Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Zamperini's life story is genuinely inspirational, but the movie seems fashioned as a standard-issue profile in courage.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
In a well-made, but one-note film.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
If you can take it, "Unbroken" will lift you like the classics of adventure cinema.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
It is a harrowing journey, and an inspirational one. But, as director, Jolie takes far too long to tell it, particularly in such a conventional manner.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
This great, tough-skinned movie can stand with the muscular action dramas that are a crucial part of American movie canon.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
A good 45 minutes of the movie consists of showing Louis getting beaten up, then healing; getting beaten up, then healing, over and over.

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : AV Club
Though Jolie is shooting for Christ-like passion and redemption, she only ends up slathering one man's very real, very morbid struggles in the usual reductive "greatest generation" sentiment.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
What the movie ends up in desperate need of is a sense of life made real and palpable through dreadful, transporting details, not a life embalmed in hagiographic awe.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
Angelina Jolie's film as a director is a gorgeously shot and hardhitting old-school war drama - but still somehow fails to get under its subject's skin.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Handsome, alert and intensely focused, little-known English actor Jack O'Connell is a fine choice as Louis. And Japanese pop star Takamasa "Miyavi" Ishihara shines as "The Bird,' Louis' sadistic captor and war criminal in training.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Jolie is more fixated on gore than grace. In making us feel every crushing blow - the better to burnish her reputation as a serious director - we're shortchanged on the beauty of Zamperini's story

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
One of the finest achievements of the 2014 film year.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It's moving, admirable, and occasionally exhilarating. What it's missing is the one thing that could always be counted on with Jolie as a star: the spark of danger.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
The film boasts both sheen and efficiency without always delivering an equivalent emotional impact. It's easier to be awed or impressed by it than moved.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
All the movie's tension comes down to whether Zamperini can withstand Watanabe's abuse, which is probably when it's helpful to forget the title.

Name : Connie Ogle / Alias : Miami Herald
The bigger problem is that neither Jolie nor the script bothers to flesh Louis out as a fully formed person with faults and fears and regrets, which keeps the film from ever capturing you emotionally.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
This passion project for Angelina Jolie shines with her abiding love for Louis Zamperini and his courage under fire. In honoring Louis' endurance, she does herself proud.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
A beautifully shot, well-acted, and worthy-to-a-fault Second World War survivor story that only intermittently achieves the kind of emotional impact for which it aims.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
The truest testament to the film's strength is the degree to which it all but achieves greatness.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
A tale of endurance, "Unbroken" takes endurance to sit through.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Jolie has made a grand, solid movie of the Zamperini story, but O'Connell is the part of Unbroken that was truly worth the wait.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Jolie gets the dirty/ennobling job done.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
More a series of similar events than a story, and lacks an underlying message except that torture hurts.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
As a castaway story, a historical drama and a portrait of an Olympian turned soldier, "Unbroken" is a touching and important work.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
A bit embalmed in its own nobility, it's an extraordinary story told in dutiful, unexceptional terms, the passionate commitment of all involved rarely achieving gut-level impact.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Well-crafted and compelling, but director Angelina Jolie's best contribution was casting the unknown Miyavi in a pivotal role.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
An interminable, redundant, unnecessary epic devoted to suffering, suffering, suffering.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
If nothing else, it's certainly better than the last time a good-looking Hollywood star decided to direct a movie about WWII. But the less said about George Clooney's The Monuments Men, the better .

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
For Jolie, it's all about the suffering, without much meaning.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"Unbroken" makes for a grueling experience, which is not quite the same as a memorable one.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
"Unbroken" stirs a moviegoer by default; it's an astounding story of human endurance that has been brought a little too safely to the screen.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
There's a lot to like about the movie. Its presentation is straightforward, chronicling Zamperini's amazing tale without flinching.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
"Unbroken" is a rousing old-fashioned yarn with numerous exciting set-pieces and an uncomplicated hero you root for all the way through. It's entertaining throughout and made with a high level of technical skill.

Name : David Hiltbrand / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Unbroken is a fitting title for this excruciating cinematic treatment of the flyboy's ordeal. It plays like an endless, unrelieved gauntlet of suffering, an onslaught untempered by grace or redemption.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
A straightforward and entirely commendable story about the triumph of the human spirit, etc.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
Jolie hasn't done a disservice to Zamperini's life, but it's hard to know what she was trying to tell. It's Zamperini's story in fact and circumstance, but somehow, he feels like an enigma.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
You find yourself happy that this film exists, but wishing it were better.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Despite its many impressive elements, "Unbroken" plays incomplete and unbalanced.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
This will be a tough film for some to take. But it also has strong appeal as an extraordinary survival story, and Laura Hillenbrand's first-rate book that inspired it has not been on the best-seller lists for four years for nothing.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
Given its subject, it should have been great, but it turns out to be simply good.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Though O'Connell's vulnerable lead performance is terrific, Unbroken's unrestrained hero worship undermines the story.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
For long stretches, it's dull and plodding, chugging along on the fumes of its earnest intentions. Still, there are worse ways to kill two hours than watching Hardy work his sturdy magic.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"Child 44" is involving despite itself.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
"Child 44" plays like a curious relic of an earlier Cold War mindset, when Western audiences took comfort that they were living on the right side of the Iron Curtain, and relied on movies to remind them as much.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
A muddled, mumbling thriller that never gets us in an iron grip.

Name : Jordan Mintzer / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The movie doesn't really captivate the way it should, and as the manhunt stretches on it actually diminishes in suspense, ultimately overstaying its two-plus-hour running time.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It's as tedious as a bottomless bowl of borscht.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
What "Child 44" most resembles is a rushed and crowded pilot for a television drama.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Just say nyet.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
[An] unrelentingly grim, plodding, and close-to-incoherent adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's best-selling mystery.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
Thanks to a feeble script, bland direction and - God, why? - those impenetrable accents, no one emerges from this fiasco with much dignity.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
Given these actors and the ravishing decrepitude of the locations and costumes and the lustrous cinematography of Oliver Wood, I found it more than watchable the whole way through.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
Despite gritty atmosphere and a sometimes smart script by the estimable Richard Price, whose credits include "The Wire," "Child 44" can't sort out the basics.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The movie hints at a riveting story but is incapable of delivering it.

Name : James Rocchi / Alias : TheWrap
A Soviet-era slog through crime and corruption, painted in grim shades of muck, blood, moss and bark, director Daniel Espinosa's "Child 44" turns a best-selling period-piece procedural into a slow, tedious thriller almost totally devoid of thrills.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
The usual serial-killer thriller in Soviet drag.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Child 44 could have been far more compelling had it dug deeper into its political thriller layers and not drifted into yet another story of a diabolical killer on the loose.

Name : Jocelyn Noveck / Alias : Associated Press
Ultimately, what we have is a bloated, grim, underwhelming affair, which is unfortunate - because the movie starts out with a lot going for it.