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

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.

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

The film, which opens today in New York and in other cities on September 11, follows Anna Wintour and the staff at Vogue during the eight months it took to construct the September 2007 issue, the largest magazine ever produced. It's believed that Wintour allowed director R.J. Cutler, who produced The War Room, such unprecedented access because she was trying to rehabilitate her image after The Devil Wears Prada or because her contract is up this year. Many reviews mention that Wintour comes off as cold and direct, but there aren't really any outrageous diva moments. However, creative director Grace Coddington emerges as the hero of the film.

Coddington is a red-haired former model from North Wales whose career was cut short by a car accident. She and Wintour started on the same day at Vogue, and she is now the only person who routinely stands up to her. Though some critics complained that the film's focus on their workplace conflicts isn't really all that dramatic since there was never a question as to whether or not the issue would be completed on time, most said it was entertaining. The film doesn't offer a scathing expose of Wintour, Vogue, or the fashion industry in general, but for those fascinated by how Wintour influences desigers' collections or why she decides to reconstruct Sienna Miller's cover shot in Photoshop, it's the most revealing portrait we're likely to see.

Below, check out what the critics are saying:

Variety

Some juicier behind-the-scenes drama and a more revealing examination of the creative process might have bulked up The September Issue,... But what remains is still a dishy and engrossing peek inside the fashion world's corridors of power — every bit as slickly packaged as the publication it seeks to uncover — that should rivet couture enthusiasts in endless trips down the cable runway... Like the hit movie version of The Devil Wears Prada, The September Issue often resorts to bubble-gum montages (edited by Azin Samari), hurling evening wear, headdresses and pop songs at the screen and inviting the viewer to get lost in the magnificent chicness of it all. The clothes are fab, to be sure. But a more rigorous, analytical approach would have offered more insight into Wintour's aesthetic criteria (about the only concrete thing we learn is that she likes fur and hates black) and reinforced her belief, shared early on, that fashion is more than just expensive fluff.

The Hollywood Reporter

Cutler navigates Vogue's predominantly feminine realm with aplomb, concentrating as much on the magazine's publishing process as the fashion angle. His observational approach captures a wealth of revealing moments between magazine staffers, designers, photographers and stylists, sometimes to the participants' palpable chagrin... The digital production clearly benefits from the format's mobility, as cinematographer Bob Richman seeks out subjects' most telling glances and gestures, then opens the frame to absorb the glamour and excitement of haute couture fashion shows and photo shoots. Editor Azin Samari stylishly distills hundreds of hours of footage into a vibrantly energetic narrative.

Time Out New York

The people on display here are neither lionized nor criticized. Cutler just lets them be, and so our interest lives or dies on how fascinating we find the world they belong to. Indeed, once you're hip to Wintour's approach (cruelly cold and distant in the office, benevolently cold and distant at home) she becomes a fairly monotonous presence. The doc's breakout star is Vogue creative director Grace Coddington, a former model whose plain appearance (the end result of a horrible car accident) and frumpy clothing belie her genius for fashion. She counters her boss every chance she can get and provides the film with a much-needed emotional center.

The Wall Street Journal

Despite the movie's use of bulletins, apparently to add a sense of urgency and suspense to the proceedings-three months until the close of the issue, six weeks, a month, a week, etc.-it's a completely false sense of urgency. None of the doings on-screen suggest a desperate race against the clock. A larger problem is that fashion is all about the moment-thismoment. The September Issue is old news, all the more so given the recent recession-driven transformation of the magazine landscape.
Because Ms. Wintour's lightest word is law-this keeps meetings brief and conversations briefer-and because the magazine's staff communicates in the shorthand of glances and gestures and seems experienced at heading trouble off at the pass, nothing much happens in The September Issue.

New York Post

R.J. Cutler's documentary never does catch Wintour lashing an assistant with her belt or any of the other dirty doings you know she gets up to when there isn't a camera in her face. But if a syllable could kill (and it can, can't it?), the movie would be the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of the stiletto-heeled and dagger-toothed... Wintour evidently consented to the film as counterpropaganda to the movie The Devil Wears Prada, which came out the year before, but that strategy is like curing a whiskey spree with a beer. The September Issue is milder, but its cast of husky-voiced women and shrill men still generate plenty of chuckles.

Time

Is it possible that Wintour isn't so much a sponge-squeezing killjoy as simply ... an editor? She names decisiveness as her greatest strength, and the movie shows her making good decisions, rapidly and repeatedly. The first picture Wintour vetoes from Coddington's treasured shoot is distractingly fussy and rococo. Grace mopes, but the magazine benefits. At the film's climax, Cutler plays up the drama of Coddington's refusal to allow an appealing but not-quite-model-standard image to be digitally nipped and tucked at Wintour's request. It's lively storytelling, except that Wintour's suggestion seems more like playful banter - an attempt to be charming for the documentary crew - than an edict.

NPR

Though most will visit R.J. Cutler's subtle, supple documentary hoping to peek beneath the formidable bangs of Vogueeditor Anna Wintour, they will be disappointed: This is a movie whose ambitions range wider than the contents of her guarded psyche... But a life dedicated to selling outrageously expensive clothing to averagely compensated women demands a personality programmed to repress, and the portrait that emerges is that of a brilliant and influential woman whose mind is as masked as her runway-show presence. We see no partner, no home life, no friends and no indication of her beliefs or worldview. Whenever a flicker of emotion disturbs her glacial surface, it's quickly contained: a flash of defensiveness when comparing her work to that of her siblings (a political editor at The Guardian, a low-income housing advocate, a labor organizer), and a fleeting sadness when her daughter, Bee, announces a preference for legal briefs over the designer variety. If Wintour's prodigious self-control were the primary emotion on view, The September Issuewould quickly alienate all but the most Ungaro-obsessed. But Cutler - and his movie - are clearly more drawn to the magazine's senior creative director, Grace Coddington, whose gorgeous layouts are continually getting bumped in favor of the celebrity du jour.

Entertainment Weekly

Is she a diva, a bitch? The devil in Prada? (If my eyes don't deceive me, she seems to prefer Lagerfeld.) Well, she's a devil only if you think there's something nasty about a woman who's paid a royal salary to elevate her every whim into a command. The September Issueis organized so that we observe the ruthlessness, the high perfectionistic logic, of each decision Wintour makes. There's not enough color in that collection! Why does this layout feature only one fur garment? - it looks out of place! "I don't see any real evening on that rack," she tells a quivering Yves Saint Laurent designer. No casual comment about after-dark wear was ever such a threat. Yet Wintour isn't mean; she simply means what she says.

If she were just pushing people around, we might look on with derision (or fear), but part of the movie's dishy fun is that there's room for more than one ego in the room. André Leon Talley, who is Wintour's consigliere and editor-at-large, isa bitch (I mean that as a compliment), a witty postmodern man so neurotic about swaddling his giant physique that he can't play tennis without draping a designer towel over his shoulders. And if Wintour is the film's subject, its true heroine is Grace Coddington, Vogue's passionate and addled creative director. A former model (like Wintour herself) who rose up in the 1960s glory days of swinging London, Coddington now looks like a Pre-Raphaelite ghost. It's she who orchestrates the magazine's photo shoots, which are like eroticized couture dioramas that fuse the past and the future... I came away from The September Issue liking Anna Wintour more than I thought I would, but mostly with an appreciation for her mission: not just to sell magazines, to market clothing and style, but to give femininity its sheen.

Salon

R.J. Cutler's vibrant and mischievous documentary The September Issue is only partly a movie about fashion. At its heart, it's really a movie about work, about the ways individuals compete with, grate against and inspire one another in the workplace. What really drives Cutler's picture is the dynamic between Wintour and her right-hand woman, creative director Grace Coddington, who has, for more than 20 years (she started at American Vogue at the same time Wintour did, in 1988), been the mastermind behind the magazine's most imaginative fashion spreads. Wintour may be the elusive minx who first captured Cutler's interest. But with Coddington as the other half of this highly mismatched tag team, Cutler has struck documentary gold. Coddington — a former model and flame-haired Welsh giantess who pads around the Vogue office in billowy black trousers and sturdy flat sandals, a chic but earthbound contrast to Wintour in her tiny, fur-trimmed jackets and spiky heels — is the not-so-secret star of The September Issue. Radiating equal parts flamboyance and good common sense, Coddington needles Wintour in a way no one else on staff dares. Their working relationship is an uneasy chemistry of mutual regard and know-it-all stubbornness, a fascinating model — not easily described, nor, alas, readily reproducible — of the way creativity and friction can coexist in the workplace.

The Village Voice

The quick peeks into Her Highness's inner life break up Cutler's too-often-rushed, montage-heavy countdown of the frenzied months leading up to that behemoth issue's close, capturing the desperate attempts of Voguestaffers to please their boss and their singular, gnomic pronouncements at meetings: "The jacket is the new coat." Even Vogue's queenly editor-at-large, André Leon Talley must bend to Madame's will, explaining his presence on a tennis court: "Miss Wintour said I had to lose weight. What Miss Wintour says, goes." But not always. Grace Coddington, Vogue's creative director and the only one who dares to say no-if not always directly-to Wintour, emerges as The September Issue's true star, or at least the player with the greatest resolve, a devoted romantic who still has the sanest perspective on the industry... Coddington is especially gifted at manipulating the presence of Cutler's crew to get what she wants from her boss.

The A.V. Club

[The Devil Wears Prada] readers might wonder why a figure as legendarily image-conscious and remote as Wintour might open herself up to the scrutiny of a documentary, but the fashion/publishing icon makes it through September with her privacy and secrets intact. Director R.J. Cutler maintains a respectful distance from Wintour and similarly compelling subjects, like model turned Voguecreative director Grace Coddington and towering, iconic editor-at-large André Leon Talley. Cutler is in the enviable position of having arguably too many fascinating documentary subjects, but while Septemberis never boring, it's also superficial. The internal machinations of Voguemight be too much for a single documentary to handle; a multi-part TV documentary series might have given the folks behind the camera more time and space to flesh out these colorful characters and let audiences decide for themselves whether they love or hate Wintour, or fall somewhere in between.

The New York Times

Most of the truly ugly stuff in fashion - the models starving themselves, the exploited Chinese workers cranking out couture fakes and the animals inhumanely slaughtered for their fur - remains unnoted in The September Issue, much as it often does in Vogue. And while the movie shuns any overt discussion of money, it includes an instructive scene of Ms. Wintour playing the coquette with one of the magazine's important advertisers. Of course it really is all about money. Despite being crammed with glossy images of beautiful, weird, unattractive, ridiculous and prohibitively expensive clothes and accessories, Vogue isn't about fashion: it's about stoking the desire for those clothes and accessories. It's about the creation of lust and the transformation of wants into needs. Almost everything in this temple of consumption, including its lavish layouts and the celebrities who now most often adorn its covers, hinges on stuff for sale. Some of that stuff comes with a price tag, but some of it is more ephemeral because Vogue is also in the aspiration business. Mr. Cutler doesn't notice or doesn't care about any of that, which makes his movie as facile as it is fun.

The director has been working on Inglourious Basterds — which opens today — for over a decade and critics say that, in all that time, he didn't come up with any meaningful message. The flick has all the trademarks of a Tarantino film: Witty dialogue; copious film references; strong female leads and extreme violence (though not as much as you'd expect). But then there's the outrageously revisionist plot for a World War II movie — it completely disregards history.

It's obvious from the trailer that Tarantino has taken some liberties in inventing the Basterds, a Jewish-American group of soldiers who scalp Nazis, but the film also requires viewers to ignore that they actually know how and where Hitler died, and it wasn't in a movie theater in Paris. The film takes place during the first year that the Nazis occupied France, and follows Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who flees to Paris and becomes the owner of the aforementioned movie theater after watching the Nazis kill her family. Meanwhile, lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) leads the group of Jewish-American soldiers to perform bloody executions of any Nazi they come across. Later, the Basterds join a German actress (Diane Kruger) who is actually an undercover agent, and try to kill the top leaders of the Third Reich in Shosanna's theater.

Though Tarantino took a huge risk by turning Jewish-Americans into brutal butchers, critics say the film never takes any responsibility for toying with one of the most horrific events in human history. The Holocaust is actually never referenced, since that would snap viewers out of the weird imaginary world where the only message is "it's fun to watch Nazis die." (The film's misspelled title is a reference to the mediocre 1978 Italian film Inglorious Bastards, which was a remake of The Dirty Dozen, but it has nothing to do with either movie.) Basterds references spaghetti westerns and the soundtrack is equally anachronistic, with David Bowie's "Cat People" playing during a climactic scene. Viewers who come to the theater expecting Tarantino to have some respect for a war in which 50 million people lost their lives will be disappointed. But if you're willing to suspend your sensitivity and knowledge of history and enjoy Tarantino's fantasy of getting back at a cartoonish version of the Nazis, critics say Basterds will be one of your favorite films of the year.

Below, we take a look at what the critics are saying:

The Chicago Sun-Times

Christoph Waltz deserves an Oscar nomination to go with his best actor award from Cannes. He creates a character unlike any Nazi - indeed, anyone at all - I've seen in a movie: evil, sardonic, ironic, mannered, absurd... Shosanna, played by Laurent as a curvy siren with red lipstick and, at the film's end, a slinky red dress. Tarantino photographs her with the absorption of a fetishist, with closeups of shoes, lips, a facial veil and details of body and dress. You can't tell me he hasn't seen the work of the Scottish artist Jack Vettriano, and his noir paintings of the cigarette-smoking ladies in red.

After I saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, although I was writing a daily blog, I resisted giving an immediate opinion about it. I knew Tarantino had made a considerable film, but I wanted it to settle, and to see it again. I'm glad I did. Like a lot of real movies, you relish it more the next time. Immediately after Pulp Fiction played at Cannes, QT asked me what I thought. "It's either the best film of the year or the worst film," I said. I hardly knew what the hell had happened to me. The answer was: the best film. Tarantino films have a way of growing on you. It's not enough to see them once.

The Miami Herald

Basterds isn't so revolutionary or so finely crafted as Pulp Fictionwas, but it crackles with the same energy and imagination and chutzpah — with the sheer, humongous pleasure of a great filmmaker firing on all cylinders, including a few new ones you didn't even know he had... A complaint often leveled at Tarantino is that his movies are about nothing more than other movies, and this one is no exception: From the spaghetti-western undertones of the opening scene set in the French countryside and the self-conscious voiceover narration by Samuel L. Jackson to the apocalyptic (and, I should note, outrageous) finale inside a movie theater, Inglourious Basterds is suffused with Tarantino's combustible love of cinema. But unlike, say, Kill Bill, in which there was little going on other than the referencing of other films, Inglourious Basterds stands as an expertly crafted and gorgeously shot (by Robert Richardson) piece of moviemaking in which plot and character are at the foreground.

Pitt plays Raine as broadly as he played the gym instructor in Burn After Reading, and the comic performance initially seems to clash with the seriousness of the rest of the movie, until you develop a feel for the volatile mix of laughs and horror Tarantino is after. Part of the beauty of Inglourious Basterds is the speed and suddenness with which Tarantino can shift gears, as he does in a long, suspenseful sequence inside a tavern in which a rowdy drinking game turns serious — and then gets worse — when a German major makes a surprise entrance.

