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

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

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

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

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

In the film, which opens today, Sandra Bullock plays Margaret, a bitchy book editor who is similar to Amanda Priestly in The Devil Prada (or any other female executive in a romantic comedy). When she learns that she's going to be deported to her native Canada, she tells immigration officials that she's engaged to her assistant Andrew, played by Ryan Reynolds. He agrees to go along with the charade, as long as she gives him a promotion. The Taming of the Shrew plot is then combined with the "city girl stranded in the country" formula when Andrew takes Margaret home to Alaska for the 90th birthday party of his wisecracking grandmother, played by Betty White.

Critics said the film was inoffensive, but reminiscent of dozens of other films in the same genre. Naturally, there is a mildly misogynistic tone. Margaret is a successful businesswomen, which of course means she hasn't had sex in two years and needs Ryan Reynolds plus a town full of quirky country folk to teach her to love again. Many reviewers said their romance was unconvincing, but the film's biggest shortcoming was just being bland and forgettable. Below, we check out the reviews for The Proposal.

The Hollywood Reporter

Starting the film as a borderline caricature of an unpleasant workaholic, Bullock convincingly peels back the layers of Margaret, revealing the pain behind her steely facade and the vulnerability that surfaces as she and Andrew get to know each other better amid the tense masquerade. By midpoint, we're actually rooting for this erstwhile office gargoyle. It helps immeasurably that Bullock has tremendous chemistry with Reynolds. The former TV actor and Van Wilder cutup has been getting a lot of work lately but hasn't quite broken through as a star. The Proposal should remedy that. He matches Bullock's comic timing note for note and conveys all of Andrew's frustration, exasperation and growing attraction to Margaret. (His remarkably fit physique also is a boxoffice plus.) The situations might be formulaic, but the teamwork of the two leads brings them to sparkling life.

The Washington Post

Just looking at the poster for The Proposal, a by-the-numbers romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, tells you exactly how it's all gonna go down... It's as predictable and comforting as a Happy Meal, but it must be said that The Proposal manages to elicit some genuinely amusing moments, especially when it comes to physical comedy. Director Anne Fletcher (27 Dresses) started out as a choreographer, and that's still where she shines, in early sequences where an entire office staff collectively shudders in horror when Bullock's character makes her scary way past their desks, and later in a preposterously staged two-way naked body-slam. Reynolds and Bullock don't generate much chemistry, but both can be thanked for bringing restraint to otherwise thankless roles.

The New York Times

Like most Hollywood romantic comedies these days, The Proposal is all about bringing a woman to her knees, quite literally in this case. The simple premise is partly telegraphed in the advertising tag line, "Here comes the bribe," which evokes wedding bells and desperation...You know the rest because you've seen (and read) it many times before. After nestling in the bountiful bosom of family and some unexpected naked slapstick with Andrew, Margaret melts. He mans the ramparts, she lowers her defenses. He thrusts, she parries. He chops wood and loses his shirt. She loses her cellphone and ditches the heels. He rescues her, scooping her out of the water after she falls from a boat. She shivers and smiles and tears up as she talks about her tragic past, revealing the sad little girl who's long been hidden behind the cruel disguise of a sensationally successful professional adult. Ding-dong the witch is soon dead and in her place, well, here comes the bride.

Reel Views

The cast isn't populated by heavyweights. It has been a while since Sandra Bullock has been in the fast lane, and it's been about a decade since she was a prime romantic comedy actress. Ryan Reynolds, who showed flashes of genuine talent in Adventureland, is back to phoning it in. (Although, to be fair, his flummoxed expression when Andrew "learns" he's engaged to Margaret - which carries through more than one scene - is possibly the film's funniest element.) Mary Steenburgen and Craig T. Nelson are playing the stereotyped father/mother roles, and Betty White is pretty much exhuming her Golden Girls character. (This is not one of those roles in which she drops a string of f-bombs and other assorted profanities - something she has done on more than one occasion to get a cheap guffaw.)

The Village Voice

The Proposal, in fact, appears to have been written using a secret cache of computers stored beneath Walt Disney HQ since 1978-codename "Pete Chiarelli," the first-time screenwriter who receives credit for having pilfered every rom-com convention since the invention of breathing. (It was directed by Anne Fletcher, who stitched together 27 Dresses out of the leftover scraps not used here.) Or, perhaps, it's the product of a book of MadLibs in which spaces are left blank for The Handsome Male Ingénue Specializing in Cocked Eyebrows, The Former Rom-Com It-Girl on Comeback Trail Who Looks 10 Years Younger Than Her Age, and The Ex–Golden Girl as Dirty-Minded Grandmother.

