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

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

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

The Wall Street Journal

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

The Chicago Sun-Times

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

Salon

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

New York Magazine

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

Entertainment Weekly

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

The New York Times

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

The Los Angeles Times

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

Reel Views

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

Rolling Stone

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

The Village Voice

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

The Hollywood Reporter

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

The New Yorker

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

Slate

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

Women & Hollywood

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

Ain't It Cool News

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

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

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

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

NPR

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

Hollywood Reporter

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

The Chicago Sun-Times

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

The Boston Globe

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

Reel Views

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

USA Today

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

Entertainment Weekly

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

Salon

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

The Los Angeles Times

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

The Washington Post

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

Variety

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

The A.V. Club

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

The Wall Street Journal

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

The New York Times

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

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?"

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

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

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

Slate

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

The Chicago Sun-Times

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

The New York Times

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

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

The Miami Herald

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

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

The Hollywood Reporter

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

USA Today

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

Variety

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

The Boston Globe

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

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

The A.V. Club

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

Reel Views

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

Salon

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

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

Earlier: 6 Reasons To Love Jennifer's Body

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

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

Below, check out what the critics are saying:

Variety

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

The Hollywood Reporter

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

Time Out New York

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

The Wall Street Journal

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

New York Post

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

Time

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

NPR

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

Entertainment Weekly

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

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

Salon

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

The Village Voice

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

The A.V. Club

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

The New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

The Chicago Sun-Times

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

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

The Miami Herald

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

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

Time

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

The Village Voice

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

Reel Views

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

Variety

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

The Boston Globe

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

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

Hollywood Reporter

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

The A.V. Club

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

The Washington Post

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

The New Yorker

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

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

The Los Angeles Times

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

Salon

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

The New York Times

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

Slate

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

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

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

The Chicago Sun-Times

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

L.A. Times

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

The Washington Post

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

The New York Times

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

The Hollywood Reporter

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

Variety

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

Miami Herald

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

Slate

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

Time

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

New York Magazine

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

The San Francisco Chronicle

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

The A.V. Club

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

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

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

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

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

Salon

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

New York Magazine

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

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

Associated Press

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

Hollywood Reporter

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

The San Francisco Chronicle

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

The Village Voice

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

The Wall Street Journal

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

Entertainment Weekly

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

The Los Angeles Times

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

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

The New York Times

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

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

The Boston Globe

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

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

Slate

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

The Worst Julie & Julia Puns [Humor Slays Me]

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

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

The Washington Post

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

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

New York Magazine

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

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

Variety

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

Slate

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

The New York Times

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

The Wall Street Journal

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

CNN

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

The Boston Globe

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

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

USA Today

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

Reel Views

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

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

Salon:

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

Slate:

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

The New York Times:

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

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

The Los Angeles Times:

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

Newsweek:

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

The A.V. Club:

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

The New York Observer:

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

Entertainment Weekly:

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

The Hollywood Reporter:

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

Variety:

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

The Toronto Star:

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

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

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

'Rachel Getting Married' opens today in limited release.

The Los Angeles Times:

The duke ought to be the villain of this piece, and, in fact, he is, but it is the wonder of Fiennes' performance that it is not only a marvelous portrayal of absolute power in the flesh but also the most sympathetic portrait of a man who, by rights, shouldn't have even the tiniest drop of our regard.

Twice Oscar-nominated (for "Schindler's List" and "The English Patient"), Fiennes works in the subtlest ways, layering in everything from how he carries himself to the way unstated emotions are hinted at by his stone-like face, to present someone who can't help being who he is. Thanks to Fiennes, we come to understand the enigmatic duke as the immovable object deeply perplexed at having to contend with the unstoppable force that is his wife. It is a quietly complex performance almost beyond words, and it overshadows all the gorgeous pictures that are its elegant frame.

Time:

At a certain level, The Duchess is a parable, possibly even a fantasy, about female empowerment.

Fortunately for us, however, it does not linger often or long at that level. As movies like this go — stately homes constantly arustle with the sound of lingerie falling gently to the parquet floors — it is quite a lively, and even occasionally a rather touching, piece.

USA Today:

Though it does have occasional elements of a bodice-ripper romance, the engaging story is distinguished by sharp writing and strong acting. This is a highbrow and elegant chick flick that outstrips the likes of The Women or other insipid movies targeted to females.

The Duchess explores the nature of celebrity and charisma. Most compellingly, it chronicles the saga of a vibrant and forward-thinking woman hampered by the constraints of a rigid society.

Salon:

The raw material here would be a pile of riches for any actress to dig into, and the screenwriters give Knightley plenty to work with. (The script was adapted by Dibb, Anders Thomas Jensen and Jeffrey Hatcher, the last of whom is the screenwriter, and playwright, behind "Stage Beauty," as well as the writer of the underappreciated bonbon "Casanova," starring the late Heath Ledger.) And Knightley doesn't let them down. I've come a long way with Knightley over the years, from finding her almost unbearable to watch (I just couldn't get past the skeletal planes of her face) to falling in love with her circa "Pride and Prejudice." Knightley's performance here veers gracefully from the charming to the devastating: One minute she's giggling as she plays cards with her cherubic little offspring; the next, she's crestfallen when she realizes that her husband is determined to choke off all her life's happiness. (Fiennes' performance here is wholly without vanity: He holds nothing back in playing a loathsome, stubborn character, though he still manages to let glimmers of humanity peek through.) Everything Knightley does rings true and clear — she defines the character of Georgiana in a way that's not anachronistic, nor modern in a forced way, but timeless. That's a lot to ask of a young actress, but Knightley is up to the task. Her Georgiana is history with a human face.

The New York Times:

A big-boned beauty who leads with her jaw, Ms. Knightley looks pretty as a Gainsborough picture in and out of her silks and satins, but she’s not a remotely composed one. Though now 23, she still tends to throw herself around the room like one of those jangling adolescent girls who, arms and legs pinwheeling, heads bobbing like Halloween apples, have yet to adjust to their newly sprouted bodies. (Modigliani would have loved the willowy bend of her neck if he could have persuaded her to stop fidgeting.) She’s not much of an actress — she pops her eyes instead and thrusts out her chest — but she doesn’t need to be Helen Mirren if she can cultivate a real screen presence. Stillness would become her, as would a good director.