Time

The scalping is appropriately detailed, and several guns are pointed at the tender areas of adversaries. But this is a 2 1/2-hour war movie without a single scene on the front lines. No long tracking shots of soldiers in foxholes or marching across an open field with a chorus of rifle fire. Fans of the operatic violence in Pulp Fiction and the Kill Billmovies eager for a thick new slab of steak Tarantino will be disappointed. ... Most of the film, though, reminds you that Tarantino may be a world-class director but what he really wants to do is write. Here the most explosive confrontations are verbal - long dialogues, often admirably tense and usually in French or German. (It's basically a foreign-language film.) The chats take the form of interrogations. A German officer probes; a Resistance fighter evades.

The Village Voice

Given its subject and the director's track record, Inglourious Basterdshas less mayhem than one might expect. There's nothing comparable here-either as choreographed violence or virtuoso filmmaking-to the D-Day landing that opens Saving Private Ryan. (But neither is there anything as false, sanctimonious, and emotionally manipulative as the rest of Spielberg's movie.) Inglourious Basterds is essentially conceptual and, as with any Western, all about determining the nature of permissible aggression. Operating like a cross between the Dirty Dozen and a Nazi death squad, the Basterds take no prisoners-designated "survivors" are shipped back to Germany, swastikas carved in their foreheads to spook the brass.

Reel Views

With Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino has made his best movie sincePulp Fiction. He has also made what could arguably be considered the most audacious World War II movie of all-time. If you think there are rules for this sort of motion picture, guess again. And it's not just that Tarantino is using the spaghetti western as his template; it's that the sheer unpredictability of where all this is going makes it compelling from beginning to end. Even the film's occasional artistic flourishes (such as chapter titles and out-of-period music pieces) work within the context of what Tarantino is trying to accomplish. This is clearly an attempt by the director to expand his range and step outside of the comfort zone in which he has worked for the majority of his career.

Variety

Inglourious Basterds is a violent fairy tale, an increasingly entertaining fantasia in which the history of World War II is wildly reimagined so that the cinema can play the decisive role in destroying the Third Reich. Quentin Tarantino's long-gestating war saga invests a long-simmering revenge plot with reworkings of innumerable genre conventions, but only fully finds its tonal footing about halfway through, after which it's off to the races. By turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness, the picture is a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that's new for the director.

The Boston Globe

Yet you come away amused and unmoved, and that wasn't the case with, say, Kill Bill, where by the end Uma Thurman had assumed an exhausted, hard-won majesty. For the first time in a Tarantino movie, the women's roles feel underwritten, and most of the men don't get enough screen time.

It's obviously too much to expect a clever kid - which at 46, Tarantino still is - to grapple with history in any meaningful sense. For all that, the movie's pop-art shallowness feels forced. Inglourious Basterds is an entertainment but an uneasy one; it represents 153 minutes of bravura stalling, after which its creator loses interest and walks away. Tarantino may be the most talented filmmaker in America who prides himself on having absolutely nothing to say.

Hollywood Reporter

The film is by no means terrible — its two hours and 32 minutes running time races by — but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing... The film lacks not only tension but those juicy sequences where actors deliver lines loaded with subtext and characters drip menace with icy wit. Tarantino never finds a way to introduce his vivid sense of pulp fiction within the context of a war movie. He is not kidding B movies as he was with Grindhouse nor riffing on cinema as with Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill films. Tarantino has been quoted as saying of Inglourious Basterds, "This ain't your daddy's World War II movie." In fact, it pretty much is. His scalp-hunters are any Dirty Dozen on a mission, the bread and butter of war movies. The major difference is that some fine European actors simply aren't given enough to do.... in your daddy's war movies, men and women often did undergo interesting transformations. So perhaps Tarantino is right.

The A.V. Club

Inglourious Basterds is a film years in the making and hours in the watching, but it seems designed to inspire mere minutes of reflection. Quentin Tarantino's long-discussed World War II movie-it's been in the works in one form or another since Jackie Brown-features some thrilling action sequences, in which Tarantino's gift for dialogue gets honed to a razor-dangerous edge, and some seamlessly integrated reflections on cinema's role in shaping and reflecting history. But its moments of greatness-and there are more than a couple-feel weirdly disconnected, stuck in a movie that doesn't know how to put them together, or find a good way to move from one to the next.

The Washington Post

From the admittedly breathtaking opening sequence, which in its meticulous staging, pacing and acting pays loving homage to the work of Sergio Leone, to the Grand Guignol of a climax set in a Paris cinema, Inglourious Basterds isn't about history or war, or people and their problems, or anything of substance or meaning. It's a movie about other movies. For all its visual bravura and occasional bursts of antic inspiration, it feels trivial, the work of a kid who can't stop grabbing his favorite shiny plaything. To the degree that viewers share Tarantino's obsessions — with cinema, music and bloody, ritualized violence — they will enjoy Inglourious Basterds, which undoubtedly possesses its share of grace notes.

The New Yorker

Whether the Basterds are Tarantino's ideal of an all-American killing team or his parody of one is hard to know. Very little in Basterds is meant to be taken straight, but the movie isn't quite farce, either. It's lodged in an uneasy nowheresville between counterfactual pop wish fulfillment and trashy exploitation, between exuberant nonsense and cinema scholasticism.

Inglourious Basterds is not boring, but it's ridiculous and appallingly insensitive-a Louisville Slugger applied to the head of anyone who has ever taken the Nazis, the war, or the Resistance seriously. Not that Tarantino intends any malice toward such earnest people. The Nazis, for him, are merely available movie tropes-articulate monsters with a talent for sadism. By making the Americans cruel, too, he escapes the customary division of good and evil along national lines, but he escapes any sense of moral accountability as well.

The Los Angeles Times

Also getting in the way is Tarantino's inevitable self-indulgence, his willingess to please himself by choosing movie moments over genuine emotion, making a point of having Frenchwoman Shosanna, for instance, say, "We respect directors in our country." As it goes on and on, Inglourious Basterds feels increasingly like the kind of hollow, fanboyish cinema that is all the rage these days... Despite nods to notions like Jewish revenge and the power of cinema, the director has paid so much attention to the film's peripherals he has neglected to provide a center worth embracing. You can raise B pictures to A picture status, as Tarantino has made a career out of doing, but giving them A picture value is not so easily done.

Salon

There's been a lot of buzz – some of it coming from people who have actually seen the movie, and some coming from the always-more-vocal ones who haven't – about Tarantino's hyper-fictionalization of World War II conflict. Some have asserted that he's trivializing the seriousness of the Holocaust. It bears mentioning that even though Inglourious Basterds addresses "the hunting of Jews" by Nazis, its subject is most certainly notthe death camps or the mechanized slaughter of Jews. (And in a tense, beautifully sustained opening scene, Tarantino acknowledges – briefly but succinctly – the horror of the fate of the Jews under the Third Reich.) Even beyond that, though, in some minds the idea of Jews banding together aggressively to kick Nazi ass is itself offensive. By now almost everyone has forgotten, with good reason, last year's dreary Defiance, which is based on a true and inherently compelling story about real-life Jewish brothers who brutally fought the Nazis. But I see Tarantino's movie more as a manifestation of the kind of crude moral justice that fiction – if not fact – can allow us. To me, the aggressively fictional "Jews vs. Nazis" conflict in Inglourious Basterds is analogous to "Santa Claus vs. the Martians," an easily readable bit of cartoon shorthand for good vs. evil. Come on – you know whose side you'd be on.

The New York Times

Too often in Inglourious Basterds the filmmaking falls short. Mr. Tarantino is a great writer and director of individual scenes, though he can have trouble putting those together, a difficulty that has sometimes been obscured by the clever temporal kinks in his earlier work. He has also turned into a bad editor of his own material (his nominal editor, as usual, is Sally Menke) and seems unwilling or incapable of telling his A material from his B. The conversations in Inglourious Basterds are often repetitive and overlong and they rarely sing, in part because the period setting doesn't allow him to raid his vast pop-cultural storehouse. A joke about Wiener schnitzel just doesn't pop like the burger riff in Pulp Fiction

Slate

If Inglourious Basterds is offensive-and in spots, it's wildly so-it's not because Tarantino tries to bring Hitler and comedy together. That's been done before-by Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, and others-back when the wound of the war was much fresher. The queasiness comes in when the movie unproblematically offers up sadistic voyeurism as a satisfying form of payback. As he's trying to extract information from a German soldier, Brad Pitt's character speaks a line that could function as the movie's motto: "Watching Germans get beat to death is as close as we get to going to the movies." Tarantino's radical rewriting of the war's ending is audacious and perversely enthralling. But if Inglourious Basterds were about something more than the cinematic thrill of watching Nazis suffer, it could have been a revelation.

The movie, which opens today, was written and directed by Miyazaki and animated by hand. The film was released in Japan last summer and won the Japanese Academy's award for Best Animation Film and Best Score. The story is about a magical goldfish named Ponyo (voice by Noah Cyrus, Miley's little sister) who wants to be a human girl and is based loosely on The Little Mermaid. Ponyo runs away from her home in the sea and washes up on shore trapped in a glass bottle. Five-year-old Sosuke (Frankie Jonas, younger brother of the Jonas Brothers) frees her and cuts himself on the glass. Ponyo uses her magical powers to heal him, but when she tastes his blood she starts becoming human. Ponyo goes home with Sosuke, who lives with his mother Lisa (Tina Fey). This upsets the natural balance and Ponyo's sea god father (Liam Neeson) comes to bring his daughter back home.

Reviewers say Ponyo is more geared toward children than some of Miyazaki's recent films like Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle, but has powerful themes, an imaganative plot, and intricate animation that adults will appreciate as well. Disney is distributing the film in America (which explains the presence of Noah Cyrus and Frankie Jonas) but critics claim that the American voice actors are talented and well-cast. The only complaint? That the film just ends, without much of a climax. But every critic agreed that the film lives up to Miyazaki's previous work and is a must-see for fans of the director, animation, or just good filmmaking. Below, check out the reviews for Ponyo.

The Chicago Sun-Times

There is a word to describe Ponyo, and that word is magical. This poetic, visually breathtaking work by the greatest of all animators has such deep charm that adults and children will both be touched. It's wonderful and never even seems to try: It unfolds fantastically.

L.A. Times

Paralleling this is Miyazaki's intuitive understanding of magic and how best to use it on screen. It's not just that there are supernatural doings in Ponyo, including all-powerful wizards and goddesses who control the heavens and the seas, it's the film's notion that magic haunts the edges of the everyday, mixing with the ordinary in ways we don't always take the time to notice.

The Washington Post

And Ponyo? She's the kind of bizarre character who would never appear in an American children's movie but whom American children will find instantly hilarious. Ponyo also will appeal to parents exhausted by the constant Disney-led drumbeat of Princessdom. Unlike her clear antecedent, Ariel from The Little Mermaid, Ponyo doesn't care how she looks, nor is she respectful or deferential. She doesn't wait for true love to give her a voice or make her human, but busts out of the undersea kingdom on her own. Wreaking havoc and spouting non sequiturs, she comes off as a mix of Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons and the Tasmanian Devil.

The New York Times

To watch the image of a young girl burbling with laughter as she runs atop cresting waves in Ponyo is to be reminded of how infrequently the movies seem to express joy now, how rarely they sweep us up in ecstatic reverie. It's a giddy, touchingly resonant image of freedom - the animated girl is as liberated from shoes as from the laws of nature - one that the director Hayao Miyazaki lingers on only as long as it takes your eyes and mind to hold it close, love it deeply and immediately regret its impermanence...
It's hard not to think of the wizard, particularly when he gently and very cleanly curses the human world and its harmful ways, as something of a Miyazaki self-portrait. Whatever the case, like his creator, Fujimoto can't keep Ponyo under wraps: she springs from the sea, exploding into the world with a reckless, infectious, almost calamitous exuberance.

The Hollywood Reporter

A contemporary Japanese backdrop brings the Andersen story closer home, while the total absence of CGI work — the whole film is drawn by animators — heightens the film's childlike charm. In Miyazaki's fertile imagination, the ordinary and magical worlds blend into each other; both are full of marvels. Perhaps his most imaginative representation is the sea itself, which he transforms into a living, pulsating character. On another level, the sea can represent the subconscious mind bursting onto the land above. The tender mother-child relationship of Sosuke and Lisa, and Ponyo and her radiant Mother of the Sea, strikes a deep chord of universality.

Variety

Miyazaki has inadvertently dished up yet another challenge to the universe of hand-drawn toons: Even more so than his previous outings, the film confounds traditional notions of anthropomorphism, dwelling especially on the transformative properties of water. Far more upbeat than much of Miyazaki's oeuvre, limned in bright pastel colors where even destruction is golden, Ponyo possesses an almost demonic childish energy and a delight in form stronger than reason or narrative. Even Armageddon, as loosed by Ponyo and imagined by Miyazaki, is a wondrous place where half-armored prehistoric fish glide alongside their more evolved cousins, submerged trees form mysterious swamplands and a "ship graveyard" of foundering vessels appears in the distance, like a fairyland of lights stretched out upon the water.

Miami Herald

Miyazaki's infinitely imaginative, lovingly rendered visions tickle the imagination in a way CGI cartoons can't. Ponyois stuffed with the sort of indelible, fantastical images for which Miyazaki is revered: Ponyo running atop churning waves that look like giant fish; a city flooded by a micro typhoon as prehistoric creatures swim through its streets; barges and oil rigs piled high after the ocean level rises, and the moon begins to pull closer to Earth. Even by Miyazaki standards, Ponyomakes less narrative sense than it should, and the pat ending is a bit of a letdown: The story doesn't reach a climax; it just stops. But the flat finale doesn't take away from the hypnotic spell the rest of the movie can weave on 5- or 50-year-olds.

Slate

The fact that a child can grasp its logic doesn't mean that Ponyois a kids' movie-in fact, many of its themes and images may be too intense for younger children. It means that Miyazaki is a great artist, able to tap into a part of his mind that most grownups (including artists) have long ago closed off. Ponyo is baroquely and extravagantly weird, yet its story has a mythic simplicity: Boy meets fish-girl, boy loses fish-girl, fish-girl risks upsetting the cosmic order to get boy back. It's Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, with less sacrificial suffering and more ramen noodles.

Time

When you see Ponyo- and you must - be prepared for a movie that doesn't abide by Hollywood rules. This is a tale for children (yes, of all ages) who are ready to be coaxed into another world through simple words and luscious pictures. Miyazaki knows the secret language of children; he dives deep into the pool of childhood dreams and fears and, through his animagic, takes children down to where they can breathe, and feel, and be free.

New York Magazine

Nothing in Miyazaki's universe ever stops transforming: There are spirits tucked away, ready to turn what you think you see-the visible world-into something else. Miyazaki proves why two-dimensional hand-drawn animation will always be more thrilling than 3-D: It doesn't need to pretend to be bound by the laws of physics. The borders between flesh and spirit are infinitely porous. Before I get too high-flown, let me say that Ponyois unsullied by Disney's English-language casting of Miley Cyrus's little sister as Ponyo and a Jonas brother as Sosuke-although Noah Lindsey Cyrus is a tad shrill. But Liam Neeson has gravely splendid pipes as Ponyo's father, a once-human wizard who lives underwater and despises humankind for polluting the planet.

The San Francisco Chronicle

The English-language translation is better than most, with Tina Fey adding a modern spunkiness as Sosuke's mother. Liam Neeson is also perfectly cast as Ponyo's father, and Lily Tomlin, Cloris Leachman and Betty White are as warm as a cup of cocoa playing three women at a senior home.