The A. V. Club

What do you do when your movie is all premise and no pop? Try harder. Or at least that's the tack taken by The Proposal, a romantic comedy that yokes Sandra Bullock to Ryan Reynolds as a sham couple, then tries to compensate for the absence of chemistry by keeping them busybusybusy with random subplots and comic business. Look, there's Oscar Nuñez from The Office, stripping! And Betty White doing a tribal dance! And Craig T. Nelson grimacing paternally! And an eagle chasing a puppy!

The Chicago Tribune

"The Proposal" reworks Two Weeks Notice with the genders switched. Bullock's Margaret Tate is known as "it," not "her," around her publishing house full of ninnies and bowers and scrapers. Assistant Andrew (Reynolds) loathes her ways, her cutting, soulless but well-preserved ways. (I don't want to get into the whole plastic surgery question, but I did prefer Bullock's previous look, the one that looked a little less like someone wearing a Sandra Bullock mask.)

The San Francisco Chronicle

it could have done without the serial misuse of The Office's Oscar Nuñez as Ramon, a waiter/exotic dancer/store manager/minister who ups the yuck factor with the world's most revolting striptease. He accounts for most of the script's worst cliches. The rest are mild enough, including one pallid joke about the leading lady's age. Bullock has 12 years on Reynolds, the actual Canadian in the group.

Salon

A romantic comedy doesn't need to be original to be enjoyable, and yet The Proposal still falls way too short of the mark. Its appeal rests on how much we can bring ourselves to love Bullock: She can be an extremely appealing actress... and at worst she's just sort of vaguely inoffensive. It's probably possible to actively dislike Sandra Bullock, but she gives off such an approachable, nice-girl vibe that it barely seems worth the effort. There's a degree of warmth in The Proposal; there just isn't enough crackle, particularly between the two stars. Reynolds, whom I'd pegged as a dull, flavorless actor until I saw his nicely shaded performance in Greg Mottola's recent Adventureland actually gives a better performance here than Bullock does.

The Boston Globe

Individually, his sarcasm can be amusing, and her straining for comedy is occasionally funny. In The Proposal, neither brings out anything good in the other, and watching them try hurts the eyes, the tummy, and the libido. The nature of the genre, regardless of how it begins, ends with both parties in each other's arms. And while I watched these two sets of lips (one set being a little fuller than I recall) head for collision, I prayed the movie might fall off the assembly line and jostle loose the dreaded oncoming event. I've rarely been less lucky. What is the opposite of fireworks? When two people kiss, can firing squads go off?

The New York Daily News

If every relationship is built on shared interests, it's easy to see why Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds would pair off. After all, they have at least two major things in common: they're both unusually likable leading actors, and they both have unusually awful taste in movies. Reynolds, at least, has finally started heading in the right direction after years of choosing scripts painfully beneath him. So it would have been nice if these two had found something worthy of their combined talents. Instead, their mutual inclination towards synthetic Hollywood junk just drags them down together.

The Los Angeles Times:

It also must be emphasized that even though director Howard had all these first-class elements to work with, "Frost/Nixon" wouldn't have succeeded as well as it does without his experience, his professionalism and his skills. He's successfully opened the play up without pushing anything too hard, and he's deftly avoided the sentimentality that, with the exception of the underrated "The Missing," has often been a quality of his films.

The result is involving, engrossing cinema — more thrilling, in fact, than Howard's "The Da Vinci Code" — filmmaking of a type rarely seen anymore and sorely missed.

Wall Street Journal:

What Ron Howard gets, to a degree that's astonishing in a two-hour film, is the density and complexity, as well as the generous entertainment quotient, of Peter Morgan's screenplay. (Mr. Morgan previously wrote "The Queen," in which Michael Sheen played Tony Blair, and "The Last King of Scotland.") "Frost/Nixon" does more than dramatize the high points of the TV interviews. In the frantic run-up to the recorded interviews, and during the early videotape sessions, the film gives us the collateral drama of a talk-show host, accustomed to celebrity chatter, trying desperately to play the role of a serious journalist.