NPR:

And when Her Grace undresses — or rather, is undressed by an impatient if only vaguely attentive duke on their wedding night — the director shows us the pinch marks made in Knightley's back by her tight-laced corset.

As many times as I've watched women getting strapped into those things in costume epics, I don't think I've ever seen the pinched flesh. Says worlds, I'd say, about what both the star and the duchess were willing to put up with

The A.V. Club:

To some extent, The Duchess recalls Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, in that it's about bed-hopping and courtly ritual during a time of revolution. Dibb isn't interested in delivering an audience-unfriendly art film, though. His Duchess is thoroughly populist and middlebrow, full of all the high wigs, thick powder, perfect diction, and straightforward dialogue that define bodice-ripping prestige pictures about silently suffering souls. Knightley's brand of muted iconoclasm has always been well-suited to just these kind of coach-and-corset movies, and as a result, the story of her character's fall from idealism to practicality becomes fairly moving. Dibb and company make too much of the parallels between Georgiana's story and that of her most famous descendent, Lady Diana Spencer, but at the same time, the "ironies of fame" material works well—not because of its specific application to the aristocracy, but for how it relates to the commoners. Lots of people dream of better lives for themselves and the citizens of the world. And lots of people stop short when they realize they need to stay home and tuck their kids into bed, so the next generation can have their own unfulfilled dreams someday.

Entertainment Weekly:

But with Knightley in the title role, something interesting happens:
 The star's sporty, modern-girl
 attitude, her Vogue-worthy eyebrows, 
and her athletic build (no matter how impressively those long limbs are encased in complicated gowns of satin and silk) lend an attitude of now-ness to a production that wants to be part historical biopic, part 
 tabloid-relevant. (Director Saul Dibb has a background in documentaries.)

Knightley, now 23, is not a very deep interpreter of her roles (whether in Atonement or the Pirates of the 
 Caribbean trilogy), nor is she as hip as Kirsten Dunst and the rest of the in crowd who cavorted in Sofia Coppola's 
fashion-forward Marie Antoinette with downtown élan. But that hardly matters in The Duchess.

New York:

Every turn is telegraphed, but Fiennes’s duke is a fascinating stiff—uneasy with his privilege but ruthless in using it. Not only is Knightley most excellent, her starved-supermodel look adds an affecting subtext: that the economic impact of male disapproval still inhibits women’s freedom.

Variety:

How Georgiana exploited both her celebrity and her instinctive empathy with commoners to drum up electoral support for her close associate, Lord Charles Fox (an underused Simon McBurney), is dealt with only superficially. Though equally apolitical, Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" displayed more insight into its subject (an acquaintance of Georgiana's, and arguably the less interesting figure) than "The Duchess" manages with its more straightforward reading of history.

While Knightley ably embodies Georgiana's easy wit, occasional naivete and ahead-of-her-time common sense, her performance is somewhat diminished by its familiarity and the film's reductive view of its protag. And as lovely as the actress is, all that finery can have a smothering effect; she looked more radiant amid the sweat and squalor of Joe Wright's "Pride & Prejudice."

The Hollywood Reporter:

The melodrama is a bit bloodless, though, figuratively and literally. This is a not-uninteresting chapter during an exciting time in British and European politics — neither the American nor French revolutions get mentioned — but writers Dibbs, Jeffrey Hatcher and Anders Thomas Jensen find no way to connect us with these distant personages. Probably the most surprising thing to a modern audience is how aristocrats engage in the most intimate and embarrassing conduct in full view of servants who are treated as little more than furniture.

'The Duchess' opens today in limited release.

Village Voice:

Resist if you dare, and for as long as you must, but even the hoariest haters eventually succumbed to the girly, cottony charms of 2005's Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, if in the privacy of their Netflix queues. I foresee a similar fate for its blandly engaging sequel: moms, daughters, and faux-ironic twentysomethings filling the theaters, the rest of us filling our jammies and DVD players in six months.

Fox News:

Stuff happens, feelings are hurt, boys dramatically enter and leave their lives and major problems wrap up a bit too neatly, especially at the picturesque ending. That "Traveling Pants 2" offers material that's tailored to an underserved audience _ girls and women who like films that allow them to think and feel _ is, of course, a solid start. You just wish it were a more comfortable fit.

The Hollywood Reporter:

Much has transpired in the lives of best friends forever Tibby, Carmen, Bridget and Lena and their shared globe-trotting jeans in the three years since the first "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants."

But it's nothing compared to castmate America Ferrera's career in the interim, as the Emmy-winning breakout star of ABC's "Ugly Betty."

She remains very much the team player in "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2," a shapely sequel that retains much of the sparkle and warmth that made the original such a pleasant surprise.

USA Today:

With the quartet of girls now in their first year of college, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (* * 1/2 out of four) is more of a coming-of-age story than its 2005 predecessor, tackling more mature subjects. However, for all its moments of believable dialogue and persuasive emotional truths, it also has some fairy-tale scenarios. But that's almost a textbook definition of a chick flick, so it doesn't interfere much with the film's appeal. And the performances of the four young women, particularly plucky America Ferrera and sardonic Amber Tamblyn, are likable and often charming.

Entertainment Weekly via CNN:

But three years ago, in "Sisterhood 1," half the cast were way more famous than the other. Back then, TV stars Alexis Bledel ("Gilmore Girls") and Amber Tamblyn ("Joan of Arcadia") were the well-known pair of actresses, although you'd never know it from the movie, which smoothly offered all four performers equal time to be cute, freak out about something, and literally wear the pants.

Perhaps it's no shocker, given the way Hollywood likes to turn 'em over, but now it's the other two members of the sisterhood — Blake Lively of "Gossip Girl" and America Ferrera of "Ugly Betty" — who are a lot bigger deals outside the multiplex.

Once again, much to the sequel's credit, the story doesn't seem to care. The movie keeps moving quickly (but not sloppily) among the heroines, so that if you're overloaded, say, on one sister's sugary plotline, it only comes around every fourth scene or so, and never sticks around too long. Even at 111 minutes, "Pants" mostly sprints.