The A.V. Club

While the story is modeled on a traditional fairy tale and a traditional love story, it's more primal than it looks. In keeping with Miyazaki's usual motifs, Ponyo's attachment to Sosuke is an unthinking force, as avid and single-minded as the decapitated forest spirit in Princess Mononoke, or the crazed, murderous Ohmu in Miyazaki's Nausicaä Of The Valley Of The Wind. Miyazaki never lets viewers forget that Ponyo is human-shaped but not actually human; her shape shifts and dissolves back toward fish-dom whenever she exerts her magical powers. In this and other things, the story operates on a fluid dream-logic, or the storytelling logic of a very small child: Events melt into each other without urgency, and a simple act like making and drinking tea is treated with the same complacent, wondrous gravity as magic that calls wave-monsters into being. Even so, older kids and even adults are unlikely to get bored, thanks to the story's unforced sweetness, giddy highs, and stunningly beautiful visuals. Even in the unspoiled Devonian, real life never looked this good.

Earlier: Meet Ponyo, Hauao Miyazaki's Latest Girl Friendly Film

The film, which comes out today, was written and directed by Nora Ephron and cuts between scenes based on Julia Child's memoir My Life in France and Julie Powell's 2005 book Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. Both Julie and Julia are happily married, but not sure what they want to do with their lives. The film depicts Julia's life in France in the late '40s and '50s, as she enrolls in Le Cordon Bleu, discovers her passion for cooking and publishes the seminal cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. About 50 years in the future, Julie Powell lives in an apartment in Queens and works in a government job she hates, tending to the families of victims of the World Trade Center attacks. In 2002 she decides to cook her way through every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking and writes about it in a blog originally published on Salon.com.

Julie & Julia is a rarity: A movie about the mentoring relationship between two women that doesn't focus on them trying to find a man. Both Julia's husband Paul Childs (Stanley Tucci) and Julie's husband Eric Powell (Chris Messina) are supportive of their wives' pursuits. Paul Childs accepts his wife's need to find her calling at a time when that was not considered a necessity for women. Eric Powell has to learn to take his wife's cooking seriously when many people consider cooking oppressive housework rather than a liberating activity. As one critic notes, the film makes "deboning a duck a feminist act."

Every review said the scenes featuring Julia Child were far better, as a modern day woman cooking in her apartment and blogging can't really compete with the iconic cook, her odd but passionate marriage, and the romance of post-war Paris. While critics said Amy Adams performance was good, they found her character Julie Powell hopelessly whiney and narcissistic. Or, as the Wall Street Journal review put it, her scenes were "dollops of margarine that barely hint at butter." (As noted on the blog Humor Slays Me, the reviews were teeming — or maybe boiling over — with bad food puns.) Many thought the film would have been better as just a Julia Child biopic, and one reviewer even suggested someone should make a bootleg edit excising all the Julie scenes. Below, we check out the reviews for Julie & Julia.

Salon

Streep isn't playing Julia Child here, but something both more elusive and more truthful — she's playing our ideaof Julia Child. When Streep's Julia nearly loses that omelette on TV, she pooh-poohs the possible dangers of dropping food on the floor: "You're alone in the kitchen. Whoooooooo's to see?" The line, and the way Streep draws it out, is just one measure of the intimacy of this performance. We're not observers here, but conspirators: We know exactly where the food has been, and we're not telling.

New York Magazine

That's the case with Meryl Streep as the middle-aged Julia Child in the comedy Julie & Julia: What begins as a great impersonation becomes a marvel of sympathetic imagination. The performance is transcendental. Streep's voice is deeply musical, starting in the chest and erupting into that burbling falsetto with its trills and diphthongs. The voice is Streep's way into Child's pleasure centers, and the body-stiff-shouldered, sloshing around like an ocean liner-follows along in a kind of daffy interpretive dance. Streep isn't tall, but she's photographed carefully and projects height; she understands that the six-foot-two Child learned not to be ashamed of her size but to go with it. Her Julia is a force. At one point, she falls into bed with her husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci), and one's instinctive response-"Julia Child having sex … Ewww …"-gives way to, "Julia Child having sex … Awesome!" Anything to hear that voice in full, happy throttle!

But when Ephron cuts between Paris in the fifties and Queens in 2002 to show Julia and Julie as they both achieve autonomy through cooking, The Godfather Part II this ain't-the connection is strained. (The Child material is based on her memoir My Life in France, written with her nephew, Alex Prud'Homme.) Julie's character doesn't even track. She's referred to as a "bitch," but all we've seen is the patented Ephron adorable klutz. (Adams is too good to waste on Meg Ryan parts.) Ephron should make a film about the person she herself is (smart, acid) instead of the cutie-pixie of her dumb fantasies.

Associated Press

The Julia parts in Julie & Julia are a delight. The ones about Julie? More like an annoying distraction.,,,Julie, by contrast, isn't so well-defined; it isn't so easy to connect with her. The deeper she delves into her cooking project and the more she withdraws from her enormously supportive husband (Chris Messina), the more whiny, narcissistic and unlikable she becomes - which is surprising given Adams' seemingly boundless charm. Working her way through Julia's groundbreaking tome (co-written by Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck) feels more like a tedious chore or a source of wacky slapstick than a proud accomplishment, as Ephron focuses on Julie's culinary screw-ups. Despite the clever idea of juxtaposing both women's lives, this really should have been a biopic of Julia Child, if only to hear Streep say more things like "beurre blanc" in that distinctive, high-pitched voice. Now that would have been a meal worth sinking your teeth into.

Hollywood Reporter

Powell's story about her single-minded engagement with Child's cookbook has an almost unpleasant taste of self-absorption. And by sharing that story with Child's, Ephron throws the wrong emphasis on Child's delightful memoir of the early years in her ideal marriage to Paul Child. True, the movie shows that Paul — played with modest self-effacement by Stanley Tucci against Streep's larger-than-life Julia — encourages his beloved wife's every experiment in the kitchen and the writing of her seminal book. But by contrasting that memoir with Powell's, the movie somewhat distorts the life the Childs share as they revel in their love for la belle France and each other....Adams' Julie is more of a lost soul. She lives with a "saint," as she often calls her husband, Eric (Chris Messina), in an iffy apartment above a pizza parlor. She works in a federal government office overlooking the World Trade Center crater and laments that she has never finished anything in her life. Thus her determination to complete the cookbook marathon. She suffers for her blog. She drags herself to that cramped kitchen whether sick or well. She refuses to quit because it has become her identity. Without the "Julie/Julia Project," she'd revert to a frustrated wife with a dead-end job and another unfinished project. No joie de vivre here.

The San Francisco Chronicle

The movie just assumes that Powell is a sympathetic figure. Then it goes about justifying the juxtaposition of the two women by finding shallow parallels between them. In fact, their differences in moral stature and achievement are staggering: Julia Child passionately applies herself in an effort to do something worthwhile and finally achieves a foothold in success after 13 years of hard work and setbacks. Meanwhile, Julie, piggybacking on the efforts of a great woman, tries to get famous by writing a blog - and succeeds inside a year. On the way to her book and movie deals, she whines, throws tantrums and puts her poor husband (Chris Messina) through utter hell.

The Village Voice

The tome is an absolutely delightful read in which Powell uses Child and, in particular, Child's 1961 cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, to discover "what it takes to find your way in the world," as she wrote. Yet all Ephron saw in that tale was just another dreary romantic comedy about a woman, played by a slow-simmering Amy Adams, who hates her job (tending to the families of people killed in the World Trade Center attacks-Powell's office was perched over the gaping wound), hates her friends (climbers as self-obsessed as she), hates her apartment (in Queens, over a pizzeria), and escapes into cooking and writing about cooking till she leaves behind her supportive husband, Eric, played by Chris Messina, but only briefly, whew. The book, originally shopped as a stand-alone project, could have made for a scrappy, scrumptious indie-all the outer-borough funk and main-course "fucks" of the book left intact, Bridget Jones doused in Béarnaise sauce and vodka gimlets. But Ephron has excised the heart (and gizzard and liver and so on) from Powell's tale. How could the writer-director not see that she had rigged this patently unfair game of Compare and Contrast?... Perhaps someone will do forJulie & Juliawhat one enterprising Star Warsfan did for Episode I: The Phantom Menace, when he released a bootleg shorn of that annoyance named Jar-Jar Binks and titled it The Phantom Edit. Surely there's room enough in this world for two Meryl Streep movies named Julia.

The Wall Street Journal

The remarkable thing about the Julia segments, given Ms. Streep's daring flirtations with caricature, is how full and affecting they prove to be. Yes, Julia's windmill arms are outlandish; so is her awkward, stentorian French and her religious belief in the miracle of butter. Yet she's an endearing figure, a woman who digests the life around her with enormous gusto while she's breaking the gender barrier at a Cordon Bleu cooking class or, much later, after fame has struck, digests with incredulity her husband's advice that she ought to be on TV. Mr. Tucci's Paul plays a subordinate role in the story, but his dry wit and calm love are perfect counterpoints to the intensity of Julia's enthusiasms.

Entertainment Weekly

Amy Adams nails the obsessiveness of Julie's devotion to her muse, Julia. She also captures the tactile pleasures, and challenges, of cooking (how in God's name does one bone a duck?). And Ephron gives us nothing less than the first full-scale Hollywood portrait of the life of a blogger, in all its creative fire and solitary, caffeinated, how many comments did I get?midnight narcissism. Yet the movie wants to make Julie an edgy ''bitch'' and soften her at the same time, which doesn't exactly jell.

The Los Angeles Times

Though both women have loyal and encouraging husbands (played by fine actors Stanley Tucci and Chris Messina) who are crucial to their success, this is the rare Hollywood film where it's the men who are the support team, not the women. Julie & Julia is very much a female coming to power story, which is one of several reasons why the producers were fortunate to get Ephron to write and direct.

Though a bit overshadowed by Streep (who isn't?), the gifted Adams is essential in making this two-part story work. Playing a character that is more ordinary than the actress' past efforts (think the princess in Enchanted) but still a tad eccentric, Adams turns Julie into someone we always care about no matter what shenanigans she is going through.

The New York Times

Julie & Julia proceeds with such ease and charm that its audacity - a no-nonsense, plucky self-confidence embodied by the indomitable Julia herself - is easy to miss. Most strikingly, this is a Hollywood movie about women that is not about the desperate pursuit of men. Marriage is certainly the context both of Julia's story and of Julie's (about whom more in a moment), but it is not the point. The point, to invoke the title of a book whose author has an amusing cameo here (played by Frances Sternhagen), is the joy of cooking.

The conceit of parallel lives is undone by the movie's condescending treatment of Julie and also by its ardent embrace of the past at the expense of the present. From the very start, Paris in the late '40s and early '50s is - well, it's postwar Paris, a dream world of fabulous clothes, architecture, sex, food, cigarettes and political intrigue. And New York in 2002 is made, a little unfairly, to seem drab and soulless by comparison. Queens, demographically the most cosmopolitan of the five boroughs and something of a foodie mecca, is treated with easy Manhattanite disdain, as a punch line and punching bag. The unevenness of Julie and Julia is nobody's fault, really. It arises from an inherent flaw in the film's premise. Julie is an insecure, enterprising young woman who found a gimmick and scored a book contract. Julia is a figure of such imposing cultural stature that her pots and pans are displayed at the Smithsonian. The fact that Ms. Ephron, like Julie herself, is well aware of this gap does not prevent the film from falling into it. All the filmmaker's artful whisking can't quite achieve the light, fluffy emulsion she is trying for.

The Boston Globe

People who knew or worshiped Child will question some of the movie's details. Did she and Paul, for instance, really have this much sex? Was he this romantic? ("Where's my big sprig?'' Paul says to his wife.) But that misses the larger point of these scenes. When in an American movie do regular people have that much sex? Plus - and this is important - Stanley Tucci is very sexy.

A few people have worried that Adams's half of the movie isn't as lively or as brightly lit as Streep's (it isn't) - or that Adams isn't Streep. But it isn't that the Adams half suffers from Adams not being Streep. It's that Julie suffers (as all American cooks do) from not being Julia. And this is why the Powell parts of the film work. It's Ephron's way of coming to terms with a real consequence of post-feminism. Powell is a woman in a job she hates who finds a source of liberation doing something certain liberated women still see as oppressive housework. She turns to Child's book partly as therapy, partly as anthropology. Cooking used to be about cooking, but in so many ways it's became about politics, and the politics loosely start to take their toll on Powell's marriage. Powell's loving husband, having been trained to accept her as a professional equal, now has to learn to take his wife's kitchen work seriously. Paul Child is just as fully evolved, but free of any angst over his wife's success. He's rooting for her.

Slate

Because the movie turns on plot points no bigger than "Will my book be published?" and "Is the boeuf bourguignon overdone?," Julie & Juliamay be dismissed as insubstantial fluff, a ditzy "women's picture." And it's true that Nora Ephron doesn't rank among our nation's deepest thinkers, though she shows a surer directorial hand here than she has before. Still, the relationship at the heart of this movie-between a female mentor and pupil who never meet but who share a common passion and a drive to reinvent themselves-is one you don't often see depicted in the movies. Julie & Julia makes deboning a duck a feminist act and cooking a great meal a creative triumph.

The Worst Julie & Julia Puns [Humor Slays Me]

Half-Blood Prince opened today and has already earned $22.2 million from midnight showings last night, making it the biggest midnight gross of all time, according to Variety. Criticism of the film is unlikely to influence the film's revenue at this point, but many reviewers noted that if you haven't read the books or seen the previous films in the series, The Half-Blood Prince wastes no time filling viewers in on the back story (though expecting an explanation of the last five films seems pretty unreasonable). According to critics, screenwriter Steve Kloves and director David Yates, who have both worked on previous Harry Potter films, had a hard enough time adapting just what's in the exposition-heavy book, but managed to preserve the major plot points. Basically, Harry finds the anonymous Half-Blood Prince's potions book with helpful notes written in the margins and begins private lessons with Professor Dumbledore, during which Voldemort's past is revealed Voldemort. Meanwhile, the kids discover the opposite sex: Harry develops a crush on Ginny Weasley and Ron starts dating Lavender Brown, which leads to much teenage angst for Hermione.

Since every other chapter in the book was a flashback about Tom Riddle (who becomes Voldemort) and there isn't much action until the end, Half-Blood Prince may have been the most difficult book to adapt to film. Even the book is mostly setting up for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Now that the final book has been split into two films, critics say this installment feels even more like filler. New cast members Jim Broadbent (Professor Horace Slughorn), Hero Fiennes-Tiffin (Tom Riddle Age 11), and Frank Dillane (Tom Riddle Age 16) were all praised in reviews. As for the rest of the cast, critics found their remarkable transformation from children to attractive teenagers in the past eight years most notable. Below, reviews for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

The Washington Post

The film's sacrifice of Horcruxes in favor of hormones yields some comic highlights: The three leads, Daniel Radcliffe (Harry), Rupert Grint (Ron) and Emma Watson (Hermione), give their most charming performances to date. Ron is particularly funny under the addling effects of a love potion, and Hermione is sad and sweet in a moment of romantic disillusionment, sitting at the bottom of a set of stone stairs, conjuring a flock of twittering birds to circle above her head...

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, though not without its excellent moments, doesn't tell the two stories that, at heart, the book tells. It doesn't present a compelling portrait of the birth, life and descent into inhumanity of the villain who has haunted this series from its opening scenes: Voldemort. And it doesn't make the budding romance between Harry and Ginny feel inevitable and true.