Salon:

But by the time the Frost-Nixon interviews wound to a close — in real life, the 29 hours of taped footage were edited and aired over five nights — Frost, thanks to some wiliness and a little bit of luck, had coaxed his slippery subject into a tacit admission of guilt in the Watergate scandal. And right there, I've gone ahead and given away the ending to "Frost/Nixon" — but this is a story in which what happens is far less interesting than how it happens. Howard has made a picture for grown-ups, a well-constructed entertainment that neither talks down to its audience nor congratulates it just for showing up. That's particularly refreshing around holiday time, when the studios roll out all their big Oscar-bait pictures, bestowing upon us their most boring, stately and somber works — anything that spells "quality" with a capital "Q," even if genuine craftsmanship is sorely missing.

The New York Times:

And devour Mr. Langella does, chomp chomp. Artfully lighted and shot to accentuate the character’s trembling, affronted jowls, his shoulders hunched, face bunched, he creeps along like a spider, alternately retreating into the shadows and pouncing with a smile. That smile should give you nightmares, but Mr. Howard, a competent craftsman who tends to dim the lights in his movies even while brightening their themes (“A Beautiful Mind”), has neither the skill nor the will to draw out a dangerous performance from Mr. Langella, something to make your skin crawl or heart leap. Unlike Oliver Stone, who invested Nixon (a memorable Anthony Hopkins) with Shakespearean heft but refused to sentimentalize him, this is a portrait designed to elicit a sniffy tear or two along with a few statuettes.

Slate:

Frost/Nixon's emotional climax is, in my view, the script's weakest moment. On the eve of those last two crucial interviews, Nixon makes a drunken late-night phone call to Frost in his hotel room and feeds him the oldest line in the serial-killer-vs.-cop playbook: Deep down, you and me, we're the same. Langella makes the most of this booze-sodden monologue, but its central premise—that Nixon and Frost shared an insecurity about social class that fueled their drive to succeed—seems more British than American: Wasn't Nixon's persecution complex far too vast to be reduced to class anxiety? If our 37th president has proved such an enduring subject for on-screen fictions (see Mark Feeney's 2004 book, Nixon at the Movies), it's precisely because we can never finally fathom his bottomless pathologies. If we did, we wouldn't have Nixon to kick around anymore.

USA Today:

Howard establishes a mounting sense of tension, interspersing interviews with talking-head-style analyses from each camp. Oliver Platt, Matthew Macfadyen and Kevin Bacon are excellent in these roles.

Morgan seamlessly blends actual interview dialogue and imagined conversations.

The film convincingly conveys how uncomfortable the 37th president was in his own skin.

NPR:

Happily, director Ron Howard takes a quasi-documentary approach that has the effect of giving Frost more heft on screen — there's news footage, plus behind-the-scenes shots of TV monitors, all conspiring to make it clear that he's better at using this emotionally cool medium than Nixon, especially in the interview's big showdown.

Entertainment Weekly:

With the transcript as his guide, Morgan explores psychological terrain: how Frost found the chutzpah to land the interviews; how Nixon played cat and mouse with his interlocutor when asked to admit wrongdoing and apologize; how both men of humble beginnings felt stung by the scorn of those born with more 
privilege; and how both were superb manipulators. But Sheen (who played the very model of a modern British go-getter as Tony Blair in The Queen, also written by Morgan) and Langella (operating at the peak of his powers) are disciplined enough to crop their performances to close-up size. (The sizing echoes the look of the 
 actual interviews.) And Howard is smart 
 to enhance the one-on-ones with journalistic context, weaving archival Watergate-era 
 footage into his fictionalized re-creation.

The New York Observer:

Mr. Howard and Mr. Morgan have very astutely established Frost’s mercurial personality in advance by having him brazenly pick up Rebecca Hall’s all-too-willing Caroline Cushing on a Concorde flight from Australia to California. Indeed, the impression is given that Mr. Frost habitually makes passes at any lone and attractive woman on his many worldwide flights.

The New Yorker:

“Frost/Nixon” offers considerable insight into the Nixon mystery, without solving it; the movie is fully absorbing and even, when Nixon falls into a drunken, resentful rage, exciting, but I can’t escape the feeling that it carries about it an aura of momentousness that isn’t warranted by the events. Why is it meant to be so important to us whether David Frost revives his career? Frost and Reston did finally goad Nixon into saying that he let the American people down, and that he believed that “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal,” and they have extracted a considerable amount of copy out of the broadcasts (including two books). But it’s possible that both journalists and playwright have confused a media coup (and a less important one than that of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein) with a cleansing act that forever chastened the Presidency. It was anything but that: after all, twenty-four years later, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney entered the White House.