Variety:

With very little sex and very little city, "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2" still seems a good bet to grab a sizable chunk of the underserved chick-flick demographic, boosted by its young stars' blossoming profiles (particularly "Gossip Girl's" Blake Lively) and a blithely shallow approach to story. A likable quartet of players, a surfeit of male bimbos and an appetite for quick-cooked emotion should make the Aug. 6 Warner Bros. release a bigger hit than its 2005 predecessor, which grossed $39 million domestically.

Chicago Sun-Times:

The movie intercuts quickly but not confusingly from one story to another, is dripping with seductive locations, is not shy about romantic cliches and has a lot of heart. The women are all sincere, intelligent, vulnerable, sweet, warm. That’s in contrast to “SATC,” with its narcissistic and shallow heroines. The “SATC” ladies should fill their flasks with cosmopolitans, go to see “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2” and cry their hearts out with futile regret for their misspent lives.

The Los Angeles Times:

In the current popular culture, female friendships — at any age — are generally considered secondary to life's "important" relationships, the romantic bonds between men and women.

Nowhere is this depressing trend more evident than in Hollywood, where story lines putatively about women's friendships tend toward the saccharine ("Mona Lisa Smile"), the malicious ("Mean Girls") or the boy-crazy (take your pick).

Which is why it's such a pleasure (and a relief) to encounter movies such as " The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2." Like the first "Pants" movie, it presents its heroines' relationships as complicated, challenging and particularly rewarding, and not simply as a vehicle for finding the perfect boyfriend.

Premiere:

It's easy to dismiss The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 as just another typical teen film with jocky dudes and back-stabbing girls that tend to flood the teen market. There was the toothless film adaptation of The Baby-Sitters Club in 1995, starring Rachael Leigh Cook, who later graduated to become the ugly-duckling social outcast rescued by Freddie Prinze Jr. in She's All That in 1995. Similarly, we saw Clueless, starring Alicia Silverstone as the designer-clothes crazed Cher in 1995 and the Lindsay Lohan vehicle Mean Girls in 2004. While those films were either underestimating their audience or merely featuring makeovers and female rivalry, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 bridges the gap between them. The idealism of the books about childhood friendship smoothly tackles the mature relationship topics that are common in these other comedies with none of the angst or crassness. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, directed by Sarah Lawrence grad Sanaa Hamri, depicts refreshingly positive female friendship based in reality without cynicism.

Wednesday Is The New Friday In Movie Releases [LA Times]

Earlier: 'Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants 2' Isn't Amazing, But You Should See It Anyway

'Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2' opens today, nationwide.

The director, Sanaa Hamri, also helmed Something New, and she handled the story of four smart young women dealing with romantic, familial and working relationships really well. I dig Tibby (Amber Tamblin)'s pseudo-feminist character because she's sharp, witty and vulnerable. (Plus, her boyfriend is Asian. And they don't even mention it!) Carmen (America Ferrera) is alternately fierce and insecure. Lena (Alexis Bledel) has a magnetic attraction to the hot hot model from her figure drawing class, and that's before she sees him naked. He's black, but, again, they don't even mention it. The only character with a weak plotline is Bridget (Blake Lively), but since she appears in scenes with both Blythe Danner and personal fave Shohreh Aghdashloo, she of House Of Sand And Fog, you try to forgive. Is it too long? Maybe. Does it go back and forth between the characters too much? Perhaps. But seriously: A movie directed by a woman, written by a woman, based on books written by a woman, starring young women with minorities and older women as supporting cast? Give it a chance. Or at least rent it when it comes out on DVD.

Wall Street Journal:

"Hancock" has been packaged and heavily promoted as a summer blockbuster — a big, spectacular production starring the ever-likable Will Smith. It is indeed summer, and Mr. Smith plays the title role, but that's as far as any truth in advertising goes. The movie seems negligible; its running time is a mere 92 minutes. And it succeeds only at the hitherto-impossible task of making Mr. Smith disagreeable (though never boring; whatever he does, he's a movie star). He plays a gangsta superhero — a foulmouthed, misanthropic, booze-slugging slob who happens to have superpowers. It's a tricky notion done badly, though surely an oddity that will find a large audience. Any notions of demolishing black stereotypes — and what else could have possessed Mr. Smith to do this? — are dashed by the coarseness of it all, and by the narrative incoherence; a surprising plot twist turns a sloppy action-comedy into a totally different movie, and an even worse one.

Wired:

To match the film's tonal shift after the thrilling twist, cinematographer Tobias Schliessler trades in the sun-bleached Los Angeles cityscape that marks Hancock's early adventures for gorgeously distorted close-ups rendered in a rain-soaked color palette. These closing scenes work as the audience — and Hancock — finally learn the secret to the superhero's orneriness.

Unlike bland Everymen from Bruce "Hulk" Banner and Peter "Spidey" Parker to Clark "Superman" Kent, Smith's reluctant superhero shares an invaluable superpower with Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man. Both may have screwed-up personalities, but at least they know how to crack a joke.

TIME:

I just realized something. None of this matters. A critique of Hancock is an essay in irrelevance. It's Independence Day Week, and six times since 1996, that's meant a Will Smith movie — a mega-giga-gigantic hit. Independence Day; Men in Black; Wild Wild West; Men in Black II; I, Robot: He shows up, people line up. Thomas Jefferson used to own this holiday, but now the former Fresh Prince does. So why should critics even bother to review a new Will Smith movie? You'll go see it anyway.

Entertainment Weekly:

Hancock can revel in schmuckery, of course, because you and I and cute kids and peaceful oldies worldwide know in advance that there's no way on Hollywood's green earth Will Smith will ever play someone seriously, dangerously unsavory. Charm is the star's armor on either side of the alien-human divide, whether he's a Fresh Prince, a Bad Boy, a Man in Black, the last man alive in New York City, or Muhammad Ali. And so, in the beginning, the movie — part comedy, part action-thriller, and a whole lot of earnest, addled mush about purpose, fate, and angels — lets Smith (who is also one of the producers) have fun goofing on all that has already served him so well as a performer: Here's a hero in need of remedial charm school.

The New Republic:

Yet a dozen years after Independence Day, Smith has once again staked a claim to Independence Day, with the superhero subversion Hancock. And, like any good self-fulfilling prophecy, it will likely reign supreme at the box office because everyone has already assumed it would: Summer's other blockbusters have all deferentially ceded the field, so Hancock will go head-to-head against only a few limited releases and a kids-oriented film, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, which just happens to star Smith's seven-year-old daughter, Willow, whom we can safely assume has been promised a lifetime of spinach if she doesn't take a dive for Daddy.

