Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
What had looked like a meandering, anecdotal story turns out to be a carefully constructed narrative machine, one that dispenses a brilliantly nasty series of surprises.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Nasty Baby takes aim at a fat target: gay modern-family dramedies, those well-meaning, self-congratulatory films that haven't actually felt modern in a decade.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
A loosely scripted, raucously nonconformist laffer that looks like it's going one way, only to arrive somewhere else entirely .

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
Wiig and Adebimpe give appealing, naturalistic performances . but it's not enough to keep the otherwise rambling narrative together.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
An awkward scene between the artist and a local gallery director highlights Silva's fluency in the rituals of social superiority.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
I disliked it at first-the camera is as jittery as the characters-and kept disliking it until I realized that I'd been drawn in, if not exactly captivated.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A small, at first docile, then provocative story of alternative lifestyles in Brooklyn.

Name : Alan Zilberman / Alias : Washington Post
Ultimately, Silva's uneven command of tone undoes whatever goodwill his actors have managed to generate. They - and we - deserve much better than this.

Name : Robert Abele / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"Nasty Baby" rights itself intriguingly when Silva pushes his characters into unknown territory and lifestyle is imposed upon by life.

Name : Tricia Olszewski / Alias : TheWrap
(The end) slams the brakes on any goodwill you had for the characters.

Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
A complete mess.

Name : Sheri Linden / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Aiming to please, the filmmakers submit without hesitation to the bold yet hokey source material, with leads Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson breathing a crucial third dimension into cutout characters.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
We may have all been curious going in, but by the time the credits roll, there's another question that springs to mind: Is that all there is?

Name : Karen D'Souza / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
About an hour in, it finally dawned on me that perhaps the movie was giving me insights into masochism after all. As the minutes slowly, painfully ticked by I came to accept my punishment.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
For a movie where people are naked for a large chunk of time and play at bondage and dominance (without ever really seeming all that committed to it), it sure is boring.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Basically, they made a lousy, mid-2000s-era Katherine Heigl romance with a handful of explicit sex scenes spliced throughout the familiar cliches.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Maybe in future installments there will even be something that resembles a plot. For now, the entire movie is about as sexy as a root canal.

Name : Joy Tipping / Alias : Dallas Morning News
I'll go see the next movie quite happily.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Yet the film's biggest problem is its two stars. Despite all the ripped abs and exposed breasts, blindfolds and cuffs, there are few sparks between them. Without that, Fifty Shades of Grey feels as cold and sterile as Grey's sleek penthouse.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
I wouldn't say that Taylor-Johnson has made a good movie from "Fifty Shades of Grey," precisely. That's asking too much.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Isn't the stuff of bondage and discipline, sexual role play, silky blindfolds, and whips and floggers supposed to be, well, exciting?

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"Fifty Shades of Grey" turns out to be an intriguing tussle - not in the sack, or in the Red Room of Pain, but in its internal war between the dubious erotica of James' novel (the first of three) and the far craftier trash offered by the movie.

Name : Connie Ogle / Alias : Miami Herald
Despite what you might fear, the movie is not torture. And even if it doesn't inspire lust, you will breathe a warm sigh of relief, thinking: This could have been so much worse.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
"Fifty Shades of Grey" the movie, for the record, is not quite as bad as "Fifty Shades of Grey" the book. But that's not saying much.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
Gone are the truly dreadful aspects of the book, and the biggest surprise may be that Ana and Christian have developed senses of humor.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
The dashes of momentum are just a tease. It's hard to remember the last time this much sex was this tedious.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Creating a genteel R-rated film from a very X-rated book is like making a Mamma Mia! movie without the songs.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Despite the endless sex, a highly unsatisfying encounter. Cold as a fish and almost as dumb.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
It's been said that the movie contains 20 minutes of sex; if this is the case, it must contain at least 40 minutes of Ana biting her lip or putting a pencil in her mouth.