Newsweek:

Langella and Sheen originated these roles on stage, and it's impossible to imagine anyone else playing them. Sheen, who was Tony Blair in Morgan's "The Queen," dazzles as the debonair media high-wire artist holding on for dear life when the slippery Nixon ducks all his early-round punches. More presidential than the real president, Langella gives Nixon a stature and poignancy that the man himself rarely displayed: it's a towering, witty performance that reaches its peak in the drunken late-night phone call he makes to Frost, sizing him up as a man, like himself, with a fiercely competitive chip on his shoulder. The scene is Morgan's invention, but it's an illuminating, inspired fiction. Not everything in "Frost/Nixon" happened in real life, but both sides would probably agree it should have.

Frost/Nixon:

A totally mesmerizing battle of the wills between the occasionally charming yet wily Nixon and the increasingly desperate Frost. Supporting roles are bolstered by Kevin Bacon as Nixon’s ex-military pitbull Chief of Staff and Platt and Rockwell as the crackerjack researchers dying to crucify Nixon.

'Frost/Nixon' opens today in theaters nationwide.

Entertainment Weekly:

In the brightly drawn sequel, as technically smooth as we've come to expect from the DreamWorks cartoon factory, all four use their time in Africa — the land of their ancestors! — as an opportunity for personal growth, only to wind up more or less the way they always were.

What, you were expecting a cutting-edge twist, maybe something about a lonely postapocalyptic robot? Wrong part of the animated kingdom, my friends. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa is pretty tame, but it knows how to keep its own turf tidy.

The New York Times:

It’s unsurprising that Alex’s mane registers as more realistic than any of his words or emotions, but it’s also a bummer. “Escape 2 Africa” is good enough in patches to make its distracting star turns, storybook clichés and stereotypes harder to take than they would be in a less enjoyable movie. Casting Mr. Stiller and Mr. Schwimmer may sear their brands onto under-age cerebral cortices but does nothing for the movie. And, really, did the hippo (voiced by will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas) who courts Gloria with a low rumble and a suggestive shimmy have to sound like Barry White rather than, say, Marc Anthony or Justin Timberlake? I laughed, but honestly, if this country can vote colorblind surely its movie studios can animate colorblind too. (Can’t they?)

USA Today:

Though it doesn't add anything new to the genre, Madagascar 2 is amusing animated fare.

And with few current movies aimed at very young audiences, this menagerie offers more potential for humor and visual panache than, say, a movie about Chihuahuas.

Chicago Sun-Times:

It doesn't look like that plane is gonna make it. That doesn't mean across the Atlantic from Africa. It means across Africa to the Atlantic. Do they (or their audience) realize Madagascar is east of Africa, in the Indian Ocean? How I know, I had a friend from Madagascar once. Beat me at chess. Some people are probably wondering about the title "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa," because they think the animals escaped 2 Africa in the first place. Now shouldn't they be escaping 4rom Africa? So they take off, and (spoiler?) crash in Africa. Now they are faced with exactly the same dilemma as in the first film: Can wild animals survive in the wild?

The Hollywood Reporter:

The pleasant but far-from-pioneering crew of the cheerful 2005 DreamWorks animated film "Madagascar" reunite for "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" to similar results. Essentially this sequel has settled down into a sitcom: Each of its major zoo-raised animals has a comical issue that must get resolved before the credits roll. The film, like its predecessor, is aimed mostly at children and should score a direct hit.

Variety:

"Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" is the rare animated sequel that reps a notable improvement on its predecessor in every department. Lively and quite funny without being obnoxious, this follow-up smoothly mixes the original's New York Zoo escapees with a number of engaging new characters they encounter upon crossing from Madagascar to the mother continent. With the first film's creative team intact, this DreamWorks Animation franchise has been well tended to, meaning it's reasonable to assume a repeat of the earlier outing's $533 million worldwide haul (an unusually large percentage of which came from overseas).

Philadelphia Inquirer:

With its stylized menagerie resembling plush creatures on a Toys R Us shelf, M2 surely will appeal to undemanding viewers age 6 and younger.

Yet unlike Pixar films, this busy and noisy film has too-generic a story and too-undistinguished a look to offer much for those kids' older siblings and their parents.