Which is a shame because, Smith's indisputable talents notwithstanding, Hancock is an utter mess.

The New York Times:

The extent of that complexity doesn’t emerge until the big reveal, which involves Ms. Theron’s character and is so surprising that I heard several grown men loudly gasp. (“No way!”) I was more struck by Ms. Theron, an actress who, I think, is capable of greater depth than most of her performances require, even those that try to rub the glamour off her. She helps Mr. Smith enrich the story’s emotional texture, which is no small thing, since the movie itself starts to falter just when it begins to deepen. That’s too bad because while “Hancock” is far from perfect — it feels overly rushed, particularly toward its chaotic end — it has a raggedness that speaks honestly to the fundamental human fragility that makes the greatest heroes super.

CNN:

It's when this scenario plays out that Peter Berg's movie jumps the tracks. Writers Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan have concocted an outrageous, mind-boggling twist that comes so far out of left field you would need a crystal ball to see it coming.

No spoilers here, but it doesn't work, not in the short term and not in the big picture either. It's as if we've been whisked from one kind of movie — a brisk, superficial but entertaining high-concept comedy — and into the theater next door, where they're showing some sort of tragic "X-Men" knockoff. The last half-hour of this 92-minute movie is a fiasco.

Berg's shaky-cam technique doesn't help, nor does a weak, inadequate villain (played by Eddie Marsan). Still, it's rare — and startling — to see a big-budget movie fall apart so dramatically. Whether it was inspired by ego or economics, more than anything the turnaround feels like a colossal collective failure of nerve.

NPR:

It's a strange feeling to see the summer's most promising premise self-destruct into something bizarre and unsatisfying, but that is the Hancock experience.

It has to be emphasized that though the film's trailers carefully hide it, Hancock has a blisteringly profane tongue. How diatribes that would make a stevedore blush got a PG-13 rating is a question for another day.

The A.V. Club:

Still, it's a daring, even mildly challenging mixture for a superhero film, and while the pieces don't entirely add up, the puzzle is at least original. Smith is too much a ubiquitous superstar to entirely disappear into his role, but his playing against type offers its own flavors of comedy, and Bateman, in his comfortably well-worn role as a glib peacemaker, fills the charisma void left by Smith's stony performance. Hancock is an odd film—part My Super Ex-Girlfriend, part Transformers-esque messy blockbuster, part weird indie comic—but while it isn't necessarily as poignant as it wants to be, it manages the humor and heroics side of the equation admirably enough. If nothing else, it's worth it just to see a ready-made Superman-sized superhero in action without all the baggage of decades of retellings and reworkings; even looking at familiar faces working through a familiar genre, it's nice to be surprised for once.

Dallas Morning News:

Mr. Smith's charm helps sell the transformation of the character and the movie; part of the joke lies in seeing a megawatt star embrace his inner grouch with fantastical blunders, and part of the anticipation lies in seeing Hancock become, well, Will Smith, king of the summer box office. Some of the CG effects come off as chintzy, which may have as much to do with our general effects burnout than with deficiencies of this particular movie. (As David Denby recently noted in The New Yorker, we've reached a point where effects-driven movies come off as both too much and not enough.)

Your ultimate judgment of Hancock will likely hinge on whether or not you buy the film's dramatic identity shift. I found it rather sudden and perfunctory. I was also a little relieved to discover there's more here than initially meets the eye, that there's a movie to go along with the concept.

NY Post:

To say that Mary has a past would be the understatement of the summer. Let's just say her character makes no sense.

Nor are Mary's relationships with Ray or Hancock remotely plausible, even in a fantasy context.

Leaving behind the laughs for schmaltz, "Hancock" chickens out

at the last minute, lurching toward a cop-out happy ending that gives every indication of having been reshot at the behest of test audiences. Well, at least you won't be bored.

'Hancock' opens today, nationwide.

New York Post:

There is far too much going on in "WALL-E" to take in during a single sitting; I would have happily watched two or three more times the other night.

Some day, there will be college courses devoted to this movie.

Kids will love "WALL-E," the robot's epic adventure and his heart-tugging love story. Some adults may be less comfortable, which is fine with me; most great works of art are inherently subversive.

NPR:

But through it all, Wall-E never loses its sense of wonder: wonder at life, wonder at the universe, even wonder at the power of computer animation to bring us to worlds we've never seen before.

Wall-E is daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental — and how often do we get to say that in these dispiriting times?

The New York Times:

ather than turn a tale of environmental cataclysm into a scolding, self-satisfied lecture, Mr. Stanton shows his awareness of the contradictions inherent in using the medium of popular cinema to advance a critique of corporate consumer culture. The residents of the space station, accustomed to being tended by industrious robots, have grown to resemble giant babies, with soft faces, rounded torsos and stubby, weak limbs. Consumer capitalism, anticipating every possible need and swaddling its subjects in convenience, is an infantilizing force. But as they cruise around on reclining chairs, eyes fixed on video screens, taking in calories from straws sticking out of giant cups, these overgrown space babies also look like moviegoers at a multiplex.

They’re us, in other words. And like us, they’re not all bad.

Salon:

"WALL-E" falls somewhere between those two poles. It's not as beautifully crafted a piece of work, either visually or narratively, as "Ratatouille" is. But it does have a soul, and for a portion of the movie, at least, Stanton (who co-wrote the script, with Jim Reardon; he and Pete Docter conceived the idea for the story) does take a surprisingly firm stance on the uselessness and unlikability of humankind. "WALL-E" shows us a future world in which humans — fed largely on junk food — have become so fat they look like old-fashioned rubber dollies bloated to obscene proportions. They're obese partly because they're lazy: Instead of walking, they've gotten used to coasting along on floating chaise lounges, and robots cater to their every whim. Instead of talking to each other face-to-face, they chat with their friends on computer screens that appear to be permanently affixed just a few inches from their faces — even when their friends are sailing along right next to them.

