Name : Noel Murray / Alias : Los Angeles Times
From the troubled child who communes with the beyond to the featureless suburban home that hosts malicious spirits, this movie ticks all the boxes for modern mainstream shockers.

Name : Edward Douglas / Alias : New York Daily News
Offers very few new scares, mainly because it's so haunted by the ghosts of far better horror movies.

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

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

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

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

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 : 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 : 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 : 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 : 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.

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

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.