New York Magazine

Screenwriter Steve Kloves-who adapted earlier Potter tomes with excessive reverence-sat out part five and is in fighting form, cutting a droll path through Rowling's verbiage. Apart from the fact that no one who hasn't seen parts one through five will have a clue what's going on, this barely feels like a sequel. Director David Yates creates Orson Welles–ish multiple levels of action, and when the camera sails around Hogwarts' turrets, it's as if the CGI is an extension of the wizards' magic.

Our three protagonists are taller, more polished, more charismatic-after all, they're movie stars now. But Emma Watson's Hermione has turned out disappointingly. It's not Watson's fault she grew up so pretty, so poised, with such luscious tresses. But someone ought to have reminded the filmmakers that in this boy-centric universe, Hermione is the nerdy-wonky cutie with whom all girls, hot and not, could identify. Now she's just another cover girl. I found myself wishing for more of the washed-out blonde Evanna Lynch and her glassy singsong as the space case Luna Lovegood, the last female reminder that Harry Potter began as a universe of misfits.

Variety

But assessing the romantic entanglements is not nearly as much fun as simply beholding the big physical changes in the young actors, whose onscreen maturation will have been documented across the span of a decade when all is said and done. The biggest change since Phoenix two years ago has been registered by Tom Felton, who plays Malfoy; he's now a tall stringbean in the Jimmy Stewart mold, with a face that's come to resemble that of Jonathan Pryce, and he towers over Daniel Radcliffe's Harry, who looks to be the shortest person in the cast (not true when Imelda Staunton was around). Rupert Grint, as Ron, has always looked a tad older than the others and continues to while showing more character. Emma Watson, perennially appealing as Hermione, has become a very attractive young woman, and Bonnie Wright's Ginny intrigues as the sort of initial plain Jane who keeps growing on you.

Slate

That goodwill comes in handy around the midpoint, when you begin to recognize this episode's chief flaw: the absence of a juicy villain. Ralph Fiennes' spectral Lord Voldemort appears only as a cloud formation looming over the proceedings; his evil designs on Harry are carried out mainly by the remarkably dull Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), a fellow student who, having defected to the dark side, sulks around the halls of Hogwarts like a high-school Goth fresh from a spree at Hot Topic. Helena Bonham Carter pops up at intervals as the far scarier Bellatrix Lestrange, but her screen time is so limited that her character remains frustratingly vague. For example, why is she pregnant the first time we see her but not thereafter? Has she given birth to some awful creature that will haunt the final episodes?

The New York Times

There must be a factory where the British mint their acting royalty: Hero, who plays the dark lord as a spectrally pale, creepy child of 11, is Ralph Fiennes's nephew, and Frank is the son of the terrific actor Stephen Dillane (Thomas Jefferson in the HBO mini-series John Adams). The younger Mr. Dillane, who plays Voldemort at 16, conveys the seductiveness of evil with small, silky smiles he bestows like dangerous gifts on Jim Broadbent's Horace Slughorn, a professor whose trembling jowls suggest a deeper tremulousness. When Slughorn, the fear almost visibly leaking from his body, shares the secret of immortality with Voldemort, you feel, much as when Ralph Fiennes raged through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2005, that something vital is at stake. If that sense of exigency rarely materializes in The Half-Blood Prince, it's partly because the series finale is both too close and too far away and partly because Mr. Radcliffe and his co-stars Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, as Harry's friends Hermione and Ron, have grown up into three prettily manicured bores.

The Wall Street Journal

The filmmakers have certainly honored the book, which is famously dark, though with bright spots provided by the stirrings of teenage romance. And that chiaroscuro is enhanced by some very funny moments in the movie; the director, David Yates, has lightened his touch since the previous installment. But the book's dramatic challenge is its overall sense of incipiency, rather than immediacy-great events aren't happening quite yet, they're soon to happen. (While the death of a major character is momentous, it's mainly symbolic as a passing of the torch.) In a mythical analog to The Gathering Storm, the stage is being set for the final, epic battle between Harry and Lord Voldemort. For those who've lived with the series for more than a decade, this fateful pause may heighten the suspense. For a Muggle like me, the storm does gather slowly.

CNN

It risks annoying some fans by axing one significant character and a potential action show-stopper, but it's actually the overarching storyline that feels skimpy; the movie is replete with lovely, inventive design details and idiosyncratic effects work, while Yates' reluctance to pump up the bombast might be counted sweet relief after the latest bout of blockbusting overkill.

The Boston Globe

The Half-Blood Prince introduces Jim Broadbent as Professor Horace Slughorn, the new, extravagantly dithering potions professor. The performance is a lovely concoction of tics, stammers, and squints. But the character is a device, something to be unlatched and opened so the plot can move to the next locked door. Sadly, that door is in the next movie. There's enough cliffhanging to give you vertigo... An hour or so of interesting character development followed by 30 minutes of boredom, then an hour of plot development. That second hour always feels as if Kloves just remembered that he has to lay the groundwork for the subsequent movie. The individual installments become extensions on a lengthening fuse.

The Half-Blood Prince does remain true to the book's hormonal action... Lust in this movie is far freakier and more exciting to these kids than magic. There are moments when the actors in this movie look like they want to be ravaged as much as Kristen Stewart does in Twilight.'

USA Today

In this sixth film in the series, the cinematography is stunning, and the story unfolds in a stately and unhurried fashion. Captivating from the first frame, this Potter feels more epic than previous films, which had a less mature, more madcap quality. Yates finds an artful way to meld the teenage romance and inherent humor with a sense of impending doom. Half-Blood Prince conveys some of the rich texture and depth of J.K. Rowling's book, but it takes a lackluster turn at the end. In a key scene, Harry is rendered more ineffectual than his literary counterpart as a result of plot revisions.

Reel Views

The Half-Blood Prince suffers from what I call "setup syndrome," meaning that much of its plot and energy is devoted not to telling a self-contained story but to establishing threads that will have a payoff in a future installment. As a result, there's little doubt that The Half-Blood Prince will fare better when the entire series is available. At this point, however, it has an incomplete, unfocused feel. It is easily the least structured of the movies. Fortunately, it ends with a bang, both in terms of visual and emotional impact. The final half-hour is good enough to make one forgive the somewhat meandering nature of the two hours that precede it. For anyone unfamiliar with the novels, some of what happens during the climax may come as a surprise. The Rowling faithful, however, will be interested to see whether the movie does the written word justice with these particular scenes, and I can assure them that it does.

"Harry Potter" Pulls In $22.2 Million [Variety]

Brüno, which opens tomorrow, is similar to Sacha Baron Cohen's first film Borat, but according to the reviews it's more mean-spirited and has even less of a plot. The fake working title: Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt pretty much says it all. Adapted from a character on The Ali G. Show, Brüno is a fixture in the European fashion world until he commits a major runway faux pas and is fired from his Austrian talk show. Along with his assistant Lutz (Gustaf Hammaresten), he sets out for America with the hope of becoming "the biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler." This leads to a series of sketches in which he foists his absurdly flamboyant gayness on unsuspecting Americans, from Ron Paul, to a "gay deprogrammer," to a group of aggressively heterosexual deer hunters he compares to the ladies on Sex and the City.

A scene filmed with La Toya Jackson in which Brüno gets her to eat off the body of a Mexican laborer and tries to get Michael Jackson's phone number was cut by the studio on the day Michael died, but other than MJ nothing is too sacred for a good penis joke. Many critics were shocked that the film was only rated R, since Brüno is shown pantomiming oral sex in great detail and using a fire extinguisher and a Champagne bottle while having sex with another man. Almost every critic was unperturbed by the film's ridiculous depiction of gay men, which they reasoned was OK since the film is actually mocking homophobic people (though it's still getting a laugh out of gay stereotypes). Their biggest complaints were that it seemed some of the "real" Americans were actually actors, and the film wasn't quite as funny as Borat. Below, we check out the reviews for Brüno.

Rolling Stone

Baron Cohen takes justifiable relish in ambushing the gullible and the guilty - clueless stars eager to latch on to a fashionable charity (since George Clooney has Darfur, Brüno wants Darfive), mothers who'd starve their kids for a modeling gig, kinky swingers into all kinds of sex except same-sex, bogus efforts to bring peace to the Middle East (Brüno confuses Hamas with hummus), and the adoption of babies as accessories (Brüno swaps his iPod for little black OJ and loses custody until he throws in a MacBook Pro). And you haven't lived till you see Bono, Elton, Sting, Snoop Dogg and Chris Martin sing Brüno's "We Are the World" anthem. The lyrics urging North and South Korea to stop fighting since they both look Chinese haunt me still.

The NY Post

The humor is more mean-spirited [than in Borat] and sometimes forced, a few bits don't work at all, and there's an inescapable feeling that director Larry Charles, returning from Borat, has staged some scenes with scripted actors serving as Bruno's victims... Bruno mincingly walks a fine line in exposing homophobic behavior and perpetuating wince-inducing gay stereotypes. Not to get all PC on you, but the straight, outrageously dressed Baron Cohen camps it up in what has legitimately been criticized as swishy gay equivalent of blackface.

Reel Views

Some moments of discomfort within Brüno result from a sense that the filmmakers are not playing fair. The spontaneity of Boratis largely absent and, although some sequences are undoubtedly unrehearsed, there are indications that some were staged. The difficulty in telling one from the other speaks to the craft used to assemble the production, but it also robs Brünoof a key element - the belief that Baron Cohen is using "real" Americans to illustrate his points. The "reality" embraced by Brüno is no less artificial than the one embraced by many so-called "reality" television shows. When it comes to making viewers laugh, however, Brüno hits a home run - provided the viewer is not easily offended.

To say that Brüno pushes the proverbial envelope is to understate the situation. The only things separating this movie from a hard NC-17 are some well-placed black rectangles that hide potentially graphic content. Even with that consideration in place, it's hard to imagine why the normally prudish MPAA did not slap this film with its harshest rating. An extreme pantomime of oral sex would normally be enough to prohibit anyone under 18 from seeing this with or without an accompanying parent or guardian. And that's far from the most outrageous scene in the film. When it came to matters sexual, Borat was hardly restrained or in good taste, but Brünomakes it look like a morality play with puritanical values. Some of this content is hard-core (in more ways than one). It is also at times laugh-aloud hysterical - funnier and raunchier than anything presented in the summer's surprise hit, The Hangover.

The New Yorker

Could that be Baron Cohen's cunning plan? Might he actually be in the business of revealing our cauterized senses, and the wound where our finer judgments are meant to be? A nice idea, but I'm afraid that Brüno feels hopelessly complicit in the prejudices that it presumes to deride. You can't honestly defend your principled lampooning of homophobia when nine out of every ten images that you project onscreen comply with the most threadbare cartoons of gay behavior. A schoolboy who watches a pirated DVD of this film will look at the prancing Austrian and find more, not fewer, reasons to beat up the kid on the playground who doesn't like girls. There is, on the evidence of this movie, no such thing as gay love; there is only gay sex, a superheated substitute for love, with its own code of vulcanized calisthenics whose aim is not so much to sate the participants as to embarrass onlookers from the straight-and therefore straitlaced-society beyond.

Variety

The humor — and it keeps on coming — carries with it an almost immediate sour aftertaste, as Bruno's intentions, and necessarily Cohen's along with them, appear far from honorable. As in Borat, Bruno's pranks are designed to expose people's presumed latent prejudices. But while the previous film got away with this high-wire act for most people, Bruno is more erratic, partly since one is more aware of the game being rigged but also because Bruno himself comes off as someone the world scarcely needs another example of — a self-absorbed narcissist for whom fame is the only goal. Cohen is critiquing this attitude, of course, but the film comes to share too much of this anything-for-effect mindset.

NY Magazine

Underlying all these gags-the funny, the crude, the funny and crude-is a hard truth: Flagrant gay behavior drives a lot of heteros insane. To be honest, I'm uncomfortable watching two guys with tongues down each other's throats, too, but at least I know the problem is mine, not theirs. When the hushed, arty Brokeback Mountaincame out, its couplings set against purple mountains majesty, many right-wing commentators announced that they couldn't bear to watch such abominations. To them-and to those who'll see Brünobecause it's the latest gross-out comedy sensation-Baron Cohen is proclaiming, "Suck on this!"

The Hollywood Reporter

Bruno's adopted African baby paraded before a black audience is not funny. It's embarrassing, as is any joke that bombs, yet the comic keeps going back to it nevertheless. This is one of several instances where an audience might experience both exasperation and tedium with the comic's relentless act of running a joke into the ground... We sense, as we never did with Borat, the comic behind the character. Especially when his accent keeps changing — from an unconvincing Austrian to his own British and even to a whisper of Borat himself.

Entertainment Weekly

The more uncomfortable Brüno makes people, the more he draws attention to their petty churlishness and homophobia. When
 he ambushes the maverick politician Ron Paul with a go-go dance, you can forgive a visibly shaken Paul for thinking Brüno is nuts - though that's hardly an excuse for calling him ''queer.'' Yet is Brüno the scurrilous man-tramp himself a homophobic caricature? My honest answer is: yes and no. Baron Cohen's portrayal certainly feeds into a stereotype of haughty flamboyance. But if one condemns the movie on that basis, then shouldn't we toss Christopher Guest's sublime turn in Waiting for Guffman, Robin Williams' inspired camping in The Birdcage, and so many others onto the bonfire, too? The bottom line is that Baron Cohen, even at his most scathing, makes Brüno gleefully unapologetic about who he is.

The NY Times

The film demonstrates, at a fairly high level of conceptual sophistication, that lampooning homophobia has become an acceptable, almost unavoidable form of homophobic humor, or at least a way of licensing gags that would otherwise be out of bounds. An early sequence that graphically shows Brüno and his lover exerting themselves in various positions and with the assistance of, among other things, a Champagne bottle, a fire extinguisher and a specially modified exercise machine, derives its humor less from the extremity of their practices than from the assumption that sex between men is inherently weird, gross and comical. The same sequence with a man and a woman - or for that matter, two women - would play, most likely on the Internet rather than in the multiplex, as inventive, moderately kinky pornography rather than as icky, gasp-inducing farce.

Directed by Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon, the film tells the story of Susan (Reese Witherspoon), a Californian bride who gets hit in the head by a meteor on the day she's supposed to marry her self-important fiance, Derek (Paul Rudd). Susan grows 50 feet tall and the military takes her to a detention center for monsters. While there she meets B.O.B. (Seth Rogen), a gelatinous blue blob; Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie), who is half-insect, half-mad scientist; and Missing Link (Will Arnett), the part fish, part human. When the evil alien Galaxhar (Rainn Wilson) threatens Earth, General W.R. Monger (Kiefer Sutherland) convinces the President (Stephen Colbert) that the monsters should be released, as they are the only ones who can save the planet from cartoon doom.

From now on, DreamWorks Animation says it is only going to movies designed for 3-D. Monsters vs. Aliens is supposed to prove that the format can work as a story telling device rather than just a gimmick during Super Bowl commercials. With its stereotypical themes of outcasts saving the day and a bit of girl empowerment, it's not clear that they succeeded. While the critics found the jokes moderately amusing and most of the voice acting solid, when the film is viewed in 2-D, without anything being hurled at the screen, the story unoriginal. Below, we size up what the critics are saying about Monsters vs. Aliens.

