Avenue Svengali, although the filmmakers can't bring themselves to condemn him. He's a tender father/lover who just happens to want Amelia to make money. This is America, he keeps reminding her, and it's dollars that allow her to fly. But Amelia boasts some of the most horrific examples of biopic dialogue I've ever heard. When Amelia can't decide what to do about her adulterous love for Gene Vidal, played by Ewan McGregor, he says, "Just ask yourself," and Amelia says - "I'm not sure who that is anymore."

Hollywood Reporter

Freckle-faced, prairie-voiced and fiercely independent, Hilary Swank's depiction of aviator Amelia Earhart in Mira Nair's biographical film Amelia is of a high order. It ranks with recent real-life portrayals of Ray Charles by Jamie Foxx and Truman Capote by Philip Seymour Hoffman and could be similarly awards-bound.

The Chicago Sun-Times

I'm not suggesting that Mira Nair and her writers, Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, should have invented anything for Amelia. It is right that they resisted any temptation. It's just that there's a certain lack of drama in a generally happy life... "Amelia" is a perfectly sound biopic, well directed and acted, about an admirable woman. It confirmed for me Earhart's courage — not only in flying, but in insisting on living her life outside the conventions of her time for well-behaved females.

The Boston Globe

On the surface, the film appears to be a dispiriting awards-season white elephant, a triumph of production design, period costumes, and hollow bio-drama. The movie's trailer adds to the sense of déjà vu: Is this a sequel to Out of Africa, or a gender-bending remake of The Aviator, or what? Yet inside Amelia is a sharp idea struggling to get out: How does a woman marketed to the public as a star turn herself back into a human being? And at what cost? It's a question for our times, and the one novelty of Mira Nair's film is that it sets the conundrum in an earlier era, when celebrity branding wasn't yet a national way of life... The film's actual climax may have come earlier and more quietly, when Earhart is asked by a reporter, "Are you a better celebrity than a pilot?'' She doesn't come up with a convincing answer and neither does the movie. It asks the question, though, and that's a start.

Reel Views

Mira Nair's Amelia is a by-the-book bio-pic. By following the template, it's as safe and straightforward as one could possibly get, without narrative flourishes and with minimal exaggeration to satisfy Hollywood's appetite for fictionalization. That's not bad, but it's not necessarily good, either. Amelia Earhart led an active and interesting enough life that a simple re-telling of events works to a degree. It helps that Hilary Swank looks and acts the part and that Nair's style never gets in the way of the story. While this may not be the definitive Earhart biography, Amelia is watchable.

USA Today

Amelia's narrative adheres to the standard biopic formula. It limits its focus to about a decade, during which Earhart takes her first trans-Atlantic flight as a passenger/commander in 1928 to her disappearance in 1937. She is an intrinsically fascinating subject, but we don't get a sense of what propelled her to such courageous heights. Familiar platitudes, headline montages and voice-over pontificating bog down the story in superficiality.

Entertainment Weekly

Amelia is a frustratingly old-school, Hollywood-style, inspirational biopic about Amelia Earhart that doesn't trust a viewer's independent assessment of the famous woman pictured on the screen. The mystery we ought to be paying attention to is: What really happened on the legendary American aviator's final, fatal flight in 1937? But the question audiences are left with is this: How could so tradition-busting a role model have resulted in so square, stiff, and earthbound a movie? Why present such a modern woman in such a fusty format?

Salon

And Swank wears those clothes well: She gives a wonderful physical performance here. In fact, she tells us more about Earhart's life through her body language than she does in the dialogue. Swank's Earhart has a broad but slow-burning smile; her gait suggests a person who's gangly-graceful, generous and approachable — as Earhart, Swank's very limbs seem to call out, "Howdy!" But as perfect as Swank is for this role, the dialogue sounds stiff and overwritten as it emerges from her lips. Swank has strong, marvelous features, yet she's an actress of remarkable delicacy — that combination is part of what generally makes her so pleasurable to watch. But in Amelia she comes off as awkward and uncertain, as if she were trying to underplay the movie's too-obvious dialogue and not fully able to bring it into focus.

The Los Angeles Times

The sinewy strength and controlled aggression that Swank used to such good effect for her Oscar-winning roles in Boys Don't Cry and Million Dollar Baby is mostly diminished in Amelia by a poster-girl smile. So ever-present is that grin, whether in the cockpit, or a cocktail party or on the promotional circuit for everything from luggage to clothes that you worry it has forever lined Swank's face. But we get little of the woman behind the smile. Where is the steely force that drives grand ambition, the fears, the flaws?

The Washington Post

Look, nobody's asking for a miniseries here, but at times the movie feels more like a History Channel documentary — respectful to the point of reverential — than a rip-snorting yarn. And that's despite a scene where Earhart almost falls out of the plane while soaring over the Atlantic Ocean in what looks like an airborne tin can. Would that the film had taken as many risks. When it comes to some of the wild speculation that has arisen over the years about what happened to Earhart during that final flight, the movie doesn't even go out on a limb, opting instead for the sort of vague, open ending that, is historically safe and cinematically dull.

Variety

To say that Amelia never gets off the ground would be an understatement; it barely makes it out of the hangar. Handsomely mounted yet dismayingly superficial, Mira Nair's film offers snazzy aerial photography and inspirational platitudes in lieu of insight into Amelia Earhart's storied life and high-flying career. Prestigious packaging, led by Hilary Swank's gussied-up performance as the iconic aviatrix, portends friendly commercial skies for the Fox Searchlight release, at least initially. But critical disdain is unlikely to be countered by much audience enthusiasm, even among admirers of this kind of old-fashioned, star-powered bio-mush.

The A.V. Club

If Amelia has any value (which is a dubious proposition), it's as an object lesson in the follies of the conventional biopic, which puts mindless recapitulation of historical data above analysis or insight. The messy fascination of life is replaced by a schematic series of setups and payoffs. The second it's mentioned that Christopher Eccleston's navigator is a recovering alcoholic, it's clear that it's only a matter of time before he falls off the wagon at a pivotal moment. His lived-in performance is one of the film's only bright spots, though, along with Cherry Jones' fleeting turn as an impish Eleanor Roosevelt.

The Wall Street Journal

Ms. Swank, for her part, tries to inhabit a role with no living quarters. The writing is all about externals-what Amelia says rather than what she feels, what she looks like (glamorous, though she says she wears pants because she doesn't like her legs, and feminine, though there's one fleeting hint of more complex sexuality). Even the flying is about externals. Apart from admiring her new Electra and pushing an occasional throttle, the most famous female pilot in history displays no particular affinity for the gorgeous machinery at her disposal. The whole movie is a failure to communicate.

The New York Times

Alas, excesses of any pleasurable kind are absent from this exasperatingly dull production. The director Mira Nair, whose only qualification appears to be that she's a woman who has made others films about and with women (Mississippi Masala, Vanity Fair), keeps a tidy screen - it's all very neat and carefully scrubbed. I don't recall a single dented automobile or a fissure of real feeling etched into a face. Bathed in golden light, Amelia and G. P. are as pretty as a framed picture and as inert... With her rangy figure, Ms. Swank fills Earhart's coveralls and leather jackets nicely. But there's little to the performance other than the actress's natural earnestness and smiles so enormous, persistent and consuming that the rest of Earhart soon fades, much like the Cheshire Cat. As usual, Mr. Gere holds your attention with beauty and a screen presence so recessive that it creates its own gravitational pull. The actors don't make a persuasive fit, despite all their long stares and infernal smiling. (The movie is a more effective testament to the triumphs of American dentistry than to Earhart or aviation.) It's hard to imagine anyone, other than satirists, doing anything with the puerile, sometimes risible dialogue.

Where The Wild Things Are, of course, is based on the beloved children's book by Maurice Sendak, which presented a challenge for director Spike Jonze, who also wrote the screenplay with Dave Eggers. (The story only contains 10 sentences.) To turn the book into a full-length feature, Jonze and Eggers don't reinterpret it but expand on it, showing what prompts Max (Max Records) to misbehave and get sent to his room with no supper in the first place. In the film, which opens today, Max gets upset when his teenage sister Claire (Pepita Emmerichs) and her friends destroy his snow fort and his single mother (Catherine Keener) pays more attention to work and her new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo) than him. Max acts out and then runs away from home in his wolf costume. In his imagination, he travels by boat to an island where he befriends giant creatures who make him their king. The creatures (voiced by James Gandolfini, Paul Dano, Lauren Ambrose, Chris Cooper, and Forest Whitaker) embody Max's various emotional issues from feeling abandoned, bossy, needy, or too wild.

Many critics call the film one of the year's best, both for honoring Sendak's book and accomplishing Jonze's goal of capturing "the feeling of what it is to be 9." Other reviewers aren't as enchanted, saying it is less representative of what children are actually like, and more about adults wistfully longing for their own childhoods. While many parents are worried the "Wild Things" will scare children, the critics say they're more likely to be bored by the creatures' neurotic problems. As for adults, while many scenes of Max's "wild rumpus" provide an "undeniable rush of pleasure," their enjoyment of the film may rest on their willingness to ponder the emotional world of children while listening to an indie rock soundtrack.

Entertainment Weekly

Sendak's great gift to readers, old as well as young, is the seriousness with which he presents even the wildest mayhem, the deepest contradictions in human (and Wild Thing) behavior; the author empathizes with fantasists but has no time for cuteness. In his transcendent movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze not only respects the original text but also honors movie lovers with the same clarity of vision. This is one of the year's best. To paraphrase the Wild Thing named KW, I could eat it up, I love it so.

The Wall Street Journal

The filmmaker, Mr. Jonze, has done only two features until now, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Both were strikingly original, marvelously intricate and notably erratic in their plot and structure. They made him an exciting choice to direct this one, though also a risky choice, since the Sendak book is essentially plotless. (Boy misbehaves, boy's unseen mother sends him to bed without supper, boy's room becomes a forest populated by bizarre creatures who make him king and do his bidding until he feels hungry for love and heads back home.) Happily-and improbably, given the potential for outraging whole generations of readers-the risks have been managed by taking greater risks, and some brave ones. This adaptation, by the director and his celebrated co-writer, Dave Eggers, makes Max a somewhat older (maybe 8 or 9) and much angrier child than the original-all that wildness doesn't come from nowhere-as well as a wrenchingly vulnerable child whose adventures are elaborately rooted in his everyday life. His mother is not only seen but powerfully felt: Catherine Keener, an actress of unforced warmth and uncommon humor, has never been so affecting, even when this loving mom vents ample anger in her turn. (Mark Ruffalo appears briefly as her boyfriend.)

