NPR:

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

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

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

Los Angeles Times:

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

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

New York Sun:

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

Salon:

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

Entertainment Weekly:

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

Wired:

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

The New Republic:

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

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

The New York Times:

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

TIME:

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

'Wanted' opens today, nationwide.

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