Slate:

Directed and co-written by Andrew Stanton, a longtime Pixar collaborator who also directed the Oscar-winning Finding Nemo in 2003, Wall-E isn't quite as transcendent as last year's Ratatouille, but it's more formally innovative. Some of the lesser characters, particularly the misfit bots who help Wall-E stow away on the Axiom, could have been better fleshed out (if one can say that of a robot). But the central couple—forlorn, googly-eyed, stubbornly loyal Wall-E and sleek, directive-obsessed, but ultimately tenderhearted Eve—are triumphs of the animator's art, as their characters are established almost entirely through movement and gesture (though Burtt, who also provided the "voice" for Star Wars' R2-D2, is an expert clicker and beeper). Despite the virtuosity of its technical execution, Wall-E never feels like a soulless, well-oiled entertainment machine. Rather, the movie resembles its resilient, square-shaped hero: a built-to-last contraption with a disproportionately big heart.

Entertainment Weekly:

WALL-E is a movie you want to discover, but without giving too much of it away, I'll just say that the early ''silent movie'' section, quietly enticing as it is, is merely the prelude to an eye-boggling future-shock adventure. WALL-E himself is the movie's mascot and unlikely hero; it's up to him to save a spacebound colony of humans who've ''evolved'' into hilariously infantile technology-junkie couch potatoes. Yet even as the movie turns pointedly, and resonantly, satirical, it never loses its heart. I'm not sure I'd trust anyone, kid or adult, who didn't get a bit of a lump in the throat by the end of WALL-E, a film that brings off what the best (and only the best) Pixar films have: It whisks you to another world, then makes it every inch our own.

Variety:

That, presumably, could be addressed in a sequel. In the meantime, "Wall-E" pushes an agenda that could, and no doubt will, be interpreted as "green," or ecologically minded. It's a theme that is certainly present, at least as pertains to what forced humanity off the planet in the first place. But in a bigger sense, the picture seems to be making a quiet pitch for taking clear-headed responsibility for the health of the planet as well as one's body and mind.

The adages about how you must lie in the bed you make, and you are what you eat, both would seem to apply here. But Stanton, his co-story hatcher Pete Docter, co-scenarist Jim Reardon and the entire Pixar team operate on the principle that entertainment values come first, and they have applied it throughout to sprightly effect.

Chicago Sun-Times:

What’s more, I don’t think I’ve quite captured the film’s enchanting storytelling. Directed and co-written by Andrew Stanton, who wrote and directed “Finding Nemo,” it involves ideas, not simply mindless scenarios involving characters karate-kicking each other into high-angle shots. It involves a little work on the part of the audience, and a little thought, and might be especially stimulating to younger viewers. This story told in a different style and with a realistic look could have been a great science-fiction film. For that matter, maybe it is.

Newsweek:

Following high-concept movies about a superhero family, talking cars and a gourmet rat, this is the Disney computer animation arm's boldest experiment yet. "WALL-E" is essentially a silent film in which the two main characters, a mismatched pair of robots, communicate through bleeps and blips and maybe three words between them.

And yet director Andrew Stanton ("Finding Nemo") is resourceful enough to find infinite ways for them to express themselves — amusingly, achingly, and with emotional precision. He's also created, with the help of a team of animators, a visual marvel. Not that this is in any way surprising from a Pixar flick, but still, it's worth noting.

Wall Street Journal:

The first half hour of "WALL-E" is essentially wordless, and left me speechless. This magnificent animated feature from Pixar starts on such a high plane of aspiration, and achievement, that you wonder whether the wonder can be sustained. But yes, it can. The director, Andrew Stanton, supported by a special-forces battalion of artists, voice artists and computer wizards, has conjured up a tender, comical love story between two robots whose feelings for each other seem as nuanced and deep as any you're likely to encounter these days in live-action drama. Better still, their story plays out in two disparate worlds that amount to a unified vision, stunning and hilarious in equal measure, of what we human creatures have been up to and where it could get us.

'Wall-E' opens today, nationwide

Wall Street Journal:

The production captures the way TV used to be — before cable, alas, and before the advent of groundbreaking shows, like SATC, that pushed, ripped and shredded the envelope of episodic entertainment. It's fitfully enjoyable, and maybe better than that for those who loved the series and have been waiting eagerly for more. But in contrast to the series, which was quick-witted, fast-paced and self-ironic — oh, and sexy — the movie is earnest, often aimless (couldn't anyone cook up a plot?), visually bland (except for the fashion shows) and, at two minutes short of 2½ hours, a decreasingly amiable meander. Here's one helping of more that manages to be less.

The New Yorker:

Not a drop of the forthcoming plot had been leaked in advance, but I took a wild guess. “Apparently,” I said to the woman behind me in line, “some of the girls have problems with their men, break up for a while, and then get back together again.” “Oh, my God!” she cried. “How do you know?”...I was never sure how funny the TV series was meant to be. It kept lapsing into a straight face, even a weepy one, as the characters’ contentment came under serious threat. This uncertainty survives into the movie, which made me laugh precisely once, as a magazine editor let fly with a Diane Arbus gag. It is no coincidence that she is played by Candice Bergen, who gets just the one scene, but who is nonetheless the only bona-fide movie star on show. You cannot simply shift a load of television actors onto a movie screen and expect them to command its greater expanse; only one in a thousand will be able to summon that mysterious confluence of presence and reserve on which stardom relies—the will both to offer oneself to the camera and yet to keep back the hidden, unguessable sources of that self. We should not be surprised, therefore, that Kim Cattrall’s come-ons wilt in the transition; but who would have guessed that Sarah Jessica Parker, a nimble performer who has had a career in movies aside from the TV show, should also seem diminished and ill at ease?

The New York Times:

There was something seductive about the bubble world that the show created back in 1998, in the fantasy that all you needed to make it through the rough patches were good friends and throwdown heels. That was a beautiful lie, as the show acknowledged in its gently melancholic return in the wake of Sept. 11. Back in Season 3 Carrie asked, “Are we getting wiser, or just older?” The ideal, of course, is to do both. There is something depressingly stunted about this movie; something desperate too. It isn’t that Carrie has grown older or overly familiar. It’s that awash in materialism and narcissism, a cloth flower pinned to her dress where cool chicks wear their Obama buttons, this It Girl has become totally Ick.

