Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
A strong, striking political drama.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Rosewater" is a reminder that America may have its critics, but at least there's little danger of the average citizen being arrested for appearing on a fake news show.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Rosewater certainly has merit as an act of atonement on Stewart's part and a tribute to people like Bahari. In the end, however, the movie needs to stand on its own, apart from its noble intentions and the popularity of its writer-director.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
Jon Stewart's filmmaking debut "Rosewater" has much in common with "The Daily Show" - it's blaringly obvious, it's naive, it plays to the cheap seats and it's enamored with cheap jokes.

Name : John Anderson / Alias : Newsday
Earnest, well-acted, less than urgent, but more than a vanity project.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
What makes "Rosewater" different from similar entries in what might be called the Triumph of the Imprisoned Spirit genre is that the hero is hardly an ideologue, despite having sympathy for the Iranian reformers and the Green party.

Name : Mary Houlihan / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
With Rosewater, Stewart proves he can pull back from the satirical comedy and become a thoughtful, incisive and questioning filmmaker.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Rosewater is an earnest picture, but it's also got some juice - there's vitality and feeling in it, the secret ingredients so often missing from even the most well-intentioned first features.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
The virtue of this movie is its commitment to political ambiguity and emotional truth.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
A finely wrought, powerful drama that tells the true story of an Iranian-born journalist's imprisonment and torture by the Islamic regime in Iran.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
That the movie is as tense and chilling as it is owes much to first-time director Jon Stewart's keen eye for the way humor surfaces even in the dark places.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Stewart proves to be an able filmmaker in "Rosewater." But he also shows hints of being something more.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Stewart does a solid job of handling the facts of the time; it feels true to the moment, like a filmed Newsweek story. Creative acting, dramatizedthemes, gifted cinematic styling? Not so much.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The film goes slightly beyond rigorous earnestness and settles into a kind of stubborn atonement.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Stewart acquits himself solidly, though not thrillingly, as a beginning director .

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Stewart can never quite answer the question: Why this man's story, of all the ones that should be told? And why now, five years later?

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
For a first effort, Stewart hasn't done a bad job. There's just the nagging feeling with "Rosewater" that a better movie was possible.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Stewart lets the truth roll out, the best he can, believing in the sanitizing effect of sunlight and the inevitable fate that awaits all despots.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Though at times Rosewater is clearly the work of a first-timer still finding his voice, Stewart is indisputably a real filmmaker.

Name : Jocelyn Noveck / Alias : Associated Press
A clear-headed, sensitive and thoroughly impressive directorial debut for the Comedy Central host.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Stewart's wryly observant qualities as a TV star serve him well in his feature film debut.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
While the film keeps telling us that Bahari survived his ordeal by freeing his mind from imprisonment and eventually outsmarting his rosewater-scented interrogator, we are told that he's doing so more than we're seeing it.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
The film settles into the kind of sobriety you've seen too often .

Name : James Rocchi / Alias : Film.com
"Rosewater" marks the debut of a director whose brains and guts are the equal or the better of his eye and heart .

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
In outline, Rosewater sounds earnest, one-note, relentless - something you'd watch out of a sense of duty. But it turns out to be a sly, layered work, charged with dark wit along with horror.

Name : Geoff Pevere / Alias : Globe and Mail
It's a movie made for people who prefer to take their politics while sitting on the couch.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Stewart does a credible job of maintaining the story's immediacy, but I must say I felt relieved that the film wasn't a masterpiece. If it was, we'd have more reason to fear Stewart will leave The Daily Show.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Stewart has created an informative, dark and witty story imbued with black humor surrounding Bahari's confinement.

Name : Tomas Hachard / Alias : NPR
The result neither portrays the suffering of Bahari's incarceration adequately nor lampoons the absurdities of the situation.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
A solid, powerfully acted political drama about human endurance in the face of ideological oppression.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
"Rosewater" doesn't hector, nor does it giggle about the issue of press freedom. It's an impressive and important piece of storytelling.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Stewart and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski cover it all in a straightforward, watchable way, the performances are all sincere and solid and the situation is easy to respond to emotionally.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
The hard-focus clarity of the images (Bobby Bukowski did the cinematography) leads to an intimacy with anguish that passes into expressionism.

Name : Esther Breger / Alias : The New Republic
The main question Rosewater grapples with is whether Stewart can hack it as a filmmaker. The answer: sort of?

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
Rosewater . has an urgency that's all about the storytelling smarts of its first-time writer-director.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
While it may seem like another triumph-over-adversity tale, the movie is really about what sustains us during impossible moments.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
This is Jon Stewart's directorial debut; the talk show comedian has a handle on the material and conveys it clearly.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
A persuasive production despite its limited budget .

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Mr. Stewart's interest in the material is obviously personal, but his movie transcends mere self-interest.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Stewart's enthusiasm for his story and passion about injustice ring clear, but throughout what could have been a dreadfully somber film, he remembers to breathe.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
Centrist mush-basic, boilerplate human-interest stuff that's too shapeless to completely work as drama, and too depoliticized to be taken seriously as anything else.

Name : Joe McGovern / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Rosewater, starring the geeky-charismatic Gael Garcia Bernal as Bahari, is a gripping drama, smartly calibrated for Western audiences who still need an education in the bright, progressive, fight-back impulses in Iranian culture.