Name : David Ehrlich / Alias : Time Out
Fifty Shades of Grey is a sex-positive but hopelessly soft-core erotic drama that fails to be even a fraction as titillating as the E.L. James books that inspired it. And yet, that's exactly why it works.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Fifty Shades of Grey delivers, however ponderously, on its promise of pop transgressiveness.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
An unashamed and genially preposterous fairy tale, a kind of "Cinderella" with restraints, "50 Shades" is about as believable as "Jack and the Beanstalk," albeit considerably more kinky in intent.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
My God, this thing goes on. By the time the two get busy in Christian's "playroom," the oomph has gone out of the whole erotic setup .

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Fifty Shades of Grey" doesn't entertainingly cross the line of good taste so much as trip and fall on it.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The film doesn't culminate in anything. It's a bunch of scenes that end before any kind of satisfying conclusion.

Name : Lisa Schwarzbaum / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The movie Fifty Shades of Grey is considerably better written than the book. It is also sort of classy-looking, in a generic, TV-ad-for-bath-oil way.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
"The stylish and mostly satisfying film will be [a blockbuster], and deservedly so. Starring a vivacious Dakota Johnson and a game Jamie Dornan, Taylor-Johnson's erotic romance is a skillful distillation of James' first book."

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
I'm shocked - shocked, do you hear me?!? - that the film version of E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey is such a dull, decorous affair, about as erotic as an ad for Pottery Barn. Strictly intended for gluttons for punishment-by boredom.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
Glossy, well cast, and a consistent hoot until it becomes a serious drag.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : ChristyLemire.com
It realizes this story is ridiculous in ways the book itself never could. It has an actual sense of humor.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Actors Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan make an appealing couple and battle mightily against the flat, linear plotting, though when the story ended inconclusively I wasn't eager to follow them through the inevitable sequels.

Name : Meredith Goldstein / Alias : Boston Globe
The director of the much-anticipated adaptation, Sam Taylor-Johnson, made what could have been a trashy TV movie into well-conceived cinema.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
The only thing Dakota Johnson can't pull off is her character's over-dramatic name - she introduces herself as Anastasia Steele like an apology.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
I'm not going to pretend I didn't like this movie, just as I can't pretend there's nothing wrong with it. But try thinking of it this way: It's an event movie that's also a relationship drama, and that's rare.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Sitting through the turgid and tedious S&M melodrama that is Fifty Shades of Grey may feel like its own form of torture.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
The whole thing's about as transgressive as ordering a Cabernet Sauvignon with your fish.

Name : Bruce Kirkland / Alias : Toronto Sun
Fifty Shades of Grey only has one shade: tedious self-pity. The other 49 shades promised in the title are missing from the movie version of the infamous novel.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Vainly seeking to reach the widest possible audience, the makers of this exercise in banality stripped it of almost anything that could cause offence.

Name : Katie Rife / Alias : AV Club
Leads Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, both of whom spend the majority of the film supposedly desperately longing for each other, have so little chemistry that it gives the sexy goings-on a rather clinical feel.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Johnson is rather sweet, though, and if she played a role that required her to look more than alternately smitten and poleaxed, she could score big. But now that Fifty Shades is poised to be a franchise, will she have that chance?

Name : Meghan Daum / Alias : Slate
A generic romance cynically engineered to appeal to the lowest common denominator of female fantasy.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
Johnson is a true find: She's so committed, she makes Ana's every discovery - in or out of the bedroom - convincing.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
"Fifty Shades of Grey" might not be a good movie - O.K., it's a terrible movie - but it might nonetheless be a movie that feels good to see, whether you squirm or giggle or roll your eyes or just sit still and take your punishment.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Who would have imagined that a movie about sex could be so boring?

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The likably coy Johnson has no chemistry with the dreary, self-serious Dornan. He's a casting disaster .

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
Think of it as the "Downton Abbey" of bondage, designed neither to menace nor to offend but purely to cosset the fatigued imagination.

Name : Courtney Shea / Alias : Globe and Mail
Nobody sweats or pants or experiences onscreen ecstasy, which is presumably how a movie about violent sex manages to avoid an NC-17 rating, but the result feels like 50 shades of beige.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
In the end, there's nothing here we haven't seen before. But there's also nothing as agonizingly awkward as James's prose.