Slate

Not to let any unnecessary ideology creep into a review of a fun animated movie, but let's get this out of the way up front: Monsters vs. Aliens is a film for children with a female lead. She is not the love interest, or the helpmate, or the mom. Nor is she a princess, or princesslike. She does not marry a prince or a prince-manqué. She does not marry at all. She tries to get married, but she is struck by a meteor on her wedding day (typical!), which transforms her into an unmarriageable, world-saving, 49-foot-11-inch superfreak and-thank you, O bountiful movie gods-a Strong Female Protagonist. (Or, as my more skeptical viewing companion put it, "a strong female protagonist who just happens to be ultra-skinny with big boobs and a pneumatic butt, and who sometimes wears a catsuit." Touché.)

The Los Angeles Times

The dialogue has its share of the sly grown-up/cultural references that have become de rigueur for DreamWorks projects, designed to make sure the adults in the audience don't fidget, but there aren't enough of them to push this into full-fledged comedy mode. Which means it's up to the action/thriller elements to power the film, and they are never quite bold enough.

So it comes down to the story and the voice actors to carry the day, and they have their moments — particularly the monster crew led by a feisty Witherspoon, who brings some of the edgy-fun of her Election mean-girl to Susan as she grows stronger.

Baltimore Sun

The best running gag comes when BOB falls in love with a Jell-O mold. The mold has more shape and structure than anything else about the movie. Rogen gives a textbook demonstration of the unlikely power a juicy voice performance can provide to a gelatinous mass. Yet, amazingly, in a cast that also includes Stephen Colbert as a reputation-conscious president and Kiefer Sutherland as a monster-wrangling general (with the joke name W.R. Monger), no one else stands out or steps up the way Rogen does.

The Boston Globe

The bright, enthusiastic performances from Rogen, Witherspoon, Laurie, et al., put Monsters vs. Aliens over, not the dialogue that trundles along a well-worn family movie rut. Rudd displays none of his sneaky charm as the fiance - turns out you need to see this actor to get the joke - and the same goes for Stephen Colbert as the US president, who's drawn much funnier than he sounds, like a Mort Drucker caricature in a vintage '60s Mad magazine. In general, though, the animation isn't terribly impressive if you take away the 3-D; the monsters are fetchingly bizarre, but all the women look like Bratz dolls.

Reel Views

Monsters vs. Aliens, one of the 2009 big movies designed to highlight where 3D could transport audiences, is an example of technology run amok. With a slight, light screenplay that required five credited writers, the film tells an unimaginative story about an alien invasion of Earth that is foiled by "monsters." Of course, they're not really monsters. They're just misunderstood. But since they're in the 3D, we're too busy watching whizzing comet fragments fly out of the screen to care about things like plot or character development. It's a good thing, too, because anyone on the lookout for those elements may be a little disappointed.

NPR

Here, directors Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon push so hard for three-dimensionality - and they're so reliant on it - that they basically have their animators putting sightlines before storylines; they set up practically every scene so that something in it can be sent careening at your head. After a while, you can see the setups happening - and once you do, the careening gets predictable. Which gets old, really fast.

The A. V. Club

On some level, the latest DreamWorks CGI project isn't a movie so much as a gag-delivery system wrapped in special effects. The story is crammed with incident, yet completely trifling; there are a ton of personalities, but no real characters. It zips along at hyperspeed, alternating jokes, explosions, and videogame-ready action segments, but never comes to rest long enough to make an impression. It's available in some markets in 3D, but regardless of presentation, it's strictly two-dimensional.

The film, which comes out in New York and Los Angeles today, stars Amy Adams as Rose Lorkowski, a woman who peaked in high school when she was a popular cheerleader dating the star quarterback. Now a single mother in her 30s, she clings to her former glory by having an affair with her high school boyfriend (Steve Zahn) who is married. When her son (Jason Spevack) needs to be sent to a special school, Lorkowski decides to raise the money by opening a business cleaning up bloody crime scenes with her cynical sister Norah (Emily Blunt). Norah lives at home with their father (Alan Arkin) and both sisters are still dealing with their mother's suicide years ago.

The film was written and directed by women - first time screenwriter Megan Holley and director Christine Jeffs - and inspired by an NPR story from 2001 about two women who clean up crime scenes. Sunshine Cleaning was produced by the same team behind Little Miss Sunshine, and most critics compared it unfavorably to the Oscar-winning film. However, they still found a lot to like in the movie, especially Amy Adams and Emily Blunt's performances. Below, we take a look at the reviews for Sunshine Cleaning.

E!

The old adage says: The best roles for actresses fall into three categories-hookers, victims, and doormats. The two sturdy, quirky heroines of Sunshine Cleaning break that rule. Good for them. But a patchy plot and dull direction blot out what could be a radiant portrait of women grappling with loss, ambition and life's general messiness ... The macabre setup is fascinating, to be sure, but the filmmakers never give us the gritty details on any of the scenes the girls are scrubbing up after. While the yellowing class photo, forgotten shopping list and forlorn pet are all nice touches, plot cannot survive on nice touches alone. Without any real conflict, Cleaning goes nowhere and creaks to a close.

Variety

Director Christine Jeffs, who previously helmed Rain and Sylvia, tries to strike a balance between the yarn's dark currents and offbeat comedy, but the result is often uneasy, with the humor receding as things progress. Still, the film is in good measure saved by the leads, especially Adams, who proves once again what a sparkling, irresistible screen presence she has. So energizing and uplifting is she that considerable interest attends the test of her ability to perform scenes of doubt and despair (she can), and no matter her character's previous decade of drudge work, Adams leaves no doubt that Rose will find a way to prevail in the end.

The A.V. Club

Sunshine Cleaning embodies a curious indie paradox: it's a non-commercial, deeply personal film that overlaps so extensively with other non-commercial, deeply personal films that it feels strangely generic. Clifton Collins Jr., for example, plays a sad-eyed, one-armed model-building clerk who forms an unlikely bond with Adams' spooky, precocious son. Though well-acted, Collins Jr.'s character nevertheless feels like a random assemblage of Sundance quirks.

CNN

Ironically, for a movie that's marketed with the one-liner "Life's a messy business," Holley's script has been polished to within an inch of its life. Emotions are experienced most vividly when they're raw, but in Sunshine Cleaning, feelings come filtered through neat-and-tidy grace notes. The film flirts with dangerous material, but it's too intent on putting the sunny side up to get its hands dirty. The way director Jeffs tells it, not only is suicide painless it can be positively feel-good.

Entertainment Weekly

Both Rose and Norah have adult sex lives - imperfect, to be sure, but real sex lives all the same. For a time, Rose has a lusty relationship with a married cop (Steve Zahn). Norah, meanwhile, beds a guy who means as little to her as she means to herself. These brief nods to the reality of female sexuality seem almost accidental in an otherwise contrived movie. But I'm grateful for the sky-clearing flashes of insight.

Salon

Although Adams and Blunt work hard at giving dimension to their characters, they can't overcome the fact that the story is essentially a greatest hits of family trauma. The dead mom, the capable sibling who tries to hold everything together at her own expense, the fragile sibling who's always relying on everyone else for help: Neither the actors nor the filmmakers can cut through those stock ideas to get to anything meaningful or moving.

The New York Times

There needs to be a childhood trauma to inject a little more pathos into their relationship, and to this end the filmmakers supply a dead mother, whose suicide continues to haunt Rose and Norah. Except when it doesn't: Rose is perfectly happy to make a flippant joke about suicide in one scene, only to howl in undimmed rage and grief a short while later.

The L.A. Times

The movie is made up of so many singular and simple pleasures, ones that Jeffs and screenwriter Megan Holley infuse with such pure grace that you want to hold on to even the most ordinary ones ... Thanks to Holley's screenplay, there are themes aplenty running through Sunshine Cleaning, such as how a family copes with the tragedies of the past and new ones in the making and the way older sisters think they are required to look after things. It is a story with economic lessons everywhere, a fitting eulogy for the culture of greed and a reminder that hard work — not miracles — will save you. When it all comes together, you are left with a tableau of hope, humor and a truth-telling reality that is a salve for the recessionary soul.

The Business of Cleaning Up After Tradgedy [NPR]

Time:

Aronofsky has been one of the few American directors whose movies upset the complacency of indie cinema. Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain were demanding and rewarding in various ways: the first wacko, the second gritty, the third sumptuously romantic, and all marvelously dense with imagery. So the big surprise in The Wrestler is that it's visually inert. Aronofsky's main camera habit is to follow Randy, just his imposing back, as he trudges through corridors toward another fight. (Martin Scorsese virtually patented that shot in Raging Bull and Goodfellas.) The trope does pay off later in the film, when the camera trails the briefly retired Randy down the stairs to his new job, behind a deli counter. But Aronofsky's main contribution was to lion-tame a jolting performance out of a forgotten hero.

USA Today:

Rourke gives the performance of his life. Tough, clueless and more self-aware than he lets on, Randy is excruciatingly sad. When he describes himself as "an old, broken-down piece of meat," your heart aches for him.

Slate:

Randy's relationships with these two women are what set The Wrestler (sparely scripted by Robert Siegel) apart from your standard sports-comeback drama. Wood has definitively made the jump from interesting child star to accomplished adult actress. Though hers is the most underwritten of the three main characters, she shines in her few scenes as the wounded, rageful daughter. And amid all the (granted well-earned) fuss about Rourke's comeback, I hope Marisa Tomei won't be overlooked for what I consider the single best female performance of the year, supporting or otherwise. She's smart, earthy, and astonishingly real in a role that could have foundered in cheap sentimentality. And if we're going to marvel at Rourke's sculpted (and no doubt hormonally augmented) 56-year-old form, how about Tomei's 44-year-old body pole-dancing in a G-string?

New York:

This is a case where an actor makes the difference. Mickey Rourke was once among our most charismatic leading men: alert, wittily self-contained (he always seemed to be smiling at a private joke), with a high but seductive voice. Whatever the hell he did to himself, it worked for Sin City, in which the makeup for his monster-man avenger Marv brought out the freakish poetry in his distended physiognomy. In The Wrestler, his face has that poetry without the makeup. Rourke has long blond hair that makes him look like a battered lion, and his tight, swollen mask makes Randy’s struggle to bare his soul even more momentous. It’s dumb, it’s outlandish, but smashing other people’s heads and getting his own smashed back really does complete him.

Entertainment Weekly:

Certain movies about losers have a special, desperately moving appeal. By showing us men whose lives have fallen dramatically short of their dreams, they speak to — and for — all of us. Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, with Mickey Rourke as a broken-down professional wrestling star still clinging to his glory days from the 1980s, could touch a chord in audiences the way On the Waterfront and Rocky did. It has that kind of lyrical humanity. Aronofsky doesn't speak a sentimental cinematic language. Shooting in a grainy, bare-bones naturalistic style, full of jump cuts and raw light and a handheld camera whooshing about, the director of Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain now strips away all frills, tapping a classic Hollywood myth — a has-been looking for redemption — and, at the same time, transcending that myth. The Wrestler is like Rocky made by the Scorsese of Mean Streets. It's the rare movie fairy tale that's also a bravura work of art.

The New York Observer:

It’s a plot so familiar it borders on cliché, and elements of everything from Champion to Million Dollar Baby are inescapable. But there’s no denying Aronofsky’s commitment (gone are all traces of arty self-indulgence that have been his trademarks in junk like The Fountain); the tough script by Robert D. Siegel, which never begs pity for its downbeat characters; and especially Mickey Rourke’s raw, naked passion, which makes his galvanizing performance a real awards contender, and provides a jump-start for a career with a dead transmission.

The New Yorker:

What Rourke offers us, in short, is not just a comeback performance but something much rarer: a rounded, raddled portrait of a good man. Suddenly, there it is again—the charm, the anxious modesty, the never-distant hint of wrath, the teen-age smiles, and all the other virtues of a winner. No wonder people warmed to Randy Robinson twenty years ago. I felt the same about Mickey Rourke, and I still do.

Salon:

Whatever Aronofsky did — or didn't — do, Rourke's performance comes off beautifully. "The Wrestler" may not be the "best" Aronofsky movie in any technical sense. But the director clearly feels a great deal of tenderness toward his lead character, without ever emasculating him, and Rourke's performance blossoms and thrives within that affectionate framework. Rourke's face looks a little strange: He appears to have had some plastic surgery, which has made his features look both a little too fine and a little too blurred, compared with the Rourke we used to know. But that face hasn't lost any of its expressiveness. Rourke's performance will be praised, rightly enough, for the way he pushes his characterization of Randy right over the edge of our expectations. But what I love most about Rourke's performance are the small gestures, the little things he does probably without even thinking. The way, for example, Randy delicately places his hearing aid (this guy has clearly sustained so many injuries over the course of his career, you wonder how any of his parts still work) on the bedside table in his trailer, before going to sleep.

Newsweek:

Another actor could have played this wreck for easy pathos—a sad-sack giant in decline. We've seen that act before. But Rourke, underplaying beautifully, gives him a tough, tender humor that skirts the usual clichés of aging gladiators that go back beyond "Requiem for a Heavyweight" all the way to Wallace Beery. There's none of the actorish self-indulgence, that taint of narcissism, that sometimes marred Rourke's earlier performances. It's hard at times to even imagine this is the same guy who was the Hot New Thing in "Diner" and "Rumble Fish," his brooding intensity evoking the usual James Dean references, or the lounge lizard who specialized in soft-core erotica ("9 ½ Weeks" and "Wild Orchid"). Rourke, macho man extraordinaire, disparaged the acting life for its suggestion of "femininity" and took up a boxing career to shore up his self-esteem. He seems to have poured all those demons into this part and emerged with a new sense of himself as an actor. When screen acting is this pure and simple, it doesn't look like acting at all.

The Hollywood Reporter:

Although the film teeters on the brink of sentimentality, it never topples into the slush, and this is a tribute to the rigorous direction as well as the astringent performances. Still, there are mawkish moments: When Rourke and Wood visit an abandoned beachside emporium, a tear trickles down his cheek as he pleads for her love. "Wrestler" oscillates between hard-edged naturalism and stock melodrama but ends on an understated note of melancholy that seems just right.

Variety:

Talk about comebacks. After many years in the wilderness and being considered MIA professionally, Mickey Rourke, just like the washed-up character he plays, attempts a return to the big show in "The Wrestler." Not only does he pull it off, but Rourke creates a galvanizing, humorous, deeply moving portrait that instantly takes its place among the great, iconic screen performances. An elemental story simply and brilliantly told, Darren Aronofsky's fourth feature is a winner from every possible angle, although it will require deft handling by a smart distributor to overcome public preconceptions about Rourke, the subject matter and the nature of the film.

'The Wrestler' opens today in limited release.

USA Today:

Doubt makes the most of the medium. Too many theatrical adaptations end up feeling stagy and stilted. Doubt builds upon the play, contextualizing and broadening the landscape while remaining true to its essence. Evocative overhead shots, symbolic visuals of a strong wind blowing around the school, and additional characters help to amplify and distill Shanley's vision.

