1. Hardcore Career Woman Whose Heart Melts: Pity the loveless, career-driven shrew — that is, until the right man comes along. Best-laid plans, etc. As seen in The Proposal, No Reservations, What Happens In Vegas, Raising Helen, and New In Town, these hard-hearted women learn what really matters through a series of highly convoluted circumstances.

2. Falling In Love With The Help : It's a genre at least as old as Jane Eyre, but the last decade saw no sign of upstairs-downstairs eroticism abating. Often with the service-industry job in the title — Maid in Manhattan, The Wedding Planner, The Nanny Diaries, even Secretary, these movies were mostly Cinderella fantasies, spiced up with power differentials. Love Actually actually managed to fit several such romances into one movie (with Colin Firth, Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman's plotlines).

3. Quirky Girl Brings Adventure: It's good news that eighties-style makeover flicks were in short supply in the last decade. And maybe we can also be happy that in the place of the ugly duckling came the nominally indie, self-consciously quirky girl with the adventurous streak — see Natalie Portman in Garden State, (500) Days Of Summer (actually, this genre is essentially owned by Zooey Deschanel), Nick & Nora's Infinite Playlist, Juno, and even Serendipity and Along Came Polly.

4. Journalist On Assignment (Often Secretly): The traditional media may be in crisis, but on the silver screen, being a journalist remains glamorous, exciting, and the best way to meet a man. How else does one get into romance-ready scrapes? See: How To Lose A Guy in Ten Days, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Rumor Has It, Down With Love, The Ugly Truth, and even wedged into dual audience comedies like Mr. Deeds (an unconvincing Winona Ryder as a tabloid reporter) and Zoolander (Christine Taylor as an investigatory journalist.)

5. The Reformed Bad Boy. This genre allows both male actors and the audience to have it both ways: first, caddish masculinity and assurance that our hero is a guy's guy, then, the right woman to come along and transform him, unwillingly, into a softy. See, for example, Wedding Crashers, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Hitch, Two Weeks Notice, About a Boy, and What Women Want. Who said you can't change a man?

6. My Best Friend's Wedding (Stretched Over Another Decade). There is a strong correlation between the ballad of the overlooked best friend (or sometimes sibling) and the frantic drama of the wedding. Maybe we can blame Julia Roberts — if her character in the 1997 hit didn't get the guy at the end, well, we've spent the oughts making up for it. Movies like Made of Honor, My Best Friend's Girl, 27 Dresses, Definitely Maybe, Just Friends, and In Her Shoes make it clear from the trailer that the buddy will come to his or her senses in 90 minutes or less.

7. Dealing With The Hardass Parents: In-law jokes are a worn genre in and of themselves, but films like Monster in Law, Meet The Parents, Guess Who, You Me & Dupree, and Just Married took it to the next level with slapstick gags about overbearing parents jealously protecting their offspring. An implicit reaction to the new overparenting?

8. Male Lead, Stammering Charm: Whether you preferred him British (Hugh Grant) or Yiddish (Ben Stiller), it was all about the klutzy je ne sais quoi. Grant in particular owned this genre, starting in the 90s and persisting throughout the oughts with the wretched Music & Lyrics, the Bridget Jones' Diary movies, and now Did You Hear About The Morgans?, among others.

9. Fish Out Of Water: Nothing's hotter than being new in town and needing to be initiated by an attractive stranger. See: Save The Last Dance, The Holiday, The Prince & Me, New In Town, and Under The Tuscan Sun.

10. Time Travel: romantic comedies are all about putting road blocks between hero and heroine. And what's a better impediment than living in different ages? In movies like Kate and Leopold, 13 going on 30, 17 Again, and The Time Traveler's Wife, love proved it could triumph over the time-space continuum.

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

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

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

NPR

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

Rolling Stone

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

Time

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

The Los Angeles Times

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

Entertainment Weekly

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

The A.V. Club

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

The New Yorker

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

Newsweek

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

The New York Times

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

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

Slate

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

Variety

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

The Wall Street Journal

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

The Village Voice

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

Salon

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

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

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

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

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

Reel Views

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

Reel Views

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

The New York Times

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

New York Magazine

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

The Chicago Sun-Times

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

USA Today

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

Salon

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

The Hollywood Reporter

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

Variety

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

Time Out New York

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

The A.V. Club

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

The New York Post

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

The Washington Post

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

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

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

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

The Los Angeles Times

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

The New York Post

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

USA Today

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

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

Associated Press

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

Variety

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

Time Out New York

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

The Chicago Sun-Times

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

New York Daily News

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

Rolling Stone

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

The New York Times

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

Salon

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

Time

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

The Boston Globe

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

The A.V. Club

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

Slate

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Village Voice

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

Salon

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

Entertainment Weekly

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

Slate

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

New York Magazine

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

The Los Angeles Times

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

The Hollywood Reporter

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

The New York Times

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

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

Official trailer:

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.

Worry 1: Overly Hipstered-Out.
Justified? You know what I mean; I trust Spike Jonze, but there's always the danger of lots of Marie Antoinette-style posturing better suited to a music video. The crowd - a mix of 20-something couples and with-it parents (I heard kids addressed as Milo, Oscar, Adlai and Dahlia while on line) didn't exactly allay my fears, But! It wasn't! I'll admit to concerns when I saw Max's hand-knit Scandinavian sweater and hair that looked suspiciously like it might be acquainted with a barber's razor. But despite the continual presence of Karen O's voice, the atmo never grew, to my mind, self-conscious.

Worry 2: Overly Precocious Kid
Justified? This was a major, major concern of mine, as I feel like wise-cracking kids spouting an adult's idea of clever is a major bane of our times and has an adverse effect on our children. Not a chance. The little boy in the movie, Max Records, was fantastic. Not a sassy line, and he seemed to be genuinely enjoying it.