The New York Times

Much is left unexplained in Mr. Jonze's adaptation, including Max's melancholia, which hangs over him, his family and his wild things like a gathering storm. But childhood has its secrets, mysteries, small and large terrors. When a hilariously bungling teacher explains, rather too casually, that the sun is going to die, the flash of horror on Max's face indicates that he understands that the sun won't be the only one to go. There are other reasons, perhaps, an absent father, a distracted mother. (And when a frightened Max listens to an argument between Carol and K W, you hear the echoes of parental discord.) But such analysis is for therapy, not art, and one of the film's pleasures is its refusal of banal explanation.

The Washington Post

Viewers expecting a consoling, soft-focus version of an anodyne children's story should be forewarned: Jonze takes the story to the dark and edgy place where devotion slips into aggression, where loneliness and fear are indistinguishable from liberation and desire. This isn't to say that Where the Wild Things Are isn't suitable for children; it's just that it will probably be most enjoyable to children with a working knowledge of Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses of Enchantment" and psychoanalytic theory.

The A.V. Club

Though little happens, it doesn't much need to. Max gets to know the wild things in ways that simply ring true, and that's story enough. He favors Gandolfini, all but ignores the timid goat-beast voiced by Paul Dano, tries to impress big-sister figure Lauren Ambrose, and bosses around Chris Cooper's bird-man. And in a subtle, daring, but thoroughly effective move, Jonze has Max fearfully avoid the nameless, near-silent bull, who often appears alone and in the distance, unremarked upon. Whether the action is grand and exciting, as when Jonze brings to life a massive fortress made of twigs, or simple and human, as in touching one-on-ones that Max has with Ambrose, Dano, and Gandolfini, it all feels genuine to the actual experience of childhood in ways that children's movies generally don't. Max learns about himself, to be sure, but Jonze never considers making the sort of broad-stroke, "Here's what everybody learned!" gestures that attempt to stand in for actual emotion. Instead, he lets a little kid loose to explore the terrain of his own mind, which turns out to be an amazing place.

USA Today

Eggers has said he and Jonze wanted to avoid depicting Max as so many movie kids are shown: "de-fanged." Max certainly has fangs - and he's not afraid to use them. The uneven pacing and tone are stirring, blending melancholy with boisterous fun. When you think about it, those polarities best capture the most indelible images of anyone's childhood - those which hurt or frighten, and those which thrill... Where the Wild Things Are is a fiercely innovative film with surprising texture and nuance. It captures the joy and exuberance of childhood without shying away from its very real pains and woes.

New York Magazine

Jonze and Eggers's most agreeable innovation is turning Sendak's rather anonymous beasts into complex, conflicted personalities. They sit around quarreling, smashing things, making holes in trees, staring into space, and wishing for a leader. They're like a counterculture commune after all the hippies and their woks have left, after the drugs have stopped working so well. And then comes little Max, who proclaims himself a king to keep them from devouring him. Max Records (I still can't get over that name) has a mop of dark hair and a sweet face, but his Max is petulant and edgy. It's a wonderful performance; you'd never know he was acting opposite nine-foot puppets.

The Chicago Sun-Times

The movie felt long to me, and there were some stretches during which I was less than riveted. Is it possible that there wasn't enough Sendak story to justify a feature-length film? In a way I suppose the book tells a feature-length story just in Sendak's drawings, and Jonze and Eggers have taken those for their inspiration. All the same, the film will play better for older audiences remembering a much-loved book from childhood, and not as well with kids who have been trained on slam-bam action animation.

Reel Views

The only actor with significant screen time is relative newcomer Max Records, whose only previous feature credit is a small part in The Brothers Bloom (he played Stephen as a boy). Records' greatest strength is his incredibly expressive face. He conveys emotions through his expressions; his delivery of dialogue is less certain. It remains to be seen whether his career trajectory will lead him to become the next "big" child actor or whether he'll perform on the periphery until puberty hits. Catherine Keener has a small role as Max's mom, and her confident presence in her few scenes makes us wish Jonze had found a way to expand her screen time. The vocal casting is perfect: James Gandolfini as Carol, Lauren Ambrose as KW, Paul Dano as the goat Alexander; Catherine O'Hara as the perpetually negative Judith; Forest Whitaker as Judith's sadsack companion, Ira; Chris Cooper as Douglas, this film's Big Bird; and Michael Berry Jr. as the taciturn Bull. Only Gandolfini's voice is immediately recognizable; everyone else blends anonymously into their parts, and the Tony Soprano connection serves only to invest Carol with an extra edge.

The Boston Globe

While this much-awaited, long-in-the-works film has more than its share of wild rumpuses, its big, shaggy heart is in what happens after the rumpus dies down: insecurities, misunderstandings, fears. Where the Wild Things Are isn't for little kids so much as it's about them, and parents and tykes expecting the next Shrek or even a seamless work of Pixar genius will be sorely disappointed if not a little freaked out. The movie is a wild thing, and that's not such a bad thing at all.

The Hollywood Reporter

The film does surmount one of its two difficult challenges: Through puppetry and computer animation, the filmmaking teams have successfully put a world of childhood imagination on the screen. Where the film falters is Jonze and novelist Dave Eggers' adaptation, which fails to invest this world with strong emotions. Children might enjoy the goofy monsters and their fights and squabbles, but adults likely are to grow weary of the repetitiveness. In the end, the book probably was too slender to support a 102-minute movie. Without a quest to propel the story, such as Dorothy's journey in The Wizard of Oz, the movie turns into an afternoon-special with an easily digested moral that fails to grab youngsters by the collar and shake them up with an exciting adventure.

Variety

The wild things move around pretty well and interact with Max in a credible way that fully justifies the no doubt difficult decision not to use CGI all the way. All the more ironic, then, that the film's biggest problem is not the look of the creatures but the manner in which they speak. That said, the thesps provide low-key, nuanced readings, with Gandolfini and Lauren Ambrose particularly distinguishing themselves with dialogue that often seems odd coming from the toothsome mouths seen onscreen. Excellent production values stress the relative realness of what's on view compared to the digital worlds of most kidpics these days. The alt-rock tenor of the music scoring is refreshing at first, but the predictability of the music cues proves increasingly wearisome.

The Village Voice

What's best about Jonze's movie is its kinetic feel for physical play-herky-jerky camera as Max and the WTs zip and bounce through the forest-not surprising from a former skateboard punk like Spike. What's weakest is its blandness, the sense memory of a child raised on Sesame Street. The psychic environment is less King Kong's Skull Island than Fred Rogers' neighborhood: Where the Wild Things Aren't. Wild Things isn't overlong, but it is underwhelming. Who is the audience? Children brought to see it might find it a downer-a case of what the New York Times has called "misery for art's sake." Triumph or travesty, this movie is more likely something for Jonze's generational cohorts to love or loathe. (How many suburban garage bands had the name Wild Rumpus?) For me, it seemed like group therapy with the muppets.

The New Yorker

Jonze and Eggers have spoken of their desire to keep the film close to a child's needs, but have they done that? Kids like danger, followed by a release from danger and a return to safety, yet the only danger posed by these creatures is that they will turn Max into someone as messed-up as they are. The filmmakers may have wanted to link Max's anger to the creatures' wounds, but the connection is fuzzy-Max isn't the one who hurt them. I have a vision of eight-year-olds leaving the movie in bewilderment. Why are the creatures so unhappy? That question doesn't return a child to safety or anywhere else. Of one thing I am sure: children will be relieved when Max gets away from this anxious crew.

Slate

When the wild things race through the forest to the sound of a Yeah Yeah Yeahs song or leap atop Max and one another in a great, snuggly pile, there's an undeniable rush of pleasure. (You can get it in its purest form by watching the trailer.) But in between these hits of energy are long swaths of desultory narrative about the relationships among the wild things themselves: Judith is jealous of Carol because of his special closeness to Max. Carol is bummed that K.W. has made friends outside the wild-thing community. Alexander struggles with the self-esteem issues you might expect from a puny, introverted goat. Essentially, the entire middle section could be summed up as follows: Fuzzy guys build a stick fort, sit inside it, and mope. If I avoid taking my 3-and-a-half-year-old daughter to this movie, it won't be because the wild things would scare her. (They might frighten some children, but I live with a miniature adrenaline junkie.) It'll be because their endless therapeutic workshopping would bore her stiff.

The Los Angeles Times

The problem with this cast of characters is not so much their personalities but the way screenwriters Jonze and Eggers have turned them into neurotic adults with dysfunctional relationships. To hear them talk among themselves is to feel like you've stumbled onto a group therapy session involving unfunny refugees from an alternate universe Woody Allen movie. It's not a good feeling. Max does utter the book's signature line, "Let the wild rumpus start," but he spends a lot of his time not really being sure what he's doing. When Jonze told the New York Times Magazine, "Everything we did, all the decisions we made, were to try to capture the feeling of what it is to be 9," he's telling the truth. Unfortunately, in this case, that's not a very interesting place to be.

Salon

That right there is enough to make me urge any filmmaker to stick to his vision. It isn't, unfortunately, enough to make me like his movie. Where the Wild Things Are may be a childlike picture, but it isn't an innocent one. The movie is so loaded with adult ideas about childhood — as opposed to things that might delight or engage an actual child — that it comes off as a calculated, petulant shout, the kind of trick kids play to guilt-trip their parents into paying attention to them. It appears to be a movie made by, and for, members of a generation who feel it's unfair to have to grow up. Jonze isn't channeling the feelings of 9-year-olds so much as he's obsessively fingering his own, like the silky edge of a blanket. "Who cares about the children?" is Jonze's sulky rhetorical question. "What about me?"

Chris Rock, who co-wrote, produced, and stars in the film, was inspired to make it when his young daughter asked why she doesn't have "good hair." He decided to explore others' ideas of what constitutes "good hair" by visiting beauty salons, analyzing the chemicals found in relaxers, and interviewing celebrities from Eve to Al Sharpton to Maya Angelou about their hair.

Almost every critic praises Good Hair, but for the most part, their reviews stick to a summary of the film and analysis of Rock as host/narrator. Several say they found themselves surprised by the information presented - possibly because, judging from photos found online, none of them reviewers actually have black hair. While this latter fact doesn't disqualify them from critiquing the quality of the film, the reviews do come from an outsider's perspective, like The New York Times' take, which notes, "One of the happy consequences of Good Hair should be a radical increase in white-woman empathy for their black sisters."