The Austin Chronicle:

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa extends what Madagascar did best: fill up the screen with computer-generated visual novelty. The slapstick humor remains, as does the slack plotting. Introducing only a few new characters that are unfortunately unmemorable, this sequel is likewise a decent diversion that's not much worth talking about afterward.

The Los Angeles Times:

I took my kid and three of his pals to an Imax screening, and while I could've done without the film's martial arts slapstick involving the cranky old outer-borough lady on safari, in a role expanded from her Grand Central Station cameo in the first picture, well, if there's one thing parenthood teaches anybody in this country, it's that boys rarely fail to laugh at someone gettin' it in the 'nads from a senior citizen.

Reviews from our second-grade posse: "Really liked it." "Four million stars." "Five million stars."

Newsday ('Kidsday' Reporters):

The movie was hysterical, especially the scenes with the old lady and the penguins. One of our favorite parts was when the old lady beats up an evil lion named Makunga. Another funny scene is when Gloria, the Hippo, dances.

We give the movie 4 1/2 smiles!

The Toronto Star:

The movie even looks better than the original, approaching photo-realism in its jungle imagery. For better or worse, the music is every bit as corny as before: "Born Free" is still the theme tune and Barry Manilow and Boston is on the penguins' eight-track player – but what do you expect from those bird brains?

The highest praise I can give Madagascar 2 is to say that it reminds me of the antics of another animal, the one called Monty Python.

'Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa' opens today in wide release.

Time:

Decisiveness is fine, but it raises the question: What does it take to satisfy Clint Eastwood? Sometimes the answer is: Not much.

Or too much, as here in Jolie's high emoting. With flaring red lipstick on a face that hasn't seen much time in the California sun, and with a grieving matched in severity only by her will to learn the truth, Jolie is supposed to be a regular working mom who rises to meet the challenge of dreadful events. The actress is capable of many things, but being ordinary isn't one of them. Jolie seems to know that her startling, cartoonish, monumental beauty is a handicap here, so she goes bigger in her movements. A stream of tears stains her Kabuki makeup; her sighs come with shrugs worthy of Atlas. Underplaying would have helped. So would the casting of an actress who's less glamorous and, I have to say, more human — someone like Naomi Watts.

NPR:

Based on police files, J. Michael Straczynski's script is too stuffed with incident to have much room for psychological nuance. The characters are either upright or malevolent, depending on whether they represent the average man or the decadent establishment. Even Malkovich, whose performances usually have a sly undertone, portrays a character with no apparent self-interest. Only Harner's accused murderer is intriguingly (and disturbingly) unpredictable.

The Wall Street Journal:

The clumsy dialogue and stolid performances in secondary roles deserve one another; an exception is a showy but genuinely creepy performance by Jason Butler Harner as the psychotically jovial mass murderer. The story abounds in anachronism, both verbal and dramatic: People didn't talk about self-esteem in the 1920s; they didn't call groups of reporters "the press"; the phrase "begs the question" meant "evades the question," exactly the opposite of what it means today; and women like Christine simply didn't behave as she does in an outlandish climax, however much Angelina Jolie may have wanted to cross Ida Lupino with Erin Brockovich.

Los Angeles Times:

Though "Changeling" stars actress of the moment Angelina Jolie, Eastwood's films are invariably old-fashioned, in the best sense, in that they are concerned with telling a story. Increasingly over this last five years the stories told have darkened, and "Changeling" unfolds with a melancholy fatalism, a sense of evil so pervasive it takes an act of will to believe that the persistence of goodness can make a difference.

USA Today:

But key characters lack dimension, particularly Capt. Jones and Christine. He has no redeeming qualities, and she has no flaws. It's as if Eastwood forgot to give her a personality. Instead, he calls for repetitive and unrevealing close-ups of her suffering face. Her lack of affect is punctuated by regular outbursts of "He's not my son!"

While the neo-Gothic tale is inherently intriguing, the film should inspire strong emotion, but deliberate pacing and a contained sense of melodrama make it a surprisingly passive experience.

The New York Times:

That seems to be the plan behind “Changeling,” at any rate, an ambition telegraphed a shade too blatantly in the many close-ups of Ms. Jolie’s extraordinary face, which is by turns tear-streaked, stoical, crestfallen and howling. To watch her trace Christine’s harrowing emotional passage — a series of flights from anxiety to terror, from grief to rage, pausing occasionally at calm defiance or tremulous hope — is to witness an undeniable tour de force of screen acting. It insists on being regarded as a great performance and may, indeed, be mistaken for one.