Worry 3: Would Pull A Polar Express - Or Worse, Cat in the Hat.
Justified? There's a terrible trend of sort of throwing out what's magical about a kid's book and using it as a chance for technical acrobatics or a star's wholly unrelated shtick (ahem, Jim Carey.) Jonze didn't - he seems to have stuck to the book as he understood it. But those are the operative words: no one's experience of an 8-page book is going to be the same, because it's at least 40% imagination. Which brings me to worry 5:

Worry 4: That The Wild Things Would Be Cartoon-Cute
Justified? Yeah, kinda. I'm not saying they were Jim Carey-cloying, because they weren't. But the Wild Things were still cartoon animals in the sitcom, Ice-Age, vocal talent, one-liner tradition. Which is okay, I guess, and it's what kids are used to. Jonze clearly envisioned the Wild Things as adult entities with kid sensibilities. I guess to me they'd always been essentially savage - you know, wild! Here, they became projections of Max, whereas I'd always felt a lot of the book's power came from actually having control over a world much scarier than the real one. The id, sure, but a more abstract one! When they said, "we'll eat you up, we love you so" it wasn't an endearment, but a threat. Maybe this is why the two moments that really captured the book for me were the dirt fight - in which they all go genuinely kid-wild - and the final farewell, in which all the Wild Things begin a mournful yowl. I wish there'd been more yowling, less banter. Even when the Wild Things showed their fangs, as it were, they were still...familiar.

Worry 5: Would Suck
Justified? Nope. It's a little slow for some, a little cute for me and, yes, the under-5's in the audience commenced screaming a few minutes in, precipitating a mass exodus. But those kids who stayed seemed to like it. A little girl of about 6 told me she hadn't been scared (although her dad said she was.) One little guy, 5, told me seriously, "It was sad. But wild." And you really can't ask for more than that.

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

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

Entertainment Weekly

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

The Wall Street Journal

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

The New York Times

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

The Washington Post

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

The A.V. Club

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

USA Today

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

New York Magazine

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

The Chicago Sun-Times

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

Reel Views

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

The Boston Globe

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

The Hollywood Reporter

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

Variety

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

The Village Voice

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

The New Yorker

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

Slate

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

The Los Angeles Times

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

Salon

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

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

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

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

Entertainment Weekly

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

The A.V. Club

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

The New York Times

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

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

Salon

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

Variety

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

The Los Angeles Times

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

The Washington Post

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

The Village Voice

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

Time Out New York

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

The Chicago Sun-Times

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

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

Directed and produced by Corinne Manabat, Gangsta Ways shares the powerful story of Davina Wan, a former gang member who charted a different course for her life after losing one of her closest friends. The description is here:

For most of us, wedding cakes and caps and gowns mark our life's milestones. For D. Wan, it is switchblades and dog tags. Excuse My Gangsta Ways, a documentary by Corinne E. Manabat, explores the life of Wan, a Chinese American from New York's Lower East Side, and her transition from a life of gang violence to a "normal" life. Visually poetic and uncompromising in its portrayal of gang culture, Excuse My Gangsta Ways uses interviews with Wan and her family to reach beyond stereotypes of urban gang members and America's "model minority." We will take a look at the person she was and the person she has become, where fate and inspiration endure.

When I saw the short film at this year's DC APA Film Festival, I was blown away at the level of honesty and pain captured in a scant fifteen minutes.

Wan's grandmother and godfather both share tales of Wan's rebellion, beginning after her parent's separation when she was young. Keenly describing the painful home situation she grew up in, it almost makes sense why she abandoned her former life and fell into an all-girl gang. However, through it all, she still dreamed of a different type of future. When one of her best friends dies, the tightly knit gang unraveled and Wan found herself wanting out. The film also explores her life now, and discusses the cost and result of that journey.

Manabat, in an interview about the film, talks about the ways in which Wan's story challenged the predominant (and often stereotypical) narrative about the lives of Asian American women:

In the Q & A session after the film, Manabat mentioned that while her film was geared toward an Asian American/Urban audience in mind, the film was really for everyone - that the theme of transformation was most prominent. I agree - though gang life is a far cry from the relatively safe and stable world I grew up in, I felt myself relating to Wan's tale of being lost and adrift in a hostile world. This articulation of the inner lives of young girls is rare, but explains why some of us flee from our homes early, often into the arms of older men, trying to "raise ourselves the best way [we] knew how" as Davina's godfather put it.

Both Wan and Manabat do community outreach, and workshops targeted around the film - through their work, they are hoping to reach some of the other lost girls in the world, and show them there is a way for them to find something like home.

Excuse My Gangsta Ways [Third World Newsreel]
Official Site [DC APA Film Festival 2009]
My Space Page [Excuse My Gangsta Ways]
Next Screening [San Diego Asian Film Festival]

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

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

Chicago Sun-Times

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

New York Daily News

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

The Los Angeles Times

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

The Hollywood Reporter

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

Variety

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

Time Out New York

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

The Boston Globe

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

The Miami Herald

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

The Washington Post

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

The A. V. Club

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

Entertainment Weekly

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

Reel Views

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

USA Today

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

The New York Times

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

Salon

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

Earlier: 7 Things I Loved About Whip It

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

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

Here's what the critics are saying:

USA Today

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

The Los Angeles Times

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

The New York Times

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

New York Daily News

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

Associated Press

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

The New Yorker

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

Time

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

Below is the trailer for Coco Before Chanel:

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

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

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

The Kansas City Star

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

The Guardian

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

Entertainment Weekly

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

The Boston Herald

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

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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

Time Out London

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

Variety

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

Empire

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

IGN

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

The Orlando Sentinel

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

The 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