Some critics do say the film doesn't adequately explore the gender politics of how black men feel about black women's hair, which Dodai worried about after watching a preview clip of men discussing their wives' and girlfriends' hair in a barber shop. The most in-depth analysis comes from Roger Ebert, who claims in his Chicago Sun-Times review that the kind of relaxer shown eating through a Coke can isn't commonly used. (Ebert, who is married to an African-American woman, also complains about Chris Rock seeming to advocate for "natural hair", pointing out that every woman, regardless of color, uses some type of product or treatment on her tresses.)

Entertainment Weekly

Rock, who co-wrote Good Hairand serves as its guiding host, is hilariously aware of the cultural insecurities that have driven many African-Americans to spend a fortune on straightening their hair. Yet by structuring the film around the Bronner Bros. Hair Show, a battle-of-the-salon-stars so over-the-top it's like Iron Chefmeets Paris Is Burning, Rock gives Good Hair a rousing message: Where African-Americans in the '60s adopted a ''natural'' look, they now feel free to coif their heads any way they want. That's cultural power.

The A.V. Club

Is it possible to talk about the fascinating and complex universe of black hair without dealing with race and identity? That's the question posed by Good Hair, director Jeff Stilson and co-writer/producer/narrator/star Chris Rock's charming new comic exploration of African-American hair. The film is filled with sadly telling moments, like a black beauty student telling Rock that she'd have a hard time taking a job applicant seriously if he had an afro, yet its tone is one of amusement rather than indignation. Rock is an entertainer, not a polemicist, and Good Hair will never be mistaken for a college course in African American Hair And Racial Identity, though it does stress the pain women will endure and the exorbitant prices they'll pay to keep up with follicular trends. To the film's subjects, paying thousands for a complicated, high-maintenance weave is less a luxury than a necessity, even for those low on the socio-economic scale.

The New York Times

In fact, one of the happy consequences of Good Hair should be a radical increase in white-woman empathy for their black sisters. Whether in thrall to "creamy crack," a scary, aluminum-dissolving chemical otherwise known as relaxer (what it's really relaxing, observes Mr. Rock astutely, is white people), or the staggeringly expensive and time-consuming weave (often available on layaway plan), the women in the film bare heads and hearts with humor and without complaint...

Competently directed by Jeff Stilson, Good Hair employs humor as a medium for insightful and often uncomfortable observations on race and conformity. The film's only misstep is its fixation on the competitors in a flamboyant Atlanta hair show. Far more entertaining are the barbershop conversations in which ordinary men jovially gripe about their honeys' hairdos; they're a brotherhood joined in financial commitment and - thanks to hands-off-the-head decrees at home - emotional frustration.

Salon

One thing Rock, as a guy, might not understand is that not all curly-wavy-kinky hair, regardless of the race of the person it belongs to, is the same. And keeping any hair "natural" can take a bit of work: Rock interviews actress Tracie Thoms (who appeared in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof), who has the most beautiful head of tiny, perfectly formed corkscrew curls I've ever seen. Thank goodness she doesn't straighten it — but I suspect she takes great care keeping it conditioned, too.Regardless, Rock isn't out to chide people for the choices they make. And he allows himself to be the butt of a joke, too. When Maya Angelou, who is in her early 80s, tells him she didn't have her hair relaxed until she was about 70, he murmurs something about how she went "her whole life" without doing so. She counters mischievously, "Not my whole life, I'm still alive!" Rock laughs, a lot, during Good Hair, which suggests he's having a great time. It also suggests that while he won't be dictatorial with his own daughters, he wants them to be happy with the hair they've got — at least to the point of recognizing that good hair lies in the eye of the beholder.

Variety

It's telling that, with the exception of the Rev. Al Sharpton, who proudly flaunts his perm, Rock's subjects acknowledge that hair vanity is an almost exclusively female attribute. But to the comedian's credit, he doesn't let the guys off the hook, either, and an uproarious series of interviews with black male patrons at a barbershop brings the docu's battle-of-the-sexes subtext to the fore. There's something of a barbershop quality to Good Hair, in the way Rock creates a lively public forum for people to riff with delightful frankness on subjects that seem more taboo than they should be... [Rock] also spends a lot of time at the Bronner Bros. Intl. Hair Show, an annual hair-care convention in Atlanta. These segments, which bookend the pic, are a bit overextended, but an outrageous contest, pitting four leading stylists of black hair against each other, must be seen to be believed.

The Los Angeles Times

Not surprisingly, it is a story with money at its center — the multibillion-dollar business of black hair from the processes used to straighten it, to the money spent to weave straight hair over it, to the cultural stigma attached to it.Though Rock has a distinct point of view — natural is better — instead of outrage, he relies on irony and his own bemusement to walk us through a world he clearly finds troubling. Indeed, what carries this film is Rock, as both star and part of the writing team he has surrounded himself with old friends from The Chris Rock Show: writer-director Jeff Stilson and writers Chuck Sklar and Lance Crouther. The result is a documentary that weaves as much comedy as fact into the narrative, making the experience a satisfying entertainment even for the lucky few who have no hair cares at all.

The Washington Post

If the audience misses anything in Good Hair, it might be more testimony from African American women who have let their hair grow naturally, for whatever reason — aesthetic, philosophical or practical. "To keep my hair the same texture as it grows out of my head is looked at as revolutionary," says the actress Tracie Thoms. "Why is that?" The answer proves elusive, but Good Hair at least raises the question, with equal doses of affection, provocation and wisdom.

The Village Voice

Rock is certainly a sympathetic and curious observer, though including Ice-T's remark that "a real pimp can tell what a woman looks like baldheaded" betrays some of the gender politics that remain vigorously unexamined in this breezy, superficial doc.

Time Out New York

Good Hair is a slipshod doc about a fascinating subject: the loaded history and current complications of African-American hairstyling. The film is especially powerful in how it offhandedly shows certain races fomenting and exploiting the desires of others-these range from the obvious (the Caucasian-manufactured longing among black women to look more white) to the illuminating (the majority of black hair products are processed and sold by Koreans). Yet our tour guide through this sociopolitical miasma, Chris Rock, merely sees it as an opportunity to crack wise.

The Chicago Sun-Times

Chris Rock the host and narrator, is a likable man, quick, truly curious, with the gift of encouraging people to speak openly about a subject they usually keep private. He conveys a lot of information, but also some unfortunate opinions and misleading facts. That doesn't mean the movie isn't warm, funny and entertaining... What about the hazards of straightening? Rock shows a hair-raising demonstration of an aluminum Coke can literally being eaten up in a bath of sodium hydroxide. It may help to recall that another name for sodium hydroxide is "lye." God forbid a woman should put that on her head! What Rock doesn't mention is that few women do. If he had peeked in Wikipedia, he would have learned: "Because of the high incidence and intensity of chemical burns, chemical relaxer manufacturers have now switched to other alkaline chemicals." Modern relaxers can also burn if left on too long, but they won't eat up your Coke cans... The use of the word "natural hair" is, in any event, misleading. Take a stroll down the hair products aisle of a drugstore or look at the stock price of Supercuts. Few people of any race wear completely natural hair. If they did, we would be a nation of Unibombers.

Earlier: Oprah & Chris Rock Talk Good Hair
Sneak Peek: A Good Look At Good Hair

Women's Wear Daily had perhaps the harshest reaction to Lohan's foray into fashion, advising her to "get serious about reviving the acting career," and though some critics agree with this assessment, other critics found a few bright spots to celebrate.

L.A. Times

When Lohan came out for a runway bow, her eyes were full of tears. And it's easy to see why. After all the hullabaloo over her appointment a month ago, with some fashion insiders suggesting it was an insult to anyone who had ever really worked in design, it had to have been the walk of shame to end all.

The Associated Press

Expectations going into the show were low. Still, the collection was not the utter disaster that many had - almost gleefully - predicted. It was chock-full of more of the ultra-mini party girl dresses that have flooded Paris' catwalks this season, but it also had some nice, wearable suits that harkened back to Ungaro's heyday in the 1980s.

Women's Wear Daily

No one ever said fashion design is brain surgery. It's a different discipline altogether. But it is indeed a discipline and a commercial art, a fact variously muted and underscored by the celebrity infiltration of the last decade. And like brain surgery - yes, like brain surgery and all disciplines at which people work for years to develop proficiency - it has its rare geniuses and capable practitioners, all of whom must possess talent, skill and dedication. Being a young, pretty, controversial woman who looks good in clothes and photo ops just isn't enough.

New York Times:

Emanuel Ungaro was a couture king of drape and shape. When a swathe of white dress was covered with a white fur stole, there was some attempt to move from teen night out to a couture elegance. Yet will this collection of hearts but with no soul be enough to entice young women who could probably find these looks anywhere?

The Telegraph

The collection she collaborated on with the Spanish designer, Estrella Archs, was hardly an unqualified success. How could it be when the pair, chiefly Archs, had only three weeks to pull it together? Ungaro himself, who founded his house in 1965, must be horrified at the arrogance of even thinking it could be done. He would have spent that time on a single piece. The best that can be said is that they tried.

At Ungaro, Mayhem Erupts Over Lindsay Lohan [ABCNews]
Paris Fashion Week: Lindsay Lohan's First Emmanuel Ungaro Collection Is A Walk Of Shame [LATimes]
Hearts But No Soul [NYTimes]
Paris Fashion Week: Ungaro Spring/Summer 2010 [The Telegraph]

Earlier: Lindsay Lohan Makes Her Debut As Ungaro's Artistic Director At Paris Fashion Week

Whip It, which opens today, was adapted by Shauna Cross from her novel Derby Girl. Ellen Page plays Bliss Cavendar, who lives in a small town in Texas and is being coached by her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) to compete in beauty pageants. One day, she sees an ad for the Roller Derby in Austin and sneaks off to see a game with her best friend Pash (Arrested Development's Alia Shawkat). She falls in love with the sport and secretly joins a team called the Hurl Scouts, which includes Kristen Wiig, Drew Barrymore, and Eve (who, for the most part, do their own skating).

Along the way Bliss clashes with her mom, her best friend, her indie rocker boyfriend Oliver (Landon Piig), and her roller derby rival Iron Maven (Juliette Lewis). A few critics complain that the plot is filled with sports-movie cliches and doesn't focus enough on real athletic ability, but all say that at the very least, the movie is extremely fun to watch. Below, a look at what the critics have to say.