Slate:

The movie's initially brisk pacing slackens when the girls spend a holiday in Mexico that's long enough for them to cycle through an entire resort-wear collection. Samantha disappears entirely for stretches, and her story arc contains some of the movie's most painfully unfeminist jokes (in which we learn, for example, that vigilant pubic grooming and toned abs are essential to female self-esteem). And an attempt to address the series' endemic whiteness by adding a subaltern black character—Jennifer Hudson as Carrie's designer-bag-toting Girl Friday—is a major misfire that only underscores our heroine's oblivious entitlement. But if you bear even a grudging affection for the show's utopic vision of female bonding as the greatest love of all, you may get choked up when Carrie appears at Miranda's door one shitty New Year's Eve (clad only in pajamas, a sequined cloche, a full-length fur, and what appear to be patent-leather spats) and reassures her friend, "You're not alone."

Los Angeles Times:

For a film that delights in indulging in frivolity at every possible turn, it examines subjects that most movies don't dare graze for their terrifying seriousness. And when it does, the movie handles them with surprising grace, wit and maturity. In other words, it's a movie for grown-ups of all ages. The press and industry screening I attended was uncharacteristically packed with women in their 20s, and my guess is that their interest had zero to do with the inclusion of Jennifer Hudson as Carrie's personal assistant — though her character, Louise, is likable and allows the writer to expand the scope of the film from a story about four friends living in New York into a tale about the contemporary lives of urban women from early adulthood to maturity.

Salon:

Admittedly, it's harder to get away with lapses like that when you're dealing with characters that a large part of your potential audience feel they already know. Then again, why mangle perfectly good characters for the sake of your plot? The psychodrama between Carrie and Big, which looms over the movie like an oppressive mushroom cloud, does play out in a way that's true to both their characters. But King takes far too long to get to the point. What's more, the movie's second and third bananas — played by appealing actors like Willie Garson, Mario Cantone and the aforementioned Handler — have almost nothing to do. King rustles together a quickie romance for two of his minor characters, but the thing is so amateurly taped together (and so minor) that you wonder why he even bothered.

The Independent:

It certainly has its faults, from the superficial – Carrie looks like a witchy, old drag queen when she dyes her hair dark, and Samantha wears too much fur – to the serious. I seriously hated the ending. But this is not a real film, in the sense of Oscar-worthy performances or scriptwriters. It's just a big, blown-up, brash version of the show, like watching five of the soppier episodes back-to-back. But as anyone who has ever spent a day snuggled up on the sofa with a box set will know, that's no bad thing.

Daily Mail:

In years to come, I suspect - and hope - that people will watch this movie, laugh at the naivety of its faux sophistication, and find its assumptions as quaint, bigoted and unconsciously racist as those of Gone With The Wind. Horribly, but typically, the four leading women end up believing, I kid you not, that their biggest fault is not loving themselves enough. One of them actually leaves her lover with the gob- smacking line: 'I love you, but I love me more.'

The Guardian:

It is all very trivial and disposable, and yet for all its contrivances, its brand-name silliness and its amplified problems afflicting the comfortably-off metropolitan classes, I can't help thinking this is still a cut above the sinister romcom slush that we are fed, week in, week out. It is still unusual to see a film that features women as the leading characters of their own lives, and which attempts to imagine life after marriage. Like something glutinous from the pudding menu, Sex and the City isn't exactly wholesome, but it won't do you much harm this once.

Rolling Stone:

Some dudes say they'd rather light their dicks on fire than endure this movie version of the ultimate in TV chickcoms. Snap out of it, guys, you just might learn something. If the film didn't go on for a punishing two and a half hours, including two fashion shows and countless designer name-checks, I might call it must-viewing for men who are clueless about the female psyche. Come on, what men aren't?

Sex and the City: The Movie opens today.

Entertainment Weekly:

The movie version of Sex and the City, written and directed by Michael Patrick King (always the show's savviest writer), is 2 hours and 22 minutes of love, tears, fashion, depression, lavish vacation, good sex, bad sex, and supreme tenderness. It's as long as five series episodes, a big sweet tasty layer cake stuffed with zingers and soul and dirty-down verve (it's not above having one of the girls poop her pants). Given the running time, though, not that much happens, and what does has several shades more gravitas. That's as it should be. We want Sex and the City on the big screen to be true to the show yet to feel more like a movie. And it does....If Sex and the City as a movie is good rather than great, that's because it lacks the show's antic, humming New York effervescence. King would have done well to come up with at least one major subplot that didn't have to do with relationships. And though Jennifer Hudson, as Carrie's assistant, has a delicate presence, the character is almost embarrassingly saintly. Why couldn't she, too, pine and chatter with the verve of the city? These are relative quibbles, however, in a movie that taps directly back into the show's primal appeal, which is the sweet, sad, saucy delight of sharing these women's company.

NY Post:

The plot, which includes a detour to Mexico, often stops for fashion parades - Carrie alone has dozens of costume changes, including montages of wedding dresses and all the '80s get-ups in her closet. An episode at Fashion Week accomplishes nothing except to bloat the punishing running time. As was often true of the series, Nixon gives the best performance and she's rewarded here with the most developed story arc. The still-sizzling Cattrall has lost none of her skill with one-liners - especially in the movie's funniest scene where the girls use the euphemism "coloring" to discuss sex in front of a child.Davis, still amusing, has almost nothing to do...This movie provides no good reasons to revisit "Sex and the City," except to fulfill fans' desires for one more for the road and add millions to Time Warner's coffers. Be careful what you wish for.

Village Voice:

Less a movie than a very long goodbye (again), at 142 minutes, Sex and the City is basically a whole season's worth of episodes—or outtakes—slung together for no better reason than to squeeze all remaining revenues from a stupendously popular show that got out while the going was good. If nothing else, Sex and the City confirms Michael Patrick King's gifts as a television director while demonstrating conclusively that he's in way over his head working on the big screen. Where TV is small and broad and domestic and episodic, movies are large and potentially deep and climactic. But here, the show's lifeblood—its trippy, backtalking, très gay script—sags into the garden-variety sassiness you'd find on any network sitcom. After sampling the movie's bloodless dialogue, I missed the show's bitchy one-liners like hell. And despite the pubic hair, well-hung penis, and mildly graphic Malibu copulating that won the movie its R rating, there are more bad sex jokes than good sex.