Salon:

But Streep's performance scales new heights of absurdity. Like you, I've heard all the critical (or, more accurately, not-so-critical) rumbling: "Streep's performance will surely win an Oscar!" That's observant: It's so lousy that it probably will. The nuns in "Doubt" are members of the Sisters of Charity, which means they wear puffy hoods that tie under the chin, instead of the more familiar veil-and-wimple penguin getup. It's a costumey look that does no actor any favors, but it seems to have had a particularly deleterious effect on Streep, turning her into an overplaying maniac. She glowers from behind her austere little spectacles like Sunbonnet Sue on a PMS tirade. Streep's character is designed to convey the idea that women in the church, circa the 1960s, were powerless yet possibly dangerous, while the men were entitled but confused, and probably mostly harmless. Shanley offers no resolution to this Sharks vs. Jets conflict. For that, we have to wait for "Doubt! The Musical."

The New York Times:

Mr. Shanley has nothing deep to say about the church and its sex scandals, and he’s still largely using words and more words, despite the tilted camera angles and pretty pictures. But the words are good, solid, at times touching. His work with the actors is generally fine, though it’s a mystery what he thought Ms. Streep, with her wild eyes and an accent as wide as the Grand Concourse, was doing. Her outsize performance has a whiff of burlesque, but she’s really just operating in a different register from the other actors, who are working in the more naturalistic vein of modern movie realism. She’s a hoot, but she’s also a relief, because, for some of us, worshiping Our Lady of Accents is easier on the soul than doing time in church.

The New Republic:

Hoffman gives a subtle, even moving performance as the priest whose earnest appeals to tolerance, compassion, and love double as a get-out-of-jail-free card from his own conscience. But Streep treks deep into Catholic-school cliché as the tyrannical nun who stares daggers and furiously holds the line against such innocent innovations as secular Christmas music ("'Frosty the Snowman' espouses a pagan belief in magic and should be banned from the airwaves," she snaps) and the ballpoint pen. She makes it through without tumbling into caricature—she is Meryl Streep, after all—but at times only barely. Adams, for her part, dims her usual luminescence as our surrogate witness to the dispute between doubt and certainty, and Davis delivers an impassioned, if limited, performance as the anxious mother.

The Washington Post:

A great actress delivers a breathtaking star turn in "Doubt," John Patrick Shanley's taut, twisty adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Her name is Viola Davis, and in one utterly galvanizing scene, she single-handedly defines this riveting movie, emerging as its most arrestingly conflicted character and — not incidentally in a film that's all about spiritual rigor — its most compelling and unsettling moral voice.

Davis, who has delivered similarly memorable supporting performances (see "Antwone Fisher"), isn't one of the marquee names on the poster for "Doubt." But she should be, if only because she so gracefully obeys what might be one of the Ten Commandments of Acting: Thou shalt steal every single scene you can, especially from Meryl Streep. Davis does it with an emotional honesty as fierce as the unmovable object in her character's path.

The Los Angeles Times:

"Doubt" is a film with many fine elements, but its director, John Patrick Shanley, doesn't seem to trust them. Which is rather odd, because it was Shanley who wrote both the script and the play on which it's based.

The Chicago Tribune:

While Streep has a tiny bit too much fun with some of her character's excesses, she's awfully good. So is Hoffman, who walks a fine line between obvious guilt and possible innocence. So is Adams, whose naivete stays this side of the wrong kind of comedy. And in a key, wrenching scene, Viola Davis—who plays the mother of the student at risk—makes complicated emotional sense of a woman caught in an unwinnable, untenable position.

Chicago Sun-Times:

Doubt. It is the subject of the sermon Father Flynn opens the film with. Doubt was coming into the church and the United States in 1964. Would you still go to hell if you ate meat on Friday? After the assassination of Kennedy and the beginnings of Vietnam, doubt had undermined American certainty in general. What could you be sure of? What were the circumstances? The motives? The conflict between Aloysius and Flynn is the conflict between old and new, between status and change, between infallibility and uncertainty. And Shanley leaves us doubting. I know people who are absolutely certain what conclusion they should draw from this film. They disagree. "Doubt" has exact and merciless writing, powerful performances and timeless relevance. It causes us to start thinking with the first shot, and we never stop. Think how rare that is in a film.

NPR:

The film's most wrenching performance, in fact, comes from Viola Davis, who plays the boy's worried mother as a woman who is in no position to raise her voice, even when articulating a startlingly unexpected parental position on what may have transpired between the priest and her son.

The others argue strenuously and occasionally even eloquently, to ever-diminishing effect; Davis speaks plainly and quietly, and leaves not a shadow of a doubt that the moral high ground is a treacherous spot to occupy in the real world.

Rolling Stone:

Shanley stays alert to the loneliness in his main characters. And the actors could not be better or more sensitive to his intentions. Viola Davis will blow your head around six ways from Sunday as Mrs. Muller, Donald's mother, a woman who knows her son in ways that leave Sister Aloysius speechless. In just one scene of the two women walking on a wintry day, the brilliant Davis gives a performance that will be talked about for years. Adams excels as the naive nun who tries to keep her balance on shifting moral ground. But it's hard to tear your attention from the center ring, where the two protagonists try to put the other on the ropes. Hoffman nails every nuance in a complex role. And Streep is unmissable and unforgettable, finding the bruised heart of a female warrior who knows what a monster she can seem and readily exploits it. You may have doubts about which side to choose, but there's no doubt about this mind-bender. It'll pin you to your seat.

Entertainment Weekly:

Meanwhile, Streep, apparently left to her own devices, lugs a load of mannerisms under the pruny nun's severe black habit, encouraged by the movie's literal-minded director. Sister A may be an intimidating, spirit-breaking character — but for all that, she's also 
 a servant of God unswerving in her code of right and wrong, and we ought to feel her burden. We don't. Speaking lines written to reach the stage heavens, the cast is infernally noisy and hectoring about mysteries that ought 
 to be felt with a communal hush. I doubt that's what the creator — I mean the playwright — had in mind.

Newsweek:

Shanley, directing his own work, throws in a few cinematic flourishes—he's big on tilted angles—but they only reinforce "Doubt's" theatrical nature. It's a meaty showcase for its stars. Streep, with her no-nonsense Bronx accent and know-it-all smirks, gives this battleaxe a sly wit: she may be working too hard, but she's fun to watch. Hoffman makes a worthy, sympathetic foe, but it's Viola Davis as Donald's mother who gets the most striking scene. Her reaction to Sister Aloysius's suggestion that Father Flynn is taking advantage of her boy is not at all what the sister, or we, expect. "Doubt" stirs up a lot of stormy theatrical weather, but the stolid transfer from stage to screen does Shanley's play no favors. It states its Big Themes eloquently, but, really, does it have anything interesting to say about them?

The New Yorker:

Collectors of large narrative signposts will spend a happy couple of hours at Shanley’s movie, enjoying the window-rattling thunderstorms that he uses to indicate spiritual crisis, and the grimness with which Sister Aloysius, narrowing her red-rimmed eyes, delivers the line “So, it’s happened.” I didn’t know you could hiss, groan, and murmur at the same time, but Streep can do anything. She is, of course, wasted on this elephantine fable; if only “Doubt” had been made in 1964, shot by Roger Corman over a long weekend, and retitled “Spawn of the Devil Witch” or “Blood Wimple,” all would have been forgiven.

'Doubt' premieres today in limited release.

Salon:

Maybe the characters Demme is showing us are in some ways too real. There were stretches of "Rachel Getting Married" that made me feel restless and annoyed, itching to get away from the aggressive, overgrown neuroses of these characters: A little of that goes a long way in the movies, and a filmmaker doesn't need to fetishize characters' rampant self-absorption to get the point across. But just when someone says or does something that makes you want to shout at the screen, Demme pulls back and reminds us — by focusing on a particular face, or by showing us a character's awkward body language — that these are, quite simply, people in pain. Hathaway, in particular, with those wary eyes and lips that always look on the verge of quivering, brings much of that pain to the surface: This isn't a character you want to hug — she's got too many angles — but Demme feels so deeply for her that he makes us feel for her, too.

Slate:

I've never been much of an Anne Hathaway fan. She always seemed, to borrow a phrase some brilliant blogger once used about Gwyneth Paltrow, to be "sprinkling herself with fairy dust." But Hathaway transcends her usual complacency in this role and resists the temptation of using Kym's (and her own) wounded-bird appeal to let the character off the hook. Bill Irwin, the great stage clown who's a Demme regular, is marvelously expressive as the girls' overanxious father. And when the luminous Debra Winger first appears onscreen as their withholding mother, you want to grab her and say (on your own behalf as well as her daughters'): Where have you been all these years?

The New York Times:

The themes of dependency and recovery that Kym brings home in her overnight bag are familiar, even banal. Every unhappy family may be unique, but every addict is fundamentally the same, and if “Rachel Getting Married” had surrendered its story completely to Kym, it would have risked becoming as drab and familiar as a made-for-television 12-step homily.

But Mr. Demme protects the film against such an unsatisfying fate. He is certainly sympathetic to Kym, even as he and Ms. Hathaway conspire to show her at her appalling worst. But he has never been one to restrict his sympathies, and the wonderful thing about “Rachel Getting Married” is how expansive it seems, in spite of the limits of its scope and the modesty of its ambitions. It’s a small movie, and in some ways a very sad one, but it has an undeniable and authentic vitality, an exuberance of spirit, that feels welcome and rare.

The Los Angeles Times:

"Rachel Getting Married" is welcome for any number of reasons. It's a gratifying return to his independent film roots for Oscar-winning director Dem- me, a powerful screenwriting debut for Jenny Lumet, a herculean job of hand-held cinematography by Declan Quinn and a career-changing performance by Anne Hathaway, of all people, as an ultra-troubled young woman set loose from rehab for her sister's wedding.

Newsweek:

Anyone expecting the demure, doe-eyed Hathaway of "The Princess Diaries" or "The Devil Wears Prada" is in for a shock. Kym is a major pain in the ass, and Hathaway's raw, spiky performance makes no attempt to ingratiate. Yet she makes Kym's inner torment so palpable you can't help but feel for her, however insufferable she may be. It's a terrific performance, and DeWitt matches her step for step: you can feel a lifetime of tangled sisterly feelings in every charged moment between them.

The A.V. Club:

Rachel Getting Married sounds like a joyless dirge, but it's actually far from it, and a lot of that is owed to the way Demme harnesses the genuine love and good feeling that buoys the occasion. If he ever retires from directing, he could have a great side business as a wedding planner: The rehearsal dinner, the ceremony, and the reception are brimming with sweet multi-culti touches and great music, including performances by the likes of Robyn Hitchcock and TV On The Radio's Tunde Adebimpe. (The cutting of the cake, for one, may be the most moving moment in the whole movie.) With an easy, freeflowing style—owing partially to the Dogme-style approach that has led some to compare the film to The Celebration—Demme captures the group dynamic of the wedding party, with its seismic shifts in mood from celebratory to melancholy and back again.

The New York Observer:

Up to my eyeballs in draggy, shapeless amateur junk, I am genuinely thrilled to welcome a film this colorful, artistically realized and wonderfully alive. Steeped in the tradition of sound narrative form yet scrappy and unpredictable, acted and written with enormous style but with front and back doors open to experiment and surprise, it’s a film that challenges you to keep a jogger’s pace to keep up with it, then leaves you breathless. With three more months to go, Rachel Getting Married is already high on my 10-best list for 2008.

Entertainment Weekly:

This melting-pot wedding creates a frisson of its own; it's a vision of a new world. I do wish that Demme hadn't let the wedding music, by Robyn Hitchcock, Sister Carol East, and a few others, take over the last act. This much healing-by-'80s-hipster-taste is too much. But Rachel Getting Married is still a triumph — Demme's finest work since The Silence of the Lambs, and a movie that tingles with life.

The Hollywood Reporter:

Shot through with smart humor, "Rachel" outlaws cliche. Sydney's good-looking best man, Kieran (Mather Zickel), whom Kym has previously spotted at a 12-step meeting for struggling addicts, materializes at the wedding like her perfect romantic partner. In a humorously unexpected twist, Kym immediately beds him in the attic and ignores him for the rest of the film. A whole romantic subplot is nipped in the bud, leaving the screenplay room to open family wounds and explore less predictable territory.

Variety:

The characters' volatile moodswings are matched by the restlessness of the HD camerawork commandeered by Declan Quinn ("Monsoon Wedding"). Quinn's camera, few of whose moves were blocked out beforehand, proves ever ready to take off in unexpected directions.

The Toronto Star:

Hathaway's performance as the brittle Kym has been trumpeted as a potential Oscar turn for her, demonstrating her dark side after her roles playing princesses.

But there's more than one award-worthy performance here. As the titular Rachel, DeWitt adroitly plays a sympathetic figure who still manages to be hard to like.

And as the aloof Abby, the MIA Debra Winger returns to the screen with a small but powerful performance that implies a lot of repressed rage and regret.

'Rachel Getting Married' opens today in limited release.

Entertainment Weekly:

What divine inspiration moved Kimberly Rivers Roberts, an aspiring rap artist and toweringly self-possessed woman from New Orleans' Ninth Ward, to grab her Hi8 camcorder and document the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina as it smashed up her neighborhood? And what grace brought Roberts to the attention of Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, filmmakers who, like so many others, went to Louisiana after the levees broke? Whatever the cosmic luck, the result, Trouble the Water, is essential, unique viewing: a stunning experience of the hurricane and its aftermath, rooted in immediate personal response and emotions that encapsulate the full national catastrophe.

Newsday:

Shot predominantly from the attic of their rapidly submerging house during the worst of the storm, Roberts' visual record gives us a palpable sense of impending doom. But it's only after the Robertses - in the company of filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal - return to their battered city their crime-ridden neighborhood that the true, sustained and still-unresolved damage of Katrina becomes so terribly clear.

Salon:

If possible, Roberts' movie-within-a-movie is even more amazing than it sounds. She captures a tale of courage, heroism and tragedy more thrilling than any Hollywood spectacle; one neighbor, a man Roberts and her husband, Scott, hadn't even liked before the hurricane, risks his life to save them, swimming back and forth across the street using a punching bag as a flotation device. Roberts barely knew how to turn the camera on when the storm started, and her footage is highly uneven. But you can feel her taking ownership of the situation as the catastrophe worsens, doing her own TV-news-style voice- over and alternating between establishing shots and close-ups.

The Los Angeles Times:

Kim Roberts' footage, shot with a video camera she'd bought on the street for $20 only the week before, gives a rare from-the-ground-up look at what it's like to be flooded out of your house. We watch in hypnotized horror as the waters rise so high they almost obliterate the corner stop sign, forcing the Roberts and their extended family to take precarious refuge in their attic.

Startling as that footage is, however, it takes up only about 15 minutes of "Trouble the Water." The documentary's best asset is not what Kim shot, but the woman herself.

With her buoyant, naturally dramatic personality (she ended up giving birth to a daughter in Utah just days before the Sundance award ceremony), bold, nervy Kim has the kind of intensely charismatic spirit documentary directors dream about. With her as our guide, "Trouble the Water" looks at the reality of New Orleans from the inside.

New York Daily News:

Using mostly amateur video shot by an aspiring rap artist and her husband in the lead-up to Hurricane Katrina and in the weeks after, this gripping, sometimes unstructured doc shows the devastation New Orleans residents suffered in the swirl of the storm.

Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal utilize the footage Kim and Scott Roberts had taken throughout the disaster, showing how residents suffered, survived and came together to help when official assistance let them down. Kim especially emerges as a real voice of America, one that refuses to keep quiet about the horrors she saw.

New York Post:

As "Trouble the Water" points out, most of New Orleans' black residents have yet to return to a city that turned its back on them. When Kimberly sings, she gives voice to their pain.