Chicago Sun-Times

"Whip It" is an unreasonably entertaining movie, causing you perhaps to revise your notions about women's Roller Derby, assuming you have any. The movie is a coming-together of two free spirits, Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page, and while it may not reflect the kind of female empowerment Gloria Steinem had in mind, it has guts, charm, and a black-and-blue sweetness. Yes, it faithfully follows the age-old structure of the sports movie, but what a sport, and how much the Derby girls love it. Yes, the movie has cliches. Yes, it all leads up to a big game. Yes, there is a character's validating appearance near the end. Yes, and so what? The movie is miles more intelligent than most of the cream-of-wheat marketed to teenage girls. Funnier, more exciting, even liberating. In her debut as a director, Barrymore shows she must have been paying attention ever since Spielberg cast her when she was 5. She and her team do an especially effective job in staging the derby showdowns.

New York Daily News

The high-spirited story of an underdog who makes good, Drew Barrymore's "Whip It" looks a lot like your average sports flick. At heart, however, it's that happiest of surprises: a multiplex movie that genuinely respects its young audience.... Yes, the story is completely conventional. And it's true that the performances run the gamut, from awkward (Zoe Bell) to awesome (Kristen Wiig). But everyone - including Barrymore, playing an extra-violent Hurl Scout - seems to be having a blast, with a fierce Juliette Lewis, as Bliss' rival, leading the pack... Too many films geared toward young women casually undercut them in ways that are alternately lazy and cruel. You won't find any of that here - just a giddy blast of girl power that races confidently around the track while hip-checking Hollywood's worst tendencies.

The Los Angeles Times

Essentially, the film is a chicks-on-skates/coming-of-age/sports-drama/comedy/feminist polemic set in the racy world of roller derby. If it sounds as if it would be easy to lose your footing in all of that, it is. And on occasion Barrymore does, and not just because the floors are slick. But for the most part, the 34-year-old Barrymore, with much of her life spent in front of the camera and more than a few impressive producing credits already in the bank, proves steady on her feet, able to handle curves and straightaways with equal grace... Make no mistake, this is no deep treatise on female athletes — rent "Million Dollar Baby" or "Personal Best" for that. Instead, Barrymore has chosen to go broad — packing "Whip It" with tough, sarcastic chicks willing to totally commit to Maggie Mayhem's "be your own hero" mantra. They are, to put it bluntly, hell on wheels . . . exactly what happens when the skate fits.

The Hollywood Reporter

This familiar yet simultaneously different heartwarming tale of misunderstandings, smothering love and ultimate triumph is loaded with cliches, as might be expected. But somehow writer Shauna Cross (adapting from her novel) manages to continually inflect the story with fresh twists, most of which come from showing girls do what only boys have been allowed to do onscreen in the past. So, for example, when Bliss and her rock-band boyfriend reconcile after a series of misunderstandings, it's exactly what we expect, but newly empowered Bliss, no fool for love, makes sure the relationship is re-established on her terms, not his. And in this movie, the gross-out humor (vomiting, food fights and the like) is the newly won province of the girls, not the boys. The biggest surprise is the astonishing amount of violence that the girls wreak upon one another virtually nonstop in the many competitions that are brilliantly choreographed. They show off their bruises to one another like badges of honor. Of course, the film only is meant as an innocent entertainment, but somehow it seems more than that, like the start of some fundamental gender shift in the movies, especially when Bliss explicitly attacks her mother for trying to foist her "1950s idea of womanhood" on her. These are women who don't want to be corporate lawyers, they want to kick ass.

Variety

Though Barrymore isn't much interested in mapping the spatial complexities of roller-derby action, her shooting of the games — equal parts silly and violent — is plenty visceral for these purposes. What distinguishes "Whip It" from the sports-film pack is the director's keen focus on the minutiae of team camaraderie, as Bliss learns to body-check opponents and is gradually accepted by her elder Hurl Scouts — tough-as-nails chicks with self-styled Army-green getups and names like "Maggie Mayhem" (Kristen Wiig) and "Bloody Holly" (Zoe Bell, "Death Proof"). As coach of her own team, Barrymore has assembled a game crew of alt-film all-stars, including d.p. Robert Yeoman ("Rushmore"), editor Dylan Tichenor ("Magnolia") and ubiquitous music supervisor Randall Poster, whose soundtrack, ranging from the Ramones to the Breeders, matches the fast-rolling action hit for hit. Kevin Kavanaugh's production design captures working-class Texas marvelously, and Catherine Marie Thomas' costumes — particularly the skaters' outfits, from helmets to fishnets — are a hoot.

Time Out New York

Along that exuberant trajectory, Whip It rights a few wrongs. First, there's proof here that Juno's Ellen Page is no mere snark in the pan. She uses her tiny frame to project vulnerability, coming alive as she flings herself into danger, shedding the starchy name Bliss Cavendar for the unlikely track moniker "Babe Ruthless." In assembling her sassy sisterhood, Barrymore has also given the criminally underused Kristen Wiig her first proper role, as a maternal roller with no-bullshit sympathies. (You wish the script hadn't fully sanded down the butch aspects of the derby scene, but apparently that's what subtext is for.) Most substantially, the film pits parental hopes against the private ambitions of youth, and somehow manages to take both sides. Marcia Gay Harden is the picture's treasure; watching her swell with concern at her daughter's choices, you understand how hard it is to let go-even when kneepads are provided.

The Boston Globe

Barrymore's sharp instincts about how to orchestrate her very different performers. She has Harden and Wiig turn their muchness down, gives Shawkat enough to do so that the many folks who never saw her on "Ar rested Development'' will feel they've made a robust comic discovery, and proves she has good taste in Wilson brothers, casting the shaggiest one, Andrew, to play the Hurl Scouts' long-suffering coach. Most crucially, Barrymore encourages Page to just let herself go. The sight of her making her way up residential streets in a pair of Barbie roller skates or screaming "Marco'' in a game of Marco Polo is simply joyful. If American movies were full of stories about girls, their dreams, their mothers, their heartbreaks, their gift for smashing their elbows into people's chins, "Whip It'' would be just another happy comedy. But Hollywood is woefully short on such stories. I anticipate the day when a movie like this stops seeming like the antidote and more like the norm.

The Miami Herald

The kind of movie that makes the term "formulaic crowd-pleaser"' seem like a good thing, "Whip It" is completely predictable from the first frame. It also is ridiculously, utterly entertaining... Barrymore infuses "Whip It" with her natural, effusive personality, and although the roller-derby sequences are choreographed more for fun and laughs than sportsmanship, she also pulls off the occasional visually striking sequence (such as a lovely scene in which Page and Pigg make out underwater). "Whip It" doesn't reinvent the cinematic wheel, but it does remind you how much fun riding that wheel can be when it's given just the right kind of spin.

The Washington Post

On-screen, "Whip It" sags when it should skedaddle along, with Page's tart "Juno" persona submerged under an impassive blank slate; she's Little Miss Downbeat. In part, the fault lies with the script, which was written by Shauna Cross, adapting her book "Derby Girl." The small-town, teen-queen story line, which features Marcia Gay Harden infusing as much dignity as she can into Bliss's overbearing mother, feels cobbled together from a million Bible Belt caricatures, and when Bliss falls in love with a shaggy-haired rocker (Landon Pigg), "Whip It" takes yet another digressive swerve. At one point the young couple can be seen wandering around in a field looking for car keys, and it's as if Barrymore herself is out there, searching for the plot she just lost.

The A. V. Club

Barrymore's middling directorial debut, Whip It, is exactly the movie people have come to expect from her: a light, ingratiating, femme-centered ensemble piece with a positive message on empowerment and independence, with a romantic-comedy element thrown in, because she certainly knows her way around those. It's virtually impossible to hate the film, but Barrymore's presence behind the camera suggests more calculation than vision; like a lot of actors who direct, she tends to the performances, but her style never rises above bland proficiency.

Entertainment Weekly

[Bliss is] heck on wheels, or so we are asked to believe: The rink footage is pretty un-whippy. Even Juliette Lewis, playing the film's designated bad girl and Bliss/Babe's nemesis on the rink, is more of a cute bee-yotch than a real threat. The movie is Drew Barrymore's directorial debut (she also plays fellow Hurl Scout Smashley Simpson), and it's clear she's more attuned to grrrlishness than real athletic power: Smashley is the first to scream ''Food fight!'' and the 34-year-old actress leads the charge in kidlike mayhem.

Reel Views

"Whip It," the directorial debut of actress Drew Barrymore, is a sports film that uneasily straddles the divide that exists between comedy and drama. Built upon a mountain of clichés, the screenplay wallows in artificiality and, although some of the sports action sequences are well choreographed and have a ring of authenticity, nearly every scene away from the arena reeks of contrivance. The lead character isn't remotely believable and the screenplay feels like it went into production while still in the draft stage. The things Whip It does well are overshadowed by its numerous missteps.

USA Today

Under Barrymore's direction, the skating action sequences are lackluster, and the story unfolds at a leaden pace. A sports-themed/female-empowerment story may have been too ambitious for a first-time filmmaker. Though there are subtly humorous moments, the derby's sense of urgency is oddly muted. Sports films centering on girls and women are worth cheering on. But Whip It lacks the charm and energy of a Bend It Like Beckham. Strangely, Barrymore's tribute to girl power lacks exuberance.

The New York Times

Ms. Page, rotating the "Juno" cool-nerd archetype a few degrees in the nice girl direction of Molly Ringwald in "Sixteen Candles," is smart, sharp and convincing. Bliss's pluck is appealing, but the selfishness and insensitivity that are part of any adolescent's self-defensive armory are also very much in evidence. And Bliss's mother, Brooke, may start out as a caricature of prim, pathological femininity, but over the course of the movie she grows in interesting directions. The debutante fantasies that hover over her pageant fixation are not pretensions, but rather the aspirations of a tough, hard-working woman (Brooke is a mail carrier) who is ultimately more clued-in and more sympathetic than Bliss gives her credit for being.

Salon

Barrymore's actors are, at least, having a good time, and their enthusiasm shows. Wiig is a terrific comic actress, with highly idiosyncratic timing, but in this picture, as in the recent "Extract," she proves that she can do more than play amusing oddballs: She shows glimmers of vulnerability beneath her twitchy, plainspoken demeanor. And Page is a lovely, surprisingly understated presence here. She doesn't just recycle the precocious-wiseacre character she perfected in "Juno." She and Harden, in particular, have a fine-grained rapport — together, they keep the mother-daughter plot thread from becoming mundane. Barrymore doesn't do so well in terms of overseeing the movie's action sequences. They're a bit muddled, visually: Even though one of the characters takes care to explain the rules of the sport, it's sometimes hard to tell who's coming from where, or who's winning and why. And yet some of the movie's early skating sequences — particularly the one in which Bliss suddenly realizes that she's found something she's pretty good at — capture what it's like to feel you're flying on wheels. "Whip It" may be unfocused and sprawling, but it's infectiously cheerful, too.