Ain't It Cool News:

But I just couldn’t get over how much this shared in common with BRATZ: The Movie. Montage after montage after montage with each and every problem finding a solution by the fabulously dressed four getting together, squee-ing in a pitch that will deafen dogs and neuter most of the males in the audience, and realizing that friendship will get you through any bout of rampant self-absorption. Oh, so this is what happens when you leave Bratz dolls in the sun too long.

Hollywood Reporter:

Unfortunately, where episodes of the series used to take their cue from a question posed by one of Carrie's columns, writer-director Michael Patrick King never finds that focus, and "Sex and the City" loses its tart edge in the process. In need of some serious tightening up, the flabby picture does what the old Samantha would have never done: It keeps hanging around, pushing for a long-term relationship.

Variety:

For a series so steeped in romance, the eagerly awaited “Sex and the City” movie feels a trifle half-hearted. Although there’s pleasure in seeing HBO’s fabulous four reunited, writer-director Michael Patrick King doesn’t fully bridge the gap between TV and film — delivering major story flourishes but, too often, playing like a regular episode bloated to five times its customary length.

New York Magazine:

The movie, which reunites the whole cast, even if the other actresses aren’t palsy-walsy with Kim Cattrall, has the delish/insufferable mixture about right. (It wouldn’t be SATC if it weren’t a little annoying.) Sex and the City: The Motion Picture (not the actual title) is a joyful wallow. And it’s more: In this summer of do-overs (The Incredible Hulk, a new Batman versus a new Joker), it’s what the series finale should have been. For one last time, the relationship columnist–cum (no pun intended)–anthropologist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) tests the fairy-tale trappings of modern romance—turns them inside out, pulls at the loose threads, and wrings the tears that have saturated them into iridescent cocktails. (God, that’s terrible. I have to work on my Bradshaw-esque relationship musings.) It’s not that the writer-director, Michael Patrick King, breaks new ground; it’s that these women are in their fifth decade, and age is a more insistent subtext. The time for do-overs is almost up... I shall not spoil what follows, but the wedding sequence (about midway through) is a heart-stopper—a mirthless farce in which cell phones and limos function as agents of the unconscious. It’s a chance to watch Parker pull out the acting stops, and she’s spectacularly good: The neediness that makes her one of our giddiest comediennes is also a kind of black hole. Parker has come in for some monstrous derision of late—and I suppose it’s understandable, given that she’s pushed on billboards as the personification of kitty-cat sultriness. But you can sense the fragility beneath the poses. She’s always the little girl dressing up, wriggling from one outfit to the next, elated for a bit but apt to wither in the face of rejection or self-doubt. There are plenty of reasons to resent Carrie’s incessant hunger for designer anything, but how can you resent Parker’s fleeting enchantment? It’s what anchors the show.

Yahoo! News:

It's all really soapy, though, with only some smidgens of substance. Co-star Cynthia Nixon's story line is meaty, but more often than not our heroines are defined solely by the partners in their beds and the clothes on their backs, as if to suggest that the right wardrobe and a big enough closet to put it all in are the keys to ultimate happiness. The movie (and the series that inspired it) perpetuate stereotypes of female superficiality, but then again, these women do stick by each other no matter what, which makes it somewhat easier to stick around for the conclusion... Sitting through this extravaganza of extravagance, though, I couldn't help but wonder ... is this movie ever going to end? It takes about as much time as watching five episodes of the series all in a row, which you can do for free on TBS, albeit in a form that's cleaned up for basic cable — the city sans the sex. Then again, one girl's slog is another girl's celebration.

MSNBC:

Writer-director Michael Patrick King, one of the driving forces behind the original series, has cannily avoided trying to open up the material too much in taking it to the big screen. Samantha doesn’t go into outer space, Miranda doesn’t start talking to dead people, and Charlotte doesn’t break into a musical number. It’s simply an extension of the groundwork that the show already laid down, and for “Sex” fans who have waited four years for another fix, that’s all it has to be...While [Jennifer] Hudson is just fine in her first screen appearance since winning an Oscar for her “Dreamgirls” debut, the rest of the cast has the advantage of slipping back into characters they played for years on cable, and that comfort comes through in the performances. The leading quartet pings and zings as well as ever, and even second bananas like Stanford (Willie Garson) and Anthony (Mario Cantone) get their moment as well. (Candice Bergen returns briefly as Carrie’s editor at Vogue, delivering a brutally funny line that will be quoted in bridal shops for years to come.)

New York Times:

Dressed in gray coveralls, her hair bobbed and Slavic accent slipping and sliding as far south as Australia, Ms. Blanchett takes to her role with brio, snapping her black gloves and all but clicking her black boots like one of those cartoon Nazis that traipse through earlier Indy films. She’s pretty much a hoot, the life of an otherwise drearily familiar party. Among the other invited guests are Ray Winstone, John Hurt and Shia LaBeouf, who plays Mutt, the young sidekick onboard to bring in those viewers whose parents were still in grade school when the first movie hit. Karen Allen, who played Indy’s love interest in “Raiders,” is here too, with a megawatt smile and a bit of the old spunk.

Rolling Stone:

The good news is that Harrison Ford can still rock a fedora and a bullwhip like nobody's business as the globe-trotting archaeologist. The dark side is that after 19 years of wrangling between Spielberg and Lucas — in a mind-meld with writer David Koepp to craft just the right script for Indy 4 — they came up with this mess. Everything looks raided from the lost ark of the three previous Indy hits. What's worse is that after a smashing opener involving Indy getting captured by Russians in Nevada, circa 1957, the film starts piling on atomic subplots. It's a cliché overload. By midpoint, the movie starts to play like National Treasure meets The X-Files, with a touch of The Goonies, and I don't mean any of these comparisons as a compliment.

Dallas Morning News:

The problem in Crystal Skull is that too many of the set pieces lack heart or visual integrity. They feel random and piled on – witness the aforementioned monkeys – and, subsequently, safe and sterile. Hints of personality emerge in the banter between Mr. Ford, Mr. LaBeouf and Karen Allen, reprising her role as Indy's old love interest Marion, but the fallback pattern always kicks back in. Our heroes are trapped by Russians with guns. Our heroes escape. Our heroes are trapped again by Russians with guns. Mix. Stir. Repeat.