Washington Post:

Jolie gets to do all the messy scenes that Oscar voters suck up like oysters at a free buffet. The "Snake Pit"-style insanity stuff, the noble-mother stuff — she explains to Walter early on that on the day Walter was born, his father received a box containing "responsibility," and that Dad chose not to open it. J. Michael Straczynski's script is full of such nuggets, as well as about six endings to the story. These include a confrontation with serial killer Gordon Northcott (a terrific Jason Butler Harner, who really is Oscar-worthy) in which Eastwood imposes no directorial restraint and Jolie shows that "A Mighty Heart" was just a warm-up in the histrionics marathon.

The New Republic:

By the time it's over, Changeling has proven itself not merely a contender for the worst film of the year, but a contender for the worst domestic tragedy, the worst conspiracy thriller, the worst serial killer flick, and the worst courtroom drama. It is that rare movie which, long after you think it's exhausted the possibilities, keeps discovering new ways to fail.

Chicago Sun-Times:

"Changeling" displays the directness and economy of his mentor, Don Siegel. It has not a single unnecessary stylistic flourish. No contrived dramatics. No shocking stunts. Not a gunshot. A score (by Eastwood) that doesn't underline but observes. The film simply tells its relentless story and rubs the LAPD's face in it. This is the story of an administration that directed from the top down to lie, cheat, torture, extract false confessions and serve to protect its image. In a way, it is prophetic.

Entertainment Weekly:

Yet there's little mystery, and therefore very little drama, to any of this. Jolie, who brought a tremulous power to her portrayal of Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart — another woman distraught over a lost loved one — isn't given enough notes to play here. She's brave, despairing, defiant, and monotonous. Changeling is a muckraker that crushes the audience under the dull weight of injustice. And when the film starts to show you what really happened to Walter, it grows even more oppressive. The trouble with Changeling is that it plays less like reality than like a bare-bones, moralistic rehash of other, better movies, such as L.A. Confidential or Frances. The oldfangled deliberateness of Eastwood's style has backfired this time, only adding to the sense that though you may not have heard this particular story before, you already know everything that's coming.

The A.V. Club:

Working from a screenplay by Babylon 5 creator and comics fixture J. Michael Straczynski, Eastwood creates a tone that's at once stately and unsettling, allowing a lot of breathing room for Jolie's sad, unyielding performance. She anchors a film that needs an anchor the further it goes along. Where much of Changeling works at once as a compelling mystery and an agonizing human drama, it starts to drift in a series of final scenes that finish the story while losing all sense of urgency. But in the end, it's the big picture that lingers, a vision of a city in which poor stewardship and institutional rot claims victims as surely as criminals, tying up loose ends with manufactured endings that fall part with a tug.

The New York Observer:

Still, Chinatown now stands out as one of the great American films, whereas Changeling doesn’t and probably never will. Why? The writing and direction are competent enough. It is well enough acted by Ms. Jolie (though her heavy lipstick seemed to me to blow up her lips to Betty Boopish proportions), Mr. Malkovich, Mr. Donovan, Mr. Kelly, Mr. Harner, Ms. Ryan, and the two child actors, Master Griffith and Master Conti. Also commendable are James J. Murakami’s production design, Tom Stern’s cinematography and Deborah Hopper’s costuming. Nevertheless, Changeling lacks Chinatown’s passion and humor, and seems much too long for its one-note subject. True or not, there is a limit to how much unjustified persecution can be dumped on a character without the audience beginning to feel manipulated.

Women & Hollywood:

Here's the problem with Changeling the new Clint Eastwood film starring Angelina Jolie, actually it's one of the problems, but it's the biggest, the brightest and the reddest — Angelina Jolie's lips. Every single person I've talked to who has seen the film — especially the women — the first thing out of their mouth is what a distraction her lips are. One actually said, "am I making too much of this" which I have been thinking to myself over the last couple of days. As a feminist, I really try to see beyond the looks and lips but this film made it virtually impossible because they were so big onscreen and were a total distraction. I think this has become a real problem for Angelina Jolie the actress because she seem to be getting in the way of herself.