Earlier: 7 Things I Loved About Whip It

Coco Before Chanel is a French film (with English subtitles) directed by Anne Fontaine, about the early life of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel's formative years. As a child she is dropped off in an orphanage, then goes on to work in a bar. She becomes a seamstress to the performers and sings in there herself, and is nicknamed "Coco" after a song she sing with her sister (who is a composite of Chanel's sister and mother.) Her lover Baron Balsan introduces her to French society and she begins her fashion career by designing hats for his friends. Their relationship becomes complicated when she falls in love with English businessman Arthur Capel, and eventually she goes on to open her first dress-making studio.

While some critics praised the film for delving into a little-known period of the designer's life, other said by ending before she becomes famous the film doesn't reveal what made Chanel unique. Tautou plays Chanel as harder woman than her previous characters, but some found her unsympathetic and Tautou too "winsome" for the role. However, in general, the performances are good and those with some interest in fashion are likely to find it entertaining, though uninformative.

Here's what the critics are saying:

USA Today

As such, the film, directed by Anne Fontaine (The Girl From Monaco), is not an expansive biopic but a fascinating snapshot of a pivotal chapter for Chanel, her formative fashionista years. Because it's more superficially stylish than profound, Coco leaves one wanting more - more of an in-depth examination of her complex nature, and more about the years when her simple designs captivated the fashion world. Still, the film, while scaled-down, is quite beautifully woven, like a classic Chanel tweed.

The Los Angeles Times

Coco Before Chanel [is] a superior filmed biography that brings intelligence, restraint and style to what could have been a more standard treatment. The most obvious credit goes to the strong, sure performance of Tautou, who costarred in The Da Vinci Code following her breakthrough in the successful Amélie. Tautou not only resembles Chanel, she inhabits the role completely, using flashing eyes and a relentless intelligence to convey the unbending strength of a woman determined to make something of her life in a time and place when that was far from the norm.

The New York Times

Judgments are not really on the movie's agenda. Rather than take a moralizing or pitying view of its characters, who live according to the social mores of their era and the logic of their desires, Ms. Fontaine examines them with curiosity and compassion. The result is an unusually vivid and convincing account of the historical past, composed in the present tense. Though its mood and methods are different, Coco Before Chanel shares with Jane Campion's Bright Star - another new anti-biopic - a fascination, at once intense and dispassionate, with the lives of women in earlier centuries. Coco and Fanny Brawne, the heroine of Ms. Campion's film, are not victims of oppression or paragons of resistance but rather individuals, made not of ideology or wishful thinking but of flesh and blood.

New York Daily News

There are a select few artists who can take the same materials used by everyone else and create a masterpiece. Coco Chanel was one of them. Director Anne Fontaine is not. Fontaine is a competent filmmaker, and Coco Before Chanel is a mildly entertaining period piece. What's missing, ironically enough, is a distinct sense of style.But though Tautou looks charming in her character's boyish outfits, her Coco is a demanding narcissist who draws minimal empathy. And despite some cutting and stitching here and there, we never learn what distinguished this woman from all the others who made their own clothes at the time.

Associated Press

Of course, Tautou looks adorably chic in Chanel's clothes, with her petite, androgynous frame and big, brown eyes. Still, you wonder what moved her, aside from the simplicity of the men's outfits that would inspire her own suits and hats... Fontaine's camera glides smoothly, as if to invoke Chanel's perspective in assessing the fashions she sees around her. She goes through all the paces elegantly but never reaches out and grabs you. Certainly, focusing on the formative time in Chanel's life is preferable to a cursory, all-encompassing biopic. But Coco Before Chanel only starts to get interesting when she asserts her creative and financial freedom - and that's right when the movie's about to end.

The New Yorker

The problem for Audrey Tautou is that she is doomed to trail clouds of Amélie wherever she goes. Those inky round eyes and that pixie mug insure that hers are the features, poor thing, that social anthropologists will eternally reach for when asked to illustrate the term gamine. Or mignonne. She does her best to capture the sullen grit of the young Coco, and the sour distaste she felt for those off whom she sponged; but it's hard to jut your jaw when you don't have much of a jaw, just a perfectly rounded chin, and the adamantine hardness of Chanel-not just in her bone structure and bearing but in the elimination of all fuss from her couture and all wasteful palaver from her soul-is probably beyond an actress as winsome as Tautou. The ideal would have been Kristin Scott Thomas, twenty years ago. Maybe she could take over, should Fontaine decide to tell the rest of the tale.

Time

Those who love fashion will be intrigued by this, at least to a point, after which Coco Before Chanel starts to feel like witnessing a sponge at work in the act of absorption. That's not generally the stuff of compelling cinema. We prefer the end results of a personal education rather than the acquisition of it. If Project Runway were about the formation of the designers' sensibilities rather than the creative execution of that sensibility, would anyone watch? This automatically puts Fontaine's film at a disadvantage, and the truly enigmatic nature of her subject only compounds it. "You want, but you don't know what," Emilienne tells Coco, and the movie keeps us at that same remove. It may be too respectful of the legend it seeks to illuminate.

Below is the trailer for Coco Before Chanel:

In tonight's premiere, Cox plays Jules, a recently-divorced Florida real estate agent who lives with her teenage son Travis (Dan Byrd). Jules criticizes her recently separated neighbor Grayson (Josh Hopkins) for hooking up with an endless parade of younger women and he bets her that she couldn't get a younger guy to go home with her. After discussing her sex life (or lack thereof) with her best friend, Ellie (Christa Miller), her trashy assistant Laurie (Busy Philipps), and most disturbingly, Travis, she takes her neighbor's advice to "go for it" and brings home a guy who isn't much older than her son.

Cougar Town was created by the same people behind Scrubs, Bill Lawrence and Kevin Biegel, but Cougar Town lacks the charm of their previous effort. Most critics say the problem with the show isn't Courteney Cox's acting, but the fact that she's forced to deliver absurd lines like, "I was 19, I started thinking with my coochie-cooch, and then, bam, I had a kid,'' and is too hot to be a cougar. Reviewers note that even though some women in Hollywood have adopted "cougar" as a positive term, (according to critics) there's still something desperate about a woman dating a younger man. They argue that Courteney Cox just doesn't fit in the role: She's still attractive, and thus bears no resemblance to real women over 40. We've already gone over the five reasons we think Cougar Town looks awful, and below, we take a look at what the pop culture pundits are saying.

USA Today

Your first thought is that Cox is too gorgeous to have such concerns, but from her opening scene (as she's unhappily studying her bare body in the mirror), Cox is not only convincing but touching - and unfailingly funny. Her insecurities seem as natural and ingrained as her loving if sometimes tortured relationship with her teenage son, wonderfully played by Dan Byrd of Aliens in America...There's a fragility to Cox that in the wrong show can come across as brittle, but is used here to increase her vulnerability and appeal.

The New York Times

The dialogue, timing and jokes have the madcap pace and anarchic spirit of Scrubs, and it takes a while for Ms. Cox to recalibrate her Monica persona from Friends. To her credit, Ms. Cox is game for anything, and the humor is raunchy and Seth Rogenish. But in the pilot she tends to overact, flattening arch slapstick and sharp-edged dialogue with clownish overkill. It also takes awhile to accept this actress as a lonely divorcee sidelined by middle age. Ms. Cox is supposed to be a 40-year-old Everywoman who is appalled by what society - and the Florida man shortage - has done to her cohort. "I know I'm one of them," Jules says to Laurie as the camera pans Botoxed matrons in leather and low-cut leopard-print bustiers. "I just don't feel like one of them." Ms. Cox's face is so tight and unlined, and her figure so taut, that it's hard to really see the distinction. But as the pilot gets funnier, so does Jules. She is of course the butt of most of the jokes, but she is doughty and not without a sense of humor..."

Hollywood Reporter

The recently divorced Jules, who goes completely mental one morning after noting a few elbow wrinkles and tummy jiggles — is shrill, unappealing (except for the whole looking like Courteney Cox thing), self-obsessed and has no filter between what she thinks and what she says. Things she says: "All the single guys our age are broken, gay or chasing younger girls." And, "I started thinking with my coochie cooch." And don't forget the discussion with her teenage son, Travis, about penis-holding. At least the boy has the grace to be mortified by his mother's sudden need to find the G-spot. To sum up: This is a one-note premise, with a lead character no one could want to spend five minutes with, based on a passing fad.

The Los Angeles Times

This is a real show whose main conceit is that having sex with a younger man is fun and exciting for women over 40. Crude stuff for a family newspaper, but despite the warm-and-fuzzy-celebrity cred that star Courteney Cox brings to it, some funny lines and good acting all around, Cougar Town is a crude show, built on jokes about oral sex and droopy breasts, a show in which words like "coochie" are used with regrettable abandon... Clearly, creators Bill Lawrence and Kevin Biegel (both previously of Scrubs) are trying to take on some legitimate issues, and no doubt there is pathos and insight to be gleaned from a divorced woman staring down her mid-40s as her child prepares to leave the nest, wondering if this is as good as it is ever going to get. But that is no excuse, and I mean whatsoever, for having that woman look at a shirtless young man and say, "I want to lick him."

Travis (Dan Byrd of Aliens in America) is Jules' teenage son, whose actual adolescence is being preempted by his mother's second go-round. Jules seems to take pride in her lack of boundaries, giving their relationship an ick factor that even Byrd's quietly hilarious performance cannot overcome. He does his very best, though, stealing every scene he's in. "Why don't you laugh at my jokes?" his mother asks after she cracks one about the fact that, in an attempt to prove her attractiveness, she flashed a neighbor kid. "Because they make me sad," Travis says, giving voice to us all.

New York Daily News

Jules also chats about her sex life with her teenage son, Travis, which may be the truest indication of what a shallow humor pool the show is drawing from. And that's even before Travis walks in one evening to discover his mother has not only snagged a kid who isn't much older than he is, but who is performing a sex act on that fellow in the living room. Now we all know sitcoms face an ever-tougher challenge to offer a sex scene that hasn't been done by, say, Two And A Half Men." But a whole lot of viewers, if they wanted this kind of humor, would simply have gone to Spike in the first place. It's a waste of Cox's comic talents to have her spend the whole show trapped in lines like, "We had sex three times without you needing a nap or a pill or anything."