Newsweek:

It's hard to say which audience will be better suited to this latest installment. Established Indy fans may find nostalgia clouding their ability to accurately judge The Crystal Skull in the context of the first films, but young viewers who are unfamiliar with the first three will miss a lot of the jokes and may wonder what the fuss is about, especially compared to more sophisticated fare. Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, Indy is still big; it's just that, in the new world of movie franchises, The Crystal Skull feels smaller.

Chicago Sun-Times:

The Indiana Jones movies were directed by Steven Spielberg and written by George Lucas and a small army of screenwriters, but they exist in a universe of their own. Hell, they created it. All you can do is compare one to the other three. And even then, what will it get you? If you eat four pounds of sausage, how do you choose which pound tasted the best? Well, the first one, of course, and then there's a steady drop-off of interest. That's why no Indy adventure can match Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). But if Crystal Skull (or Temple of Doom from 1984 or Last Crusade from 1989) had come first in the series, who knows how much fresher it might have seemed? True, Raiders of the Lost Ark stands alone as an action masterpiece, but after that the series is compelled to be, in the words of Indiana himself, "same old same old." Yes, but that's what I want it to be.

The Hollywood Reporter:

This film feels like work, whether it's poor Harrison Ford straining to keep pace with his younger self or Spielberg and writer David Koepp piling on the thrill-ride acrobatics that have only scant connection to the plot.

Los Angeles Times:

…Given its Saturday matinee genre nature and the fact that star Ford, creator Lucas, director Spielberg, composer John Williams and editor Michael Kahn, among others, have all returned, it was inevitable that this film was going to fall within a very narrow range in terms of quality. It was either going to be a worse- or better-than-average Indiana Jones film. It turns out it's one of the better ones and everyone involved can breathe a sigh of relief.

Entertainment Weekly:

The skull may be transparent, but the plot is murky as hell.

Ain't It Cool News:

I also believe that each of the Indiana Jones films are about different things at their core. Raiders is about BELIEVING. Temple Of Doom is about TRUST. Last Crusade is about abandoning obsessions and choosing to live. And that leads us to The Crystal Skull… What is it about? Well, that I’m literally just 40 minutes from having seen it at this point – I’m going to say I feel the film is about letting go of the past and choosing a happy future. It’s LIFE. It’s also… like the Indy’s before it… A SHITLOAD OF FUCKING FUN! There’s silly shit here – but it’s FUN SHIT. But it’s loaded with classic bits.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opens today

NPR:

And thus a by-the-numbers rom-com is born. Alas, What Happens in Vegas ... limps through its first hour or so — where all the "com" is supposed to be — in a knockabout-slapstick mode for which director Tom Vaughan demonstrates no flair whatever. Still, casting will out, and the stars are appealing enough to make the making-up homestretch kinda sweet. No chemistry, mind, and precious few chuckles, but with the only romantic-comedy alternative at the moment being Made of Honor, things could definitely be worse.

Telegraph:

As premises go, it makes the heart not so much sink as shrivel. And yet, though it may indeed be synthetic pap with cynical mercenary undercurrents, I'll say this for the movie: we've seen much worse. Neither of the leads, Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz, is a stranger to the slick business of lucrative high-concept comedies - if you catch them looking ecstatic at any point, you wonder if it's just at the box-office prospects.

Salon:

While Kutcher is reliably believable as a rumpled yet fun-loving slacker, Diaz is considerably less convincing as a steely, MBA-enhanced powerhouse. She may have the jittery energy of a woman who's a stranger to sleep, but with her giggly hair flips, smeary lip gloss and neon-bright micro skirts, she looks more like a party girl staggering home at dawn than a would-be titan of the stock market.

LA Times:

Hokey and forced as it is, What Happens in Vegas eventually settles into a rhythm, maybe because Diaz and Kutcher actually look like they have fun together. Which, unfortunately, is saying a lot. Most of the humor is derived from the same moldy men are from Slobland, women are from Planet Clean clichés, but the movie is just weird and disjointed enough to keep from feeling like an utterly soulless Hollywood product.

USA Today:

Apparently what passes for comedy today is a new form of toilet humor involving the creative use of sinks... What Happens in Vegas has a variation of a joke featured in Baby Mama, as well as a slew of stale riffs on gags and scenarios from a number of comedies, mostly of the romantic variety. It's a story that feels familiar at best, hackneyed at worst, which is surprising and disappointing, as director Tom Vaughan also made last year's Starter for 10, a charming British coming-of-age comedy.

Entertainment Weekly:

Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz hate on each other with dynamite verve in What Happens in Vegas. The Punch and Judy fireworks get off to an early start, when the two wake up in Las Vegas only to learn that they got hitched during what should have been a sloshed one-night stand. To lay claim to a $3 million slot-machine payoff (one pulled the lever, the other provided the quarter), the two are forced to live together for six months as husband and wife, and I would say that the romantic hilarity just ensues from there, except that Kutcher and Diaz diss each other with such eye-rolling, fang-baring, sexually sarcastic conviction that you may think you've wandered into a dinner-theater revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? starring (and rewritten by) Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman.

Washington Post:

The best thing about the fight is how unfairly each wages it, and how the campaigns are based on the classical fault lines of boy-girl cohabitation. That one about the toilet seat (it always has to be down?): The movie addresses it in a clever scene in which Diaz's Joy McNally tries to explain the fundamental difference between the deep concepts of "up" and "down," as if she's explaining quantum theory to a chimp, which she basically is. It's a terrific little set piece, particularly for the expression on her face, which is an odd blend of pity, contempt, boredom, irritation and loathing, all without destroying the fact that she's staggeringly beautiful.

New York Times:

This digression may seem off the point of What Happens in Vegas, but because its director, Tom Vaughan, brings nothing of interest to the movie, including filmmaking, there isn't anything to say other than to note its insulting ugliness and ineptitude. The badly matched Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher mug wildly, waving their limbs like upturned beetles. Ms. Diaz is particularly ill served by the material and the production; she's harshly, at times brutally, lighted and often unflatteringly costumed. It's disheartening that Ms. Diaz doesn't seem to realize that there's no upside to a role that strips away her dignity even as it peels off her clothes, especially when she's playing the shrew. It's no wonder Mr. Kutcher looks so relaxed.

What Happens in Vegas opens in theaters today