The A.V. Club:

Trouble The Water is infuriating in its depiction of helpless Americans getting left behind, and uplifting in the way it shows the Roberts putting their lives together, but it's also frustrating, because it lacks some focus. It starts off being about the footage Kim shot, but she didn't shoot a lot, and anyone coming to Trouble The Water looking for an insider's take on the storm and its immediate aftermath will be disappointed to find that the bulk of the film takes place post-emergency. Even more bothersome is how Lessin and Deal keep steering away from the most persistently unsettling part of the Hurricane Katrina story, having to do with the multiple ways the rights of American citizens were taken away, by the suspicious and the well-meaning alike. Given that the filmmakers' original idea for their project stalled out due to lack of access, it's disappointing that they didn't explore that angle more. Even the generally upbeat Roberts and their friends note the promises and lies that have been exposed by their predicament. "Freedom exists," one of their neighbors says. "There's just… limitations on the freedom."

Village Voice:

The first and most gripping half of Trouble the Water, directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, is essentially a first-person disaster movie—history captured in the visual grammar of Cloverfield. Driven just to get it down ("I'll be able to tell the story"), Kimberly aims her palm-sized camera at her backyard, at the neighbor passed out on his porch, at the kids laughing off the storm warnings in the street. A dog whimpers, an Army truck creeps by, the sky fades to gray, a drizzle begins. Those cunning directors who've turned shaky-cam mock-vérité into a horror-movie cliché waste a lot of effort planting such "stray" details; they don't have the thing that gives Kimberly's footage its eerie force—genuine uncertainty about what's going to happen.

New York Magazine:

As someone of bounteous hope but little (formal) faith, I found Kimberly’s religious ejaculations a bit trying. She and her husband trek north to a relative’s house in which there’s no water, and when a man shows up to turn it on, she exclaims, “When you trust in God, he sends miracles your way!” Five minutes later, the man returns, now ordered to shut the water off, and this time God goes pointedly unmentioned. But I admit that my perspective is that of a privileged New Yorker who has never had to summon comparable spiritual resources. Whatever sparked and has sustained Kimberly’s resolve is indeed a kind of miracle. The rap that she performs for the camera, “Amazing,” is just that, an explicit (and profane) account of her sordid past capped with an irresistibly upbeat refrain—a potential smash. That faith brings her and her husband back to New Orleans despite continued government neglect—even as New Orleans pours its resources into luring tourists back to the French Quarter. In one scene, Kimberly and fellow refugees line up for FEMA assistance at some kind of ranch, where a sign overhead points to Gate B—CATTLE ENTRANCE. You can’t make this stuff up. You can, however, capture it on film for all time. Trouble the Water is ineradicably moving.

Rolling Stone:

Kimberly's star power comes from the music she writes and sings, music that was almost lost in the storm. The moment in the aftermath when she finds it and raps about her feelings will knock you off your feet. At the Sundance Film Festival in January, when the film premiered, that moment got audiences standing and cheering. Never mind Katrina, Kimberly Roberts is the real force of nature. Despite the political incompetence that continues to devastate New Orleans, Kimberly and Scott went home with only positive vibes. The repair needed in their city has gotten Scott a job in construction. And Kimberly's music has attracted producers. No wonder, a glory abides in this woman's voice. "Inspiring" is an overused word in the movie business. But it fits here. Lessin and Deal have made Trouble the Water a spellbinder you do not want to miss.

'Trouble The Water' opened on August 22nd in selected theaters in Los Angeles and New York.

Earlier: Hurrican Katrina, Three Years Later: A New Memoir And An Approaching Storm [Jezebel]

The Washington Post:

Viewed without skepticism, "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" is a taut, well-acted, thoughtfully organized, not very scary, not very hard to figure out serial-killer mystery revolving around two 40-something adults with trust issues. They still drive a Taurus, and their adventure takes place over a few gray, snowy days in NoVa and WeVa. (British Columbia, once again, reprises its "X-Files" role as a wet, overcast Anywhere.) Described thusly, the movie sounds like a low-budget yawner from an off night at Sundance.

People will complain (and already have) that "I Want to Believe" looks cheap and easy, barely rising to the level of a usual episode back when. Doubter that I am, I actually took it as a sweet bit of epilogue, made by and for adults. Even the show's "shippers" . . . may be surprised by how grown-up our paranormal sleuths have become. With simple sanity and lack of flash, Mulder and Scully make it clear: Our summer movies are part of a big conspiracy plot to trash our minds. I want to believe Mulder and Scully are correct.

Time:

A subtler anachronism is the seriousness with which Mulder and Scully take their work and themselves. On TV, Duchovny settled quickly into his role as an obsessive plodder; Anderson's gravity served as a rebuke to all the actresses her age who spoke in baby talk and aspired to nothing higher than Baywatch. The movie continues that dark, quiet tone, which means that today's moviegoers will have to forgo expectations of wisecracking heroes and snarling psychopaths, and to take seriously a couple of anguished folks who look and behave with the tired tenseness of anchors on C-SPAN.

USA Today:

For one thing, the Mulder-Scully chemistry seems to have evaporated. David Duchovny is still engagingly low-key as the truth-seeking Fox Mulder, while Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully seems to have become even more dour. Grounded in science, her doctor character was always serious, but she has lost some of what made her more human: passionate emotions and flashes of dry humor. There's a discernible lack of sparks during a bedroom scene. Sure, it's meant to be cozy rather than sexy, but it feels forced.

The Los AngelesTimes:

Scully, who now works as a surgeon at a Catholic hospital (Our Lady of Sorrows, nudge nudge), was always a wrestling act for Anderson, who had to fight against the character's morose, doubting-Thomas side, not to mention prosaic literary tendencies. Anderson loses the match here: Scully has ossified into one of the most humorless characters to suck the life out of a summer movie.

The New York Times:

That relationship still simmers, though at a reduced temperature. There’s nothing stirring the air between Mulder and Scully, who, having left the bureau, come across as unmoored and unfocused, even when they’re working on the outlandish criminal case that drags them back into the twilight zone. A similar lack of urgency characterizes the movie, which despite its yowling dogs, barking Russians, screaming women, swelling choral voices and moody cinematography by Bill Roe — which turns even dark blue a deeper shade of black — never finds a sustainable pulse. Mr. Carter knows how to grab your attention visually, but the amalgam of trashy thriller clichés that he has compiled with Frank Spotnitz, another series regular, creates its own deadening effect. It’s no wonder Mulder and Scully seem so diffident.

ReelViews:

The film's central "mystery" is painfully underdeveloped. The pedophile priest, in addition to being a walking cliché, adds little to the proceedings, and the revelation about what lies behind the kidnappings and murders is B-grade bad. The film musters a little tension toward the end, with Mulder in peril, but that's in stark contrast to the dull and tedious 90 minutes to precede it. One keeps waiting for I Want to Believe to shift into high gear, and it never does. Do we ever believe that the characters are in danger or that their "mission" means anything? No. The film feels like an excuse for nostalgia.

The actors don't seem to care, either. Duchovny is okay, and the film was apparently made largely because he made himself available for it, but the Mulder in this film is a lot more laid-back than his TV series counterpart. Gillian Anderson claims that it was difficult for her to re-discover the character after such a long layoff, and it shows. Scully is a shadow of what she once was. Most distressingly, where these two used to play brilliantly off one another, here they never mesh, even on those occasions when the screenplay allows them to share the screen. What's the point of a reunion if the characters are going to be kept apart so much? Amanda Peet has more scenes with Duchovny than Anderson does.

Slate:

The nefarious plot behind the agent's abduction is so far-fetched I'm itching to spoil it. But I'll limit myself to observing that, if ever I'm dying of a rare brain disease, I hope my surgeon won't go home and frantically Google treatment options, as Scully does at one key moment. (Couldn't she at least log on to Medscape?) The problem with the movie's semisupernatural crime plot, though, isn't that the resolution is completely outlandish; it's that the outlandishness is insufficiently grounded in pseudoscience. If you're going to posit stuff this crazy, you'd better have some solid-sounding bullshit to back it up.

The New Republic:

The story unspools adequately from this premise, but rarely feels like more than a middling episode of the series extended to twice its usual length. In part this is thanks to series creator (and first-time feature director) Chris Carter, who repeatedly gets failing marks in How to Make a Movie 101. It's difficult, for instance, to follow even the basic geography of the film, which jumps back and forth between the rural West Virginia crime scene and Scully's hospital (are she and Mulder commuting?), and features a climactic chase in a city I assume was Richmond but may have been somewhere else. Worse, the coy are-they-or-aren't-they relationship between Mulder and Scully that was emphasized in the latter years of the series has progressed into something revealed so opaquely that it takes a good while to recognize what it is.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe is in no conventional sense a good movie. And yet, for fans of the series, it may be just good enough. There are moments of penetrating moodiness and horror; stabs at mystical profundity that don't miss too badly; some nice performances (especially by Connolly); and even an all-too-brief appearance by Mitch Pileggi's Walter Skinner. Most important, the chemistry between Duchovny and Anderson has lost little of its fizz, and it's nice to spend more time in their company, even as it's hard not to wish they could have found a better way to occupy themselves than wandering through such a shaggy retread. This latest, and presumably last, X-Files installment is not an unpleasant way to pass a couple of hours, provided you, too, want to believe. But you have to want it pretty badly.

The New Republic:

Nolan weaves his genre obligations into this dark vision as seamlessly as one could reasonably hope. He still has some trouble establishing the geography of his action sequences and his fight scenes tend to be a bit muddled, but he nonetheless stages a number of memorable set pieces: a winged swoop over a slumbering metropolis, shot on ultra-high-definition IMAX film; a frenetic car (actually, truck) chase that culminates in the end-over-end somersaulting of an 18-wheeler. Nolan wisely minimizes the use of CGI (even when the semi is flipped), and the difference is palpable.

The director's most remarkable special effect, however, is Heath Ledger's Joker. It's a difficult performance to rate on any conventional scale, a whirlwind of energy and effects, tics and tells, Brando and Hopkins and Nicholson thrown in a blender set to "puree" and then dynamited mid-spin. To call it compelling would be a criminal understatement, and yet it seems less the creation of a living self than the annihilation of one, an exercise in the center not holding. Even without Ledger's death, this would be a deeply discomfiting performance; as it is, it's hard not to view it as sign or symptom of the subsequent tragedy.

NPR:

Ledger's Joker is every bit as disturbing as he is disturbed — tongue-flickingly reptilian, and yet disarmingly common-sensical in the way he relies on the dark side of human nature to aid him in wreaking havoc. He uses crowd psychology to endanger crowds, subverts legal niceties (wait till you see what he does with that one phone call he's allowed when arrested), and greets the perpetually self-doubting Batman as a fellow damaged soul. It's a heart-stoppingly unpredictable performance, haunted by the audience's knowledge of Ledger's death earlier this year, and rendering even darker what has to be as dark a superhero fantasy as Hollywood's likely to produce any time soon.

The A.V. Club:

Nolan lets the film's spectacular action scenes seem like the natural consequences of the conflicts between characters, conflicts that build until Gotham becomes less a setting than a stage for an operatic conflict between tortured good and contented chaos. As strong as The Dark Knight's setpieces are—and they're all pulsing showstoppers of a kind not seen in Batman Begins—the real tension comes from Nolan's willingness to let that battle's ultimate outcome remain in doubt even as the credits roll. The film's capes and cowls suggest one genre, but it's a metropolis-sized tragedy at heart.

Washington Post:

This is not because Heath Ledger died in January, though that event does perhaps add some otherwise unearned melancholy to the film. It's because Ledger's performance is so intense and so lasting; it's because despite the insane mask, it's a subtle, nuanced piece of acting so powerful it banishes all memories of the handsome Aussie behind it. The makeup seems to have liberated him: He's supple of body, expressive with only his eyes, and his voice has undulations of irony and mockery and psychopathology to it. He's an essay — in a way he's never before been, playing straight-faced characters — in pure charisma.

The New Yorker:

It’s a workable dramatic conflict, but only half the team can act it. Christian Bale has been effective in some films, but he’s a placid Bruce Wayne, a swank gent in Armani suits, with every hair in place. He’s more urgent as Batman, but he delivers all his lines in a hoarse voice, with an unvarying inflection. It’s a dogged but uninteresting performance, upstaged by the great Ledger, who shambles and slides into a room, bending his knees and twisting his neck and suddenly surging into someone’s face like a deep-sea creature coming up for air. Ledger has a fright wig of ragged hair; thick, running gobs of white makeup; scarlet lips; and dark-shadowed eyes. He’s part freaky clown, part Alice Cooper the morning after, and all actor. He’s mesmerizing in every scene. His voice is not sludgy and slow, as it was in “Brokeback Mountain.” It’s a little higher and faster, but with odd, devastating pauses and saturnine shades of mockery. At times, I was reminded of Marlon Brando at his most feline and insinuating. When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, bring the children), and, as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering—in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism—how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.

New York:

Oh, the verbiage probably wouldn’t matter if those truck crashes were any fun, but the tumult is spectacularly incoherent. Nolan appears to have no clue how to stage or shoot action. He got away with the chopped-up fights in Batman Begins because his hero was a barely glimpsed ninja, coming at villains from all angles in stroboscopic flashes. There are more variables here, which means more opportunities to say “What the f—- just happened?” I defy you to make spatial sense of the early scene in which Batman battles faux Batmen, gangsters, and the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy in a cameo that comes to nothing). If you can, move on to Level 2, diagramming the “Bat-tank versus Joker-truck versus cop car” chase. Then, finally, take the Ultimate Challenge: following the climax with Batman, the Joker, more faux Batmen, decoy hostages dressed as clowns, a SWAT team, and Morgan Freeman’s Lucius with some kind of sonar monitoring gizmo that tracks all the parties on video screens. Actually, Freeman looks like he knows what’s going on. Maybe the sequence plays well in sonar.

Slate:

There's an undeniable sense of one-upmanship at work in this sleek, luxurious-looking production—a subtext of "Oh yeah? Top this." But for all The Dark Knight's occasionally bombastic excess, it sort of does top them all, and not only in star power and sheer number of things blown up. Nolan turns the Manichean morality of comic books—pure good vs. pure evil—into a bleak post-9/11 allegory about how terror (and, make no mistake, Heath Ledger's Joker is a terrorist) breaks down those reassuring moral categories.

Globe And Mail:

Though none of the other actors comes close to matching Ledger's hideous lustre, everything in The Dark Knight is a bit more over the top than in Batman Begins. The Batman character seems to have been freshly dipped in darkness, with a new, more flexible outfit, and his raspy Batman voice sounds like a cross between Clint Eastwood and Darth Vader. His alter ego, Bruce Wayne, is even more of a smug jerk, a smooth-as-shellac billionaire who travels with a chain of fashion models on his arm.

As an actor, Bale's a bit of a stick, but at least he's constantly intense. Ditto for Eckhart as Harvey Dent, Wayne's out-of-the-closet crime fighter, his rival for the assistant district attorney Rachel Dawes. Maggie Gyllenhaal, who takes over the role of Rachel from the too perky Katie Holmes, brings welcome emotional gravity to the part, but she's far too mumsy to be convincing as the romantic ideal of both of Gotham City's most eligible hunks.