The Boston Globe

Cox is a funny TV presence with self-deprecating charm, but she's not an everywoman, and she's certainly not a stand-in for a population of women that is experiencing the aging process in real time. And so a show that's meant to be a meditation on gender, age, and insecurity is, instead, a vehicle for marveling at the amazing sculpting power of the Hollywood workout routine.... As a pop culture concept, [cougars are] already feeling stale. Besides, it's unclear that Jules even fits in the category; the lustful older women mocked in American Pie and on Saturday Night Live are well into their 40s and beyond, but by my math, Jules is in her mid-30s. I know this because she tells a potential date in a bar that "I was 19, I started thinking with my coochie-cooch, and then, bam, I had a kid.'' There's plenty of dialogue like that in tonight's premiere, and while it's meant to represent women talking frankly about sex, it comes off as women talking awkwardly about anatomy. When Jules stops her car short in one scene, Busy Philipps, as her younger, hard-partying co-worker, shouts, "Give a girl a warning. My uterus almost shot out!''

The Chicago Tribune

Cougar Town creator Bill Lawrence got a lot right about male friendship in his most notable creation, Scrubs, but this sitcom doesn't really capture much that feels true about female friendships. Women on this show tend to shout at each other, browbeat each other or simply announce, "Wow, you look like a whore." All of that claws-out humor is of a piece with the show's vaguely hostile attitude toward its female characters and their middle-aged dilemmas.

Newsday

We can all perhaps agree that Cox is a good actress. She was good in Scrubs, good in Dirt, good in Ace Ventura, good in Scream - and Friends without Monica Geller would be just about unthinkable. So why, then, is Cougar Town such a painful belly flop? Easy answer: The glaring mismatch between material and starring actress. As the woebegone divorcee with an antic streak and a full-blown need to get down, Cox is not believable. In the opening scene, attempting to forge a winking comradeship with millions of other 40-year-old women in the viewing audience, she pinches rolls of fat, flops bat wings and compares herself to a farm animal. Then, a couple of scenes later, those viewers get a full-body view, and there's not a fat molecule out of place. Cougar Town will get a big number Wednesday, but do not be fooled. It doesn't deserve one.

Cougar Town premieres tonight on ABC at 9:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 8:30, Central time.

Earlier: 5 Reasons Why Courteney Cox's Cougar Town Looks Awful

Jennifer's Body, which opens today, is a comedic horror film about Jennifer Check (Megan Fox), the meanest, prettiest, most popular girl in Devil's Kettle, Minnesota, and Anita "Needy" Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried), her smart, sensible, and mousy best friend since childhood. Jennifer, who has always had a somewhat-abusive relationship with Needy, drags her to local roadhouse to see an obnoxious emo band called Low Shoulder. When a freak fire destroys the bar Jennifer and Needy manage to escape and the band's lead singer (Adam Brody) offers Jennifer a ride home. Needy never sees Jennifer alive again, as she's transformed into a succubus, a form of zombie/vampire, when the band's satanic virgin sacrifice goes awry. Jennifer returns to feast on innocent high school boys and Needy has to defend their male classmates, including her boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons).

Earlier, we presented a few reasons to love Jennifer's Body, but critics couldn't reach a consensus on anything about the film. While some saw it as a smart and funny commentary on the angst surrounding being a teen girl and the complicated nature of female friendships, others singled out the same points to argue that the film is a "spectacular disaster." There aren't as many Juno-esque quips like "honest to blog" in Diablo Cody's screenplay, which may be good or bad depending on your opinion of Diablo Cody. Some said Megan Fox's acting was horrible, but others found her bland affect appropriate for a demonic mean girl. Reviewers expecting a straight horror movie were disappointed by the film's lack of gore, but other reviews said the film doesn't really fit into either the horror or comedy genres. Many critics described the film as a feminist take on the horror movie, but another critic praised it for refusing "to be read as a feminist revenge story." Below, we take a look at what reviewers are saying about the film, but as it deals with several topics it seems no one can agree on, including Diablo Cody, Megan Fox, feminism, and the difficulties of being a young woman, you may have to judge Jennifer's Body for yourself.

Slate

To enter into the spirit of Jennifer's Body, you have to let go of your preconceived notions of Diablo Cody, whether for good or ill. If you're looking for the gentle indie spirit of Juno, you'll be disappointed-this isn't a world in which abortion protesters make their case with twee observations about baby fingernails, and getting pregnant at 15 is nothing a Moldy Peaches song can't cure. Life at Devil's Kettle High is nasty, brutish, and short, especially for Jennifer's male victims (who aren't necessarily sexist jerks-one of the movie's strengths is its refusal to be read as a straight-up feminist revenge story). If, on the other hand, Juno's preciousness made you gag, you shouldn't write off Jennifer's Body, either. True, Cody's mania for catchphrases hasn't faded-Needy and Jennifer greet each other with rhymed putdowns along the lines of "Where's it at, Monistat?"-but she's learning to channel the more egregious lingo into the mouths of characters who might actually talk that way. In Jennifer's Body, the principal perpetrator of Codyisms is Jennifer herself, which makes perfect sense. Proving one's social worth by spouting insider slang is a mark of insecurity, and for all her sexual bravado, Jennifer is nothing if not insecure. Megan Fox, whose previous roles called on little more than her ability to successfully straddle a motorcycle, nails this tricky role. She does more than look sensational-she shows us what it feels like to be a sensational-looking young woman and to wield that as your only power. Fox seems to understand the key gambit of Cody's script: Her character is less a teenage girl turned monster than an exploration of the monster that lurks inside every teenage girl.

The Chicago Sun-Times

It's easy to go on like this, but I'd be missing something. There is within Diablo Cody the soul of an artist, and her screenplay brings to this material a certain edge, a kind of gleeful relish, that's uncompromising. This isn't your assembly-line teen horror thriller. The portraits of Jennifer and Needy are a little too knowing, the dialogue is a little too off-center, the developments are a little too quirky. After you've seen enough teen thrillers, you begin to appreciate these distinctions. Let's put it this way: I'd rather see Jennifer's Body again than Twilight.

The New York Times

Jennifer's Body, a bloody high school demonic-possession serial-killer comedy written by Diablo Cody, directed by Karyn Kusama and starring Megan Fox in the title role, is an unholy mess. I mean that as a compliment. Yes, the movie's gory set pieces are executed with more carnivorous glee than formal discipline, and its story is as full of holes as some of its disemboweled victims. But coherence has never been a significant criterion for horror movies. If it were, we could forget about Dario Argento and Brian De Palma, half of Hitchcock and most of the entries in the Friday the 13th series. And though it is too soon to install Jennifer's Body in that blood-soaked pantheon, the movie deserves - and is likely to win - a devoted cult following, despite its flaws.

These are mitigated by a sensibility that mixes playful pop-culture ingenuity with a healthy shot of feminist anger. Ms. Cody and Ms. Kusama take up a theme shared by slasher films and teenage comedies - that queasy, panicky fascination with female sexuality that we all know and sublimate - and turn it inside out. This is not a simple reversal of perspective; the girl's point of view has frequently been explored in both maniac-on-the-loose thrillers and homeroom-to-prom-night romantic comedies. Jennifer's Body goes further, taking the complication and confusion of being a young woman as its central problem and operating principle, the soil from which it harvests a tangle of unruly metaphors, mixed emotions, crazy jokes and ambivalent insights.

The Miami Herald

Jennifer's Body is also uncommonly fearless when it delves into the subject of teen sex. When the baby-faced Needy and the even younger-looking Chip get together for a stay-at-home date and start talking about condoms and lubrication, the conversation comes as a shock, because movies have traditionally taught us that only the "bad'' girls have sex when they're 16. The good ones — those who, like Needy, do their homework and are responsible — never slide past first base.

Jennifer's Bodyisn't particularly scary: Kusama feints at frightening her audience early on, but her heart just isn't in it, and she eventually loses interest. And the movie's humor is either too stale (Wikipedia gags were funny when we first heard them on The Office two seasons ago) or too dark and scalding for laughter. And some jokes, such as an ill-conceived riff on 9/11, stick out for their offensiveness.

The Hollywood Reporter

The film will most disappoint those who hoped Juno had introduced a writer with a fresh point of view about young people in today's world. Horror fans, however, will get a kick out of this absurd yarn of a high-school hottie-turned-psycho cannibal, who feasts on all those boys dying to get into her pants. And there is enough of those arch, self-conscious comic lines to remind us this is a Cody screenplay.

USA Today

Jennifer's Bodyis not as hot as you hope it would be. Written by the talented Diablo Cody, whose way with words - particularly teenspeak - was a revelation in Juno, Jennifer's Body tries hard to be cool, gross and nasty but feels forced and misses the mark... much of the humor and the scares fall short. Jennifer's Body generally follows the conventions of a teen horror tale, interspersed with some lackluster, wannabe edgy humor.

Variety

While not exactly lifeless, Jennifer's Body sure could be fresher. Even with Megan Fox ideally cast as a sharp-fanged succubus with a lusty appetite for young male (and sometimes female) flesh, this high school horror romp tackles its bad-girl-gone-really-bad premise with eye-rolling obviousness and, fatally, a near-total absence of real scares. Fox Atomic item will stir interest as a post-Juno outing for scribe Diablo Cody, whose whippersnapper sensibility can be heard in the occasional snatches of self-consciously clever dialogue. But even auds primed to see guts and other exposed body parts will be disappointed by a Body less bawdy than advertised.

The Boston Globe

The haters are already out in force for this one, storming the nation's multiplexes with torches if their blogs are to be believed. Honestly, the movie's not that terrible. That doesn't mean it's very good, though. Jennifer's Body falls into the dispiriting category of dumb movies made by smart people, in this case a glibly clever writer and a talented director who think a few wisecracks are enough to subvert the teen horror genre.

Two things keep Jennifer's Body from clicking: The script isn't nearly as wonderful as it thinks it is, and Fox has the personality of a lukewarm Thermos. (A third: Kusama's a solid director but not the wild-and-woolly stylist this project probably needs.) Cody tries to rocket her dialogue along at Juno pace, but sardonic glibness is hard to pull off when characters are going screaming to their deaths - she should have either eased up on the gas or revved through to the far side of bad taste. Worse, the writer's patented Cody-isms ("freaktarded,'' "move on-dot-org'') seem pushy and stale this time out.