The lips are a reflection of the tone of the film which is a male interpretation of a woman, and Jolie is the perfect person to embody that reflection. She's gorgeous and sexy, yet is always seen through the reflection of her family. This could have been a feminist story — a woman fights back after being thrown in the nut house because she refuses to tow the party line — but sadly the whole movie rings hollow.

'Changeling' opens today in wide release.

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.

Los Angeles Times:

The tone of the pilot careens between an after-school special and "American Pie," with a bit of "Pretty in Pink" grabbed along the way. It is almost all about sex — and a little bit about family, but the subject there is largely sex, as well, and why it's not for the young. The sexually active kids we meet are either made unhappy by having it, or they're having it because they're unhappy. (Ricky's compulsion to sleep with every girl who crosses his path is shown to spring from his having been molested by his father.) Amy confides of her deflowering: "I'm not even sure it was sex. It wasn't fun and definitely not like what you see in the movies."

Or they're unhappy because they've never had it. In a most improbable conversation (in a show full of them, nerdy wiseacre Ben (Kenny Baumann) — who has decided almost arbitrarily to pursue Amy by getting himself into the marching band — tells his guidance counselor: "To be perfectly honest, Mark, it's all motivated by the fact that I'm 15, I'm a virgin, and if I want to have a sex life I've got to start somewhere."

Variety:

ABC Family's latest original drama wants to be a slow-motion version of "Juno" but settles for being an obvious, stereotype-laden teen soap, albeit more "North Hollywood, 91607" than the story of what happens in flashier, better-known SoCal zip codes. Series creator Brenda Hampton made family drama with religious underpinnings a long-running success on "7th Heaven," but teen pregnancy — especially on a youth-oriented network — is too important a subject for such shallow, ham-fisted treatment. The topic may find a receptive audience, but based on first impressions, "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" should probably stay a secret.

The New York Times:

For a generation of young viewers raised on “The Simpsons,” “South Park” and “Degrassi Junior High” (not to mention reruns of “Sex and the City”) this kind of earnest, sound-out-all-the-syllables agitprop is almost comical, a parody of an after-school special. The occasional lapses into portentous symbolism are inadvertently hilarious. While Amy sneaks into the bathroom to take a home pregnancy test, her mother, played by Molly Ringwald, reheats Amy’s supper in the microwave. At the exact moment that the oven timer rings and reads “End,” Amy stares at the test results that will end life as she knows it.

That part is kind of fun. “Secret Life,” however, actually tries at times to be funny, and that makes it painful to watch. The peripheral presence of Ms. Ringwald, once the teenage heroine of John Hughes classics like “The Breakfast Club” and “Sixteen Candles,” is almost taunting, a reminder that these teenage morality plays have been made many times before, much better.

The Hollywood Reporter:

Eschewing subtlety for overt exposition at every turn, “Secret Life” fairly screams, “This is a middle-age adult’s fear-mongering perception of high school life circa 2008.” And just in case we weren’t feeling quite old enough, it co-stars Molly Ringwald as the mother of our teenage protagonist. (Add your own “Oh, the humanity!” moan here.) An awkward cross between “7th Heaven” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” it stars Shailene Woodley as Amy, your basic band geek who naturally becomes pregnant after her very first sexual experience — this with the school stud, Ricky (Daren Kagasoff). The screw-’em-and-leave-’em Ricky also carries his own dirty secret, because this is the age of abuse and dysfunction and everyone is driven by internal demons too numerous to even imagine.

New York Daily News:

he Ben character is a smart move. But the real question is whether the writers can make Amy's story compelling or whether they will retreat into all those other soapy dramas.

For what it's worth, about half the teen actions and exchanges in the first episode ring true. So this could go either way.

On the bright side, the show treats the religious teen with respect, not giggles, and a Down syndrome child has an honest and sympathetic role as part of a family. It almost deserves an extra star just for having Ben refer to Blind Lemon Jefferson, a blues legend from the 1920s.

Syracuse.com:

Although the dialogue in the pilot episode was somewhat stilted, possibly owing to the need to hit all of the important issues in the choices teens face in being sexually-active or not, the episode did an excellent job in establishing characters and their familial relationships. Although some older teens might find the show preachy, "The Secret Life..." seems strongly suited to help spark dialogue between junior/senior high school students and their parents.

'The Secret Life of the American Teenager' premieres tonight on ABC Family at 8 p.m.

Earlier: Writer Blames Second-Wave Feminists For Failing To Prevent Teen Pregnancy