Salon:

There's no dramatic arc in "The Dark Knight" — only a series of speed bumps. The moments in the movie that should be the most dramatic are glanced over so quickly that we barely have time to register what has happened. I'm not sure the actors know what's going on, either. Bale was a tolerable Batman the first time around, even though he ultimately failed to dissolve the distance between us and that mask. Here, he tries to build on that earlier performance. In "The Dark Knight," Batman is misunderstood and mistrusted by the people of Gotham, who see him as a vigilante and not a hero who strives to protect them. Bale is slightly better as Bruce Wayne — he's such a good actor that he's capable of conveying the deepest anguish in a single, flashing blink. But his Batman, lumbering through the movie in a suit that's supposed to be lighter than previous incarnations, is a flat, dull creature, with no new tricks up his gauntlets: Playing this moody superhero, Bale has run out of shades of gray to work with.

USA Today:

The Joker is more than wild.

It's a tribute to the power of Heath Ledger's transcendent performance in The Dark Knight (* * * * out of four) that we can watch him, transfixed and deeply unsettled by the character's creepiness, laugh at his comic menace, and still manage to block out thoughts of the actor's tragic and untimely death. This is a career-making performance if ever there was one. Too bad it was a career-ending one as well.

The New York Times:

The new Batman movie isn’t a radical overhaul like its predecessor, which is to be expected of a film with a large price tag (well north of $100 million) and major studio expectations (worldwide domination or bust). Instead, like other filmmakers who’ve successfully reworked genre staples, Mr. Nolan has found a way to make Batman relevant to his time — meaning, to ours — investing him with shadows that remind you of the character’s troubled beginning but without lingering mustiness. That’s nothing new, but what is surprising, actually startling, is that in “The Dark Knight,” which picks up the story after the first film ends, Mr. Nolan has turned Batman (again played by the sturdy, stoic Mr. Bale) into a villain’s sidekick.

Los Angeles Times:

Because these kinds of movies are only as strong as their villains, a good part of the credit for the potency of "The Dark Knight" has to go to the unusual and unusually creepy and sadistic way the Joker was conceptualized by the Nolans and David S. Goyer (who has a story credit) and played by Ledger in what turned out to be his last completed screen role. The Joker's is a different kind of evil than we're used to, one that is harder for both Batman and the audience to dismiss than what Jack Nicholson did with the part nearly two decades ago.

'Dark Knight' Speed Towards Records: Midnight Shows Broke 'Star Wars: Sith' Numbers; More & More Screens Being Added [Deadline Hollywood Daily]

'The Dark Knight' opens today, nationwide.

The Hollywood Reporter:

Reteaming with "Norbit" director Brian Robbins, Murphy tries some sharp physical comedy on for size, and though he's terrific (especially as that space ship), too often the Fox vehicle is content to meet the jokes halfway.
Still, like most of Murphy's recent output, the movie aims low — as in, the targeted pint-sized audience — and its family-friendly results should translate into some solid summer numbers.

Variety:

“Meet Dave” works best when helmer Brian Robbins, working from a clever script by Rob Greenberg and Bill Corbett, uses the f/x trickery relatively sparingly, and allows Murphy to shine as the pic’s most special effect. His gracefully awkward body language in Dave's early scenes recalls Steve Martin's herky-jerky hilarity as the spiritually possessed lawyer in "All of Me."

But even after the man-shaped spaceship adapts to ambulating, Murphy remains amusing as Dave does his best to mimic the expressions and understand the language of Earthlings.

E! Online:

Think of this as Coming to Earth with Murphy not only playing a cultural fish out of water but also an unfamiliar and uncoordinated body. Scenes like the one where Dave wrestles with both a sweater and the English language in an Old Navy store are really pretty funny, but the film falls apart once it tries to become an action movie and force a big climax.

Murphy's still got chops, but unfortunately doesn't seem to care much about the scripts he picks.

The A.V. Club:

Proven comic talents like Judah Friedlander and Ed Helms make up much of Murphy's crew, but apart from speaking in contraction-free spaceman-ese, the film doesn't give them anything funny to do. Murphy's performance is little more than an unblinking variation on his Coming To America stranger-in-a-strange-land shtick crossed with gags left over from the late, unlamented '90s sitcom Herman's Head. Here a sample: Banks offers Murphy-the-ship some meat loaf. Cut to Murphy-the-captain being confused when shown footage of the singer Meat Loaf. It's comedy that doesn't ask anyone, onscreen or in the audience, to try too hard.

Chicago Tribune:

The scenario's influences range from "All of Me" to "Innerspace" to "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex" without the sex. Murphy's Dave is typified by a look of pop-eyed otherworldliness. Better material and more adept direction might've made this a perfectly solid commercial enterprise. As is, "Meet Dave" is imperfectly lame, and until Murphy—and other movie stars in his relative position of power—hold out for fresher goods, the multiplexes will continue to offer sporadically diverting time-wasters such as this one.

USA Today:

Jokes are laced with racism, homophobia and stereotypes of all stripes.

Given that co-screenwriter Bill Corbett was a writer for the quirky Mystery Science Theater 3000, Meet Dave really should have been funnier. Things certainly don't improve when the movie plunges into trite sentimentality: "The most powerful force in all the universe often comes from the smallest stars," Dave tells Gina's son, Josh. And: "Promise me you'll always take pride in being different."

The New York Times:

Of minor note is that Mr. Murphy’s penchant for playing more than one character, which until recently suggested an impatience with the limitations of most of his roles, has started to feel like a hedge against boredom. Though mildly amusing, his two characters in “Meet Dave” — a wee captain and a humanoid spaceship — neither tax nor stretch him. When the captain instructs the spaceship to walk and talk among the earthlings, it does so perfectly, the very picture of a well-oiled comedy machine.

Los Angeles Times:

If Murphy seems to have learned something from the scathing reaction to the excessive and generally grotesque "Norbit," Brian Robbins, who directed that movie as well as this one, has not. As if to make up for Murphy's tightly controlled performance, the movie's other actors are pushed past the limits of parody. A graceful actress in a thankless role, Banks is given little but a string of open-mouthed reaction shots, and Gabrielle Union fares no better as the captain's onboard love interest. The ship's unnamed crew members are a collection of undifferentiated types who evolve into lazy caricatures under the influence of Earth's undisciplined emotions. There's a black crewman (Kevin Hart) who becomes a trash-talker lech after he's exposed to hip-hop, a mustachioed grunt (Pat Kilbane) who catches a glimpse of "A Chorus Line" and swiftly goes gay, and a nerdy engineer (Judah Friedlander) who starts racking up MySpace friends. For a self-proclaimed superior race, these Lilliputian explorers are notably underdeveloped.

AOL via AP:

Essentially phoning in the broad, family friendly shtick that has become his trademark over the past decade, Murphy stars as both a human-sized spaceship that has landed on Earth and its itty-bitty captain, who is at the controls from inside the ship's head.

It's a high-concept premise from screenwriters Rob Greenberg ("Frasier") and Bill Corbett ("Mystery Science Theater 3000"), but the execution is mostly lowbrow. Director Brian Robbins, whose "Norbit" with Murphy last year looks like a bold slice of comic genius by comparison, runs through a variety of bland fish-out-of-water scenarios in workmanlike fashion. (And let's not forget that for all eternity, we can refer to it as the Academy Award-nominated "Norbit," since it was recognized for its complex makeup.)

'Meet Dave' opens in theaters nationwide today.

NPR:

Even at their bloodiest, though, those directors never sent their characters through the abbatoir the way Wanted does. As part of his training, Wesley gets pummeled mercilessly — and the existence of the Fraternity's miraculous "recovery room" doesn't make the damage any easier to watch.

Bekmambetov sometimes shows evidence of a lighter touch, as in the scene where a furious Wesley smashes a computer keyboard and the now-detached keys spell out a taunting message as they hurtle through the air.

Too bad the director doesn't show a similar irreverence toward such inane plot devices as "the loom of fate." Night Watch and Day Watch had ludicrous elements of their own, but those movies weren't nearly as into their own nonsense as Wanted is.

Los Angeles Times:

In a movie that musters barely more than a dozen speaking parts, there are heroes and there is cannon fodder. In a thrilling face-to-face battle that sends a passenger train plummeting into a gorge, there's not even a pause to acknowledge the collateral damage of the duel between supermen. Bekmambetov savors the way a target's forehead explodes as a bullet burrows through from the back, but the slaughter of innocents fails to hold his interest.

As much fun as it is to watch Bekmambetov play with his action figures, the movie would be more engaging if he ever got under their polyurethane skin. McAvoy tries mightily to bridge the gap between wheezy nebbish and eager assassin, but there's nothing pushing him forward beyond the movie's pronounced contempt for his former life. In "Wanted's" cosmos, there are wolves and there are sheep, and the sheep are not even worth pitying.

New York Sun:

The movie has its moments, one or two good jokes, and a satisfactory number of exploding heads, but, whatever its director's aspirations, it fails to convey that sense of another world — ours but not quite — that ought to be key to any comic book adaptation. A film of this type should be a magic carpet ride, exhilarating and impossible. "Wanted," by contrast, is as functional as a trip on the crosstown bus, complete with stops, starts, and periods of boredom.

Salon:

That's why Wesley's escape from mundane life is so cathartic for us, the audience. McAvoy is a young actor who has already proved himself in several radically different roles, among them a clueless young doctor in "The Last King of Scotland" and a tragic romantic hero in "Atonement," as well as, of course, a faun in a jaunty red scarf. Here, he's an Everyman with a shot at finally being somebody. Watching Wesley imitate, or attempt to imitate, Fox's leapfrog flips and gazelle-like grand jetés (on top of a moving train, no less), is freeing for us, too. "Wanted" has a sense of humor about itself — a sick one — and a pulse, albeit one that beats deep beneath the corpselike coldness of its surface. But McAvoy, jittery and alive, is its central nervous system. He feels it where it hurts.

Entertainment Weekly:

Wanted is kind of unintelligible and idiotic. Also kind of nasty and brutish. And also undeniably kind of fun, especially when Angelina Jolie, as an assassin (assassiness? assassinix?) appropriately named Fox, narrows her cat eyes, sets her lush mouth, flashes an Illiad's worth of tattooed text on her impossible bod, and brandishes firearms.

Wired:

Orchestrating the picture's gut-thumping action is Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (the Night Watch horror trilogy). He goes to the well a few times too many with his beloved slo-mo sequences, but Bekmambetov's noir heart is in the right place. Live-action stunt work dominates CGI effects in Wanted: Rats attack, cars vault through space with unearthly grace, shooters bend their bullets' trajectories, trains fall into gorges with a satisfying crunch and faces get pummeled in the best Fight Club tradition.

The New Republic:

Any film that features Angelina Jolie as an international assassin is, pretty much by definition, a film that glamorizes violence. But Wanted, the Hollywood debut of Kazakh-Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, does more than glamorize. It glorifies. It fetishizes. It consecrates. The crunch of bone against bone, the rasp of blade through flesh, and (especially) the planting of bullet in forehead such that it may emerge as a crimson bloom out the back of the skull—the movie's commitment to the staging of such traumas is so complete that they almost seem justified on aesthetic grounds alone.

Wanted is in many ways a deplorable film, but it is also—and, depending upon your perspective, this is either a good or a bad thing—an immensely stylish, effective one. More than any film since The Matrix, it is a ballet of brutality. But unlike Keanu's excellent adventure, which tarted itself up with mystical mumbo jumbo and a sci-fi conceit (and made sure most of its victims were computer simulations), Wanted is blunt and unapologetic. I don't believe I've ever seen a movie that advertised itself more plainly as an escapist fantasy for masculine impotence.

The New York Times:

What does turn up looks familiar — the slowed bullets, the air that ripples like water, an underground group, here called the Fraternity — especially if you’ve seen “The Matrix.” Although Mr. Bekmambetov and his team take plenty of cues from that film, they have tried to distinguish their dystopian nightmare by borrowing from even farther afield. To that end the Fraternity practices its murderous skills on pig carcasses (much as Daniel Day-Lewis does in “Gangs of New York”) while bunkered in a sprawling factory (that looks like Hogwarts). I’m pretty sure I saw the fabulous recovery room — a concrete spa filled with sunken tubs and lighted candles where Fraternity members go for restorative soaks after a hard day of carnage — in a layout in Vogue.

TIME:

As if in instant celebration of the Supreme Court's ruling on a citizen's right to bear arms — and of the newly articulated "individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation" — the burly new fantasy Wanted reveals the magic that can blossom when you put a gun in the hand of a meek wage slave and tell him he was born to be a righteous killer. Directed at a pitch of gritty giddiness by the Kazakhstan-born Timur Bekmambetov, who did the DVD faves Night Watch and Day Watch, this hard-R splatter-fest about a team of sanctified assassins is also the summer's zazziest action movie.

'Wanted' opens today, nationwide.

The Love Guru:
The A.V. Club:

Pop-culture riffing, winking double entendres, scatological humor, and silly names aren't just the foremost weapons in Myers' comic arsenal, they're all he's got. Myers combines his love of references, silly names, and mindless repetition by having his guru use "Mariska Hargitay" as a greeting/mantra. The first time it's employed, it's merely unfunny; by the 13th or 40th time, it's almost hypnotic in its awfulness. Then again, given Myers' love of the tried-and-true, maybe Guru's compulsive comic recycling and endless repetition are intentional.

The New York Times:

…Which might sum up The Love Guru in its entirety but only at the risk of grievously understating the movie’s awfulness. A whole new vocabulary seems to be required. To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word “unfunny” surely applies to Mr. Myers’s obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, The Love Guru is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

Chicago Sun-Times:

Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents. Every reference to a human sex organ or process of defecation is not automatically funny simply because it is naughty, but Myers seems to labor under that delusion.

Get Smart:
The A.V. Club:

For some unfathomable reason, Adams' original Max has been reconceived here as a considerably more competent operative, a brilliant analyst who can also kick a little ass when 99 isn't rescuing him from various scrapes. How is that funny? Carell will do anything for a laugh, and as with his character in The Office, Max's obliviousness to other people and to his own ineptitude plays to Carell's strengths. But Get Smart is too slick by half, and there's little in the script to support the star but a series of warmed-over spy games punctuated by pain humor and strained banter with Hathaway's snippy, scolding 99. In updating a beloved TV show, the filmmakers have gone out of their way to excise everything that was fun about it.

Chicago Tribune:

Missed it by that much. Actually, the new version of Get Smart misses by a fair-size margin. It's too bad. It's just trying to give us a good time at the retroplex. Even if you're 14 and you've never heard Irving Szathmary's classic deedley-deedley-deedley-deedley theme before, it's enough to make you smile. This is all any of these TV-to-screen comedies are after: a few laughs. Who knows? Get Smart, starring Steve Carell in the role originated by Don Adams (though initially offered to Tom Poston!), may well turn into a summer hit of the "well, it's good enough" variety.

E! Online:

Sadly, gags fall flat, one-liners lack pizzazz and the leads generate little chemistry. Sure, Carell is cute, and Hathaway looks sassy in multizippered leather jackets and slit-to-there gowns, but without snappier banter and greater sexual tension, their pseudo romance (even involving a flashback montage, ugh!) feels forced… Those seeking more entertaining fare would be, well, smart to look elsewhere.

Verdict: Oh hell, you knew The Love Guru was going to suck more than Get Smart! It stars Justin Timberlake in a comedic role! Get Smart may stink, but at least it has Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway to rescue it from being a complete mess.

Maybe if you are in the mood for some nostalgic movie-going you could go see Kit Kittredge: An American Girl instead.