The A.V. Club

Her second film script, for the excruciating teen horror-comedy Jennifer's Body, doubles down on the slangy Cody-isms, serving as a fresh reminder that the house of Juno wasn't built on a foundation of homeskillets and honest-to-blogs. It was at heart an affecting story about a pregnant teenager sorting through some very difficult decisions and trying to do the right thing; her colorfully sarcastic one-liners worked, in part, because she deployed them as a kind of defense mechanism. By contrast, Jennifer's Body is clever for its own sake, a showy piece of writing that doesn't have that all-important ballast of sincerity. This time, Cody will stop a scene cold for the chance to shoehorn "move on dot org" into a sentence. Another major problem: Neither Megan Fox nor Amanda Seyfried can handle the wordplay like Ellen Page did. As they play best friends on opposite sides of the popularity divide, Fox rips into her line-readings with lusty overconfidence, while Seyfried timidly pushes them across, as if they were written in a second language.

Reel Views

Jennifer's Body mixes, matches, and crosses three popular genres: horror, comedy, and teen angst. Unfortunately, it fails at all of them - and "fails" might be too kind a term. This movie is a spectacular disaster, the kind of thing a cat might bury in a litter box and still keep building the covering because the stench can't be smothered. There are so many things wrong with this motion picture that it might be easier to pinpoint the few elements that are right. The film is the product of the "girl power" team of director Karyn Kusama (Girlfight) and writer Diablo Cody (Juno). Neither has previously dabbled in horror and, based on the evidence at hand in Jennifer's Body, neither should be allowed near it again. Kusama comes across as a filmmaker who is playing at making an exploitation flick without having a good understanding of what the elements are and how they mesh. The tone is off throughout, like a piece of music played in the wrong key. The notes are there but the sound is dissonant. Drinking massive amounts of coffee before seeing Jennifer's Body might make it more bearable since frequent trips to the bathroom will break up the monotony.

Salon

If Jennifer's Body were either entertaining or ultimately had a point, it would have a good enough reason for existing. Even if its star, the bodaciously built Megan Fox, were sexy in anything but a plastic way, you could make an argument for it as gore-fest eye candy. But Jennifer's Body — directed by Karyn Kusama, from a script by Diablo Cody — is so contemptuous toward its own characters, and its audience, that it chokes off any visceral thrills it might have offered. The movie substitutes calculation for brains, and the filmmakers seem to think we'll all be too stupid to notice. I can't remember the last time I saw such a naked display of opportunism and exploitation at the movies — and when I use the word "exploitation," I don't mean the good, old-fashioned grindhouse kind, but the "Let's make a buck by pretending to be transgressive" kind, the kind that reallymakes you feel dirty.

Watching two women kiss, when it's done right, is a glorious thing... But a kissing scene can also be a cheap attempt to titillate the audience, particularly when it has no real context or reason for being — it doesn't matter if there's a man or a woman behind the camera. Needy is certainly in thrall to Jennifer, possibly sexually. But Jennifer treats Needy so badly, it's impossible to understand how these two women could be friends, other than out of habit (they've been pals since childhood). And as Jennifer, Fox's mannequin eyes are lifeless; they betray an attraction to no one — there's no sex in her sexiness. The kiss comes from nowhere and leads to nothing. Its calculated eroticism is enough to make you long for the tyranny of the male gaze.

Earlier: 6 Reasons To Love Jennifer's Body

More than 17 million people watched last night's premiere according to Media Week, and Leno beat the combined ratings of the competing network show's by about 7 million viewers. However, the numbers are expected to drop off during the week, especially if critics' reviews reflect how audiences feel about the show.

Critics agree that despite all the hype, The Jay Leno show is exactly the same as The Tonight Show, except Leno seems less enthusiastic and there is no desk between him and the guests. Reviewers say Jerry Seinfeld's interview with Leno seemed too rehearsed, Leno repeated week-old jokes about Joe Wilson, and the fact that he got the first post-VMA interview with Kanye West was just a coincidence, as he was already booked as a musical guest. NBC is committed to keep the show on the air for at least two years, and if the audience that enjoyed Leno's routine at 11:30 is interested in getting to bed a little earlier, the show will probably retain enough viewers to make it a success regardless of what critics think. (After all, it worked with Leno's last gig!)

Time

The Jay Leno Show, NBC has been telling us all summer, was "comedy at 10," not simply a second Tonight Show. Instead, what we got was a monologue, a couple taped comedy bits, an interview, a musical act, another interview and Headlines. Somebody refresh my memory: what was The Tonight Show again? Because clearly I was watching the wrong show all these years.

The Boston Globe

The Jay Leno Show premiered last night with a big old disconnect. NBC's prime-time Jay Leno experiment has been hugely anticipated - both inside and outside the TV industry - since the move was announced in December. It has been called network TV's riskiest change in decades, one that could forever alter the nature of nightly programming. And yet there it was, seeming very, very much like The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,' brimming with the kind of safe, middle-of-the-road humor that has always been Leno's trademark.

Even Leno, while delivering his opening jokes, seemed relatively unenthused about the premiere. He set forth his usual flurry of average one-liners - about Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and his own ad campaign - with an ordinary energy level, unwilling to be anyone but the easygoing Jay his late-night audience already knows and loves. If he was keyed up and inspired about his new gig, he hid it well.

The New York Times

And Mr. Leno ended his maiden show the way he started it, in his familiar silly and safe Tonight mode. So much attention — and promotion — has been spent deciphering the impact Mr. Leno's 10 p.m. slot could have on prime-time programming, and so much ink has been devoted to describing how Mr. Leno's new show would depart from his old one that it was startling to see how little difference there was. The set was slightly different, and Mr. Leno spoke with his guests in matching armchairs, not across a desk, but the content and tone of the premiere looked and sounded like any ordinary Tonight show.

Slate

Leno, no more unfunny that usual, presided over a set decorated with dark wood and delicate bonsai that evoked horrible memories of paying $16 for well drinks at hotel bars. In one of the show's superficial attempts to play like something other than Tonight, Leno does without a desk, forgoing the authority a slab of lumber confers in favor of a cozier armchair setup. Thus seated, the host did not so much interview guest Jerry Seinfeld as set up his jokes.

The Chicago Sun-Times

And there he was, old reliable, slapping the hands of audience members and making jokes about George W. Bush on a mountain bike. It was almost like he never left. His first comedy bit, about participating on the show Cheaters, was lame and homophobic, although having all members of the love triangle wear argyle sweaters was a nice touch. Leno's just too corny for my taste.

NBC is committed to airing Leno's show for two years, and all the networks are watching closely to see how it goes. All Leno needs are the same 5 million viewers he had in his late-night slot, and the show will be more profitable than what it replaced. That could mean that the future of television will be lower-budget, live-event-oriented, and possibly populated by former game show hosts.

USA Today

Bet NBC wishes Kanye could do Jay every day. Because without Kanye West, and his conveniently timed controversy from the MTV Video Music Awards, NBC's Jay Leno Show premiere Monday would have been even more of a cut-rate, snooze-inducing, rehashed bore. If Leno's desire is to help fans get to sleep earlier, desire satisfied... Leno had promised his new show would not be the same as the old one, but it looked awfully similar. If you found Leno's routine amusing before, you probably found it amusing Monday night. And given his propensity for repeating jokes, you'll probably find it amusing Tuesday night as well.

The Los Angeles Times

It's not a good sign when the Bud Light commercial is funnier than the comedy show it interrupts. Sixteen minutes into the new The Jay Leno Show, it was difficult not to panic. This is the future of television? This wasn't even a good rendition of television past. Clearly Leno believes that if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and he has been very vocal about the fact that his late-night talk show was not broke. So here it is again, different time slot, busier set and same old jokes. Literally.

Newsweek

Much like the Hugh Grant interview, the sitdown with Kanye was a little funny and a little awkward, and while it wasn't particularly illuminating it'll be what everyone is talking about in the morning. There's not much else to talk about, considering there isn't much difference between the new show and Jay's Tonight Show. There's more comedy, though it's of the bland, topical variety that Jay is known for. Jay hosted The Tonight Showfor long enough that audiences came to expect that his middle-of-the-road humore he deals in, but in the earlier time slot it feels out of place. As usual, the monologue was tepid, and a short film about a musical car wash from The Dan Band, one of the comedy correspondents in Jay's new troupe, was interminable.

The Washington Post

They said The Jay Leno Show wouldn't feel like going to bed really early, that it would feel new. But it's like going to bed really early. It feels old. For a lot of people, The Jay Leno Show, which premiered Monday in its game-changing 10 o'clock weeknight format, it might feel perfectly comfy.

Leno asked [Kanye West], who sat frozen at the mention of his mother, who died in 2007. What was weird about this was how quickly West stammered through his repentance ("Obviously, I deal with hurt"), saying he needs to take a vacation from performing and the celebrity grind under which he lives, then recovering immediately to perform with Jay-Z and Rihanna, proving that really, after all the talk, Jay's show is still a place to promote your product, your song, your movie — and in special guest Jerry Seinfeld's case, your Seinfeld reunion on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Leno and his producers kept saying it wouldn't be like this, this usual shill game.

Updated: Leno Lands More Than 17 Million Viewers On Night One [Media Week]

Sorority Row is a generic low-budget horror film with plenty of shrieking, scantily-clad college women. In fact, the filmmakers didn't even bother to come up with an original script. The credits say it's based on the screenplay Seven Sisters, without mentioning that the script was already made into the 1983 movie The House on Sorority Row. In the film, which opens today, Megan (Audrina Patridge)'s boyfriend cheats on her and her sorority sisters, including their bitchy leader Jessica (Leah Pipes), nerdy Ellie (Rumer Willis), and token minority Claire (Jamie Chung), decide to get back at him by making him think he killed her. The hoax goes awry and she actually does die, so they dump her body and agree never to speak of it again. However, a year later they get a text from Megan and a killer in a graduation robe starts stalking them.

The nicest thing critics had to say about the film is that it isn't as bad as you might expect. They said the film had a few good one-liners, but the jokes don't start at all until halfway through the film. It seems the filmmakers couldn't decide whether to frighten audiences or make them laugh at how cheesy it is, so the sudden burst of humor seems out of place. Either way, one sister telling Chung's character she likes having her around because, "It makes me multi-cultural without having to do anything," doesn't seem all that funny. Nor can we appreciate Chung defending "roofie sex," saying, "You get laid and you get a good night's sleep."

Below, we take a look at what the critics (who could manage to get their hands on a copy) are saying about Sorority Row:

The Kansas City Star

Why didn't Summit Entertainment show it to critics? Hollywood has realized even positive reviews can't help exploitation efforts like this one.

The Guardian

Sisters are doing it for themselves in this jolly college horror flick – if by "it" you mean horrible slaughter and softcore nudity. Much of the plot and characterisation can be gleaned from a quick scan of the cast list: among these are "Bra-Clad Sister", "Trampoline Sister", "Already Drunk Sister", "Over-It Sister", as well as "Amazed Senior Guy" and "Nerdy Underclassman".

Entertainment Weekly

Snaps to Carrie Fisher for being a good sport, as the sorority's badass house mom, but don't rush the theater: The tedious flick offers little more than a few scares, and plenty of boobs. And we're not just talking about the cast.

The Boston Herald

Brain-dead as to motivation, plotting or common sense, [director] Stewart Hendler's Sorority Row scores where it counts: The carnage escalates, nicely tinged with black humor. Acting honors go to Leah Pipes' blond queen bee Jessica, who rules this roost but not her beau, the son of a senator (a colorless Matt Lanter). Pipes is a scary parody of Reese Witherspoon's Tracy Flick in Election, focused on just one thing: herself.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It's difficult to laugh at Sorority Row early on as the characters put their least likable traits forward. Jessica enjoys having Claire as a friend because, she says, "It makes me multi-cultural without having to do anything." Chugs defends "roofie sex," saying, "You get laid andyou get a good night's sleep." Later in the film, humor comes out more regularly, mostly thanks to rhymes-with-witch Jessica, who gets the best toss-away lines of dialogue and even takes a break from avoiding slaughter to get into a cat fight with a rival for her boyfriend's affections. As Jessica, Pipes seems to be having the most fun, but it's telling that there are few differences in the cast members' performances between early scenes when they pretend to act upset and later in the film when they're supposed to actually be terrified.

Time Out London

Sorority Row isn't as completely dire as its pedigree suggests: the script contains a few nicely barbed one-liners, while Stewart Hendler's relatively tasteful handling of the death scenes results in a few throat-grabbing shocks. And, to its credit, the movie never attempts to present its self-serving central characters as anything other than repellent, devious over-privileged monsters. But it also never delivers a decent reason for us to spend 101 minutes in their company, resulting in a shallow, occasionally diverting but largely irrelevant horror throwback.

Variety

Like the recent Drag Me to Hell, Sorority Row is fixated on oral punishment (bottles, flares). But unlike Sam Raimi's roller coaster, the script never successfully balances horror with comedy: The first half goes for the straight slice-and-dice approach, but around the halfway point, ham-fisted gallows humor suddenly — and by now inappropriately — begins to flow freely. Even Carrie Fisher's scenes as the stern, gun-totin' sorority mother (echoing her cameo in The Blues Brothers) can't choose between laughs or action.

Empire

With its endless party-hearty babble, ridiculous whodunit plot, gruesome but brief death scenes, a few funny lines (nasty sister Leah Pipes steals the show) and a bizarre Carrie Fisher-with-a-shotgun cameo, it's all slash and no stalk - a relentless series of payoffs without any build-up. A useful working definition of mindless entertainment, down to laughably gratuitous nudity, it only just scrapes a passing grade.

IGN

On a technical level, Sorority Row could be used as an example for why night exterior scenes shouldn't be shot on digital. All of the scenes set at the mine look awful; they're grainy, blurry, shifting in and out of focus like a home movie shot on an old camcorder rather than a feature film made by professionals. This hit-and-miss digital cinematography pulls the viewer right out of the movie. But what the film suffers from most is an identity crisis. Sorority Rowis never quite sure if it wants you to laugh with it or at it. The horror-comedy hybrid is perhaps the trickiest genre mash-up to get right; are you making a horror film with some moments of humor, or a comedy with some horror in it? It's the difference between Screamand Scary Movie, and a reason why so many horror-comedies don't succeed artistically or commercially. In the case of Sorority Row, one gets the distinct feeling that the filmmakers were trying to make a horror film with some comic relief in it ... until they got into the editing room, saw just how goofy their movie was, and tried to salvage it by embracing its inherent ridiculousness. But I'm just speculating.

The Orlando Sentinel

The ending of Sorority Row is bad — cheesy, worn-out, seen it in 78 horror movies before. It's almost awful enough to make you forget that the movie that came before it is — as R-rated youth-horror films go — kind of fun. It's all cheese, but at least this cheese, for the most part, doesn't stink.

The new Melrose Place is both a reboot and a sequel to the original series, which ran from 1992-1999. The new group of people living in the Los Angeles apartment complex are similar to the previous residents, yet some members of the original cast appear on the show along with their doppelgangers. Laura Leighton reprises her role of Sydney Andrews in the premiere, but is found dead in the complex's swimming pool by Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, whose character closely resembles the corpse, by the end of the episode. Flashbacks will reveal in upcoming episodes that everyone in the new cast had a reason to murder Andrews, including Jonah (Michael Rady), an aspiring filmmaker; his fiance Riley (Jessica Lucas) who is a first-grade teacher; Lauren (Stephanie Jacobsen), a poor med-school student who turns to prostitution to pay her bills; chef/alcoholic Auggie (Colin Egglesfield); and publicist Ella (Katie Cassidy). Reviewers said the new Melrose Place may be marginally better than its predecessor, but in the '90s guilty-pleasure prime-time soaps were a bit harder to come by. The new series is decent, but may not be good (or rather bad) enough to make viewers switch over from the dozens of sleazy reality dramas they're already watching.

Below, the critics weigh in:

Wall Street Journal

The real entertainment-and there's plenty of that in the new Melrose Place-builds from the endlessly brewing conflicts and rivalries within that band of young hopefuls. The writers extract sturdy drama when they bore in on psychological conundrums-the reasons, for instance, a woman can't bring herself to say "yes" to a marriage proposal from the man she loves. There's the woman who is a prostitute by night, and a doctor by day. A familiar sort of fantasy, that, but one that plays out intriguingly here. The Los Angeles setting here takes a more prominent role than in the original-one more given to reflecting its world of filmmakers and producers, its angst and unbounded ambition. The new Melrose Place may not be the old, but it is, all told, instantly engaging and-from the evidence-likely to remain so.

New York Post

The new Melrose Place is as good and sometimes better than the old Melrose Place. Think of it as a renovation, or in LA terms, a facelift. In fact, the new tenants actually made me forget the old tenants rather quickly. Well, I didn't forget all of them, because two of them are back but in a new format. Now the series is an ongoing whodunit. Remember Sydney Andrews (Laura Leighton) from the original series — the one we loved to hate so much? Well, she's baaaack — or make that back from the dead, as she gets killed in tonight's episode, but not killed off. The show's writers somehow managed to keep all the cheese we love so much, while supplying us with a solid mystery that's fun to try to solve...

Terrific fun, and much classier than the old show, but still with plenty of cheese. If you're wondering how they turned this old package of individually-sliced cheddar into a fresh slab of brie, you'll be interested to know that the new producers are from Smallville, and tonight's pilot was directed by Davis Guggenheim — the Oscar winner for An Inconvenient Truth. Geez. I hope cheese doesn't pollute the environment!

The Boston Globe

I "like'' the new Melrose Place,' in that I think it has the potential to be as addictive, and phony, as a can of Pringles potato crisps. The trashy CW series... has none of the hokey moral quandaries of the show that precedes it, 90210, no lesson-learning unless you're a student of chicanery and double-dealing. The new Melrose Place is just a mess of gossipy plotlines about adultery, murder, and secrets. If it has a moral compass, the arrow is stuck pointing down, to hell.

Variety

"I wish you'd known me when I first moved here," Laura Leighton's Sydney Andrews says wryly near the start of the Melrose Place reboot, which — given the CW's determination to recycle everything Fox did in the early 1990s — is probably better than it ought to be. That's not saying the premiere is particularly good, only that it has assembled a highly attractive cast and rapidly thrust it into tawdry situations, including a convenient murder mystery to get the ball rolling. Success will ultimately depend on ecology - that is, the level of demand for recycled trash.

Time

By the standards of the original, the remake actually comes off fairly well. Where the 90210 spinoff-about twentysomethings in a Los Angeles apartment complex-took a while to find its decadent, over-the-top tone, the new version skips over its forebear's early attempts at earnestness and goes straight for the trashy stuff. (Mostly. There are a couple misplaced stories about career-crises-of-conscience, particularly one involving aspiring filmmaker Jonah, played by Michael Rady of Swingtown, who seems to mistakenly believe he's in a TV show that requires realistic emotion.) The problem isn't that the new version-which dives right into the pool (literally) with a murder mystery and re-introduces several characters from the original-is bad, exactly. It's competent. It also seems a little familiar and unnecessary. The luridly lit nightclub scenes, for instance, by now seem familiar from the CW playbook of Gossip Girl and 90210.

The Los Angeles Times

If only it were possible to care, even the least little bit, who did what and why and what will happen next. But as of the end of Episode 2, it just isn't. Like action figure collectibles, each character is so carefully encased in his or her protective wrapping of clever plot possibilities — Auggie's a recovering alcoholic! David steals things! Lauren may have to become a high-price call girl to pay for med school! — that it's virtually impossible to connect with them emotionally.

The New York Times

The current version is slicker-looking than the old; the lighting is sultrier, and the stunned reaction shots are fewer. Much of the acting is marginally improved since the days when Andrew Shue, playing the doltish writer Billy Campbell, approached each scene as if the script demanded that he look like a 6-year-old told that he wasn't getting a puppy for his birthday. No one appearing on Melrose Place 2.0 is nearly that dreadful, and the one-liners that remind us that we are not watching the television of a historic golden age retain the zesty camp of the series's first iteration. "If it wasn't for me," Sydney Andrews tells the young protégé she has schooled in her lunatic brand of venality, "you'd still be wearing Juicy sweatsuits, French tips and a bad dye job."

The New Yorker

The old Melrose Place was on Fox, and the new one is on the CW (as is 90210, which precedes the new Melrose Place on the Tuesday-night schedule as of this week), and is a cross between a sequel and a remake-a requel-in that the story includes a couple of the old characters but isn't really about them, and yet the new characters almost completely mirror the old ones. In other words, it's as fresh as yesterday's daisy... Over all, the show has a little something, but it doesn't have outstanding curb appeal, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a foreclosure notice in the window sooner rather than later.