Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
I have some problems with this movie, not all of which can be ascribed to the usual narcissism of small differences. But first it's important to acknowledge the acuity of Mr. Baumbach's insight and his overall generosity of spirit.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
The storytelling is smooth and assured and the one-liners are generally enjoyable.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
"While We're Young" is snarky, smart and surprising, right up until the final shot.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
While We're Young starts off as an empathetic, funny look at middle age and winds up as profound and schematic as a Neil Simon play - or, for the younger set, an episode of The New Girl.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
While We're Young pairs two New York couples, one middle-aged and anxious and the other millennial and carefree. Both are in for a satirical skewering, but also - and here's a change for Baumbach - something close to a hug.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
While We're Young may provide the fusion of two disparate narrative packages but the glass is only half-full.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It's not Stiller's character who's the curmudgeon, it's Baumbach.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
"While We're Young" is one step forward and two steps back for writer-director Noah Baumbach, whose movies are never less than intelligent but, at their worst, tend to settle for gestures instead of movements.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Baumbach may be the sharpest social satirist of his generation - in some ways, he's a Woody Allen with clearer vision and fewer nervous tics - but the message of this droll, enjoyable bourgeois vaudeville can be boiled down to Father Knows Best.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
For about an hour, "While We're Young" was one of the most exhilarating times I've had at the movies in many a month. It played like razor-sharp Woody Allen in his prime.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Only an artist at the midpoint between the maypole and maturity could concoct a comedy as potent as "While We're Young."

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
When Baumbach is on, he's really on, and the brilliant "While We're Young" contains the same self-lacerating humor as his "Greenberg," "Margot at the Wedding" and "The Squid and the Whale."

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Baumbach belongs in a select group of invaluable American directors. He makes movies built, increasingly, like traditionally structured studio comedies of an earlier age.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
It shows a director not so much mooning over the past, with regret for faded powers, as probing his own obsessions and the limits of his style.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
The film has [Baumbach's] usual strengths: sharp urban insights, brainy comedy, moments of inspired high exasperation. It also shares a few of his faults.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Another inconsequential Noah Baumbach parody of so-called "normal" people trying to function in a fractional society changing too rapidly to keep up with, While We're Young is a dreary bummer.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
A sharp look at getting older, growing up and assuming responsibility.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Putting one's finger on exactly what's wrong with "While We're Young" is a challenge. Best to use several fingers.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Baumbach's eighth feature isn't just sharp, it's serrated - its jokes, and there are lots of them, come at you with rows and rows of tiny teeth.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
The most hilarious Woody Allen film in years is directed by Noah Baumbach, with Ben Stiller as basically an updated version of the idealistic documentary filmmaker the Woodman played in 'Crimes and Misdemeanors.'

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It's a satire of endless youth, "The Kids Are All Right" colliding with "My Generation." Yet it's the best kind of grown-up absurdism.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
We know from his previous work that Baumbach is capable of writing much more interesting and full-conceived female characters than these, so the gender imbalance here is disappointing.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
For a while much of this contemporary comedy is great fun - until the party ends and you're ready for these people to go home.

Name : Lisa Kennedy / Alias : Denver Post
The wonderful thing about While We're Young and the relationship that develops between Josh and Cornelia and Jamie and Darby is that it's less about resentment than it is a celebration of romantic love. At least initially.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
A sometimes poignant paean to struggling to age gracefully while time drags you kicking and screaming to the inevitable end, While We're Young effectively balances wry comedy and bittersweet drama.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
If you've been wishing you could see a good Woody Allen comedy again, you should check out Noah Baumbach's While We're Young, which sees the 45-year-old director moving in on Allen's territory - the Manhattan comedy of manners.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
The verbal wit and comic set-ups are smart and sprung from the zeitgeist.

Name : Mark Jenkins / Alias : NPR
Noah Baumbach's best movie since 2005's The Squid and the Whale, While We're Young navigates into more mainstream territory while losing none of the writer-director's rueful wit.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
This delicious satire about aging hipsters and their discontents is everything we've come to expect from the best of Noah Baumbach, as well as several things more.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Stiller's scenes with the gifted Adam Driver escalate into generational comic warfare of a high order. Baumbach touches a raw nerve.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
Baumbach plays with universal themes about the uncertainty of aging, the elusive nature of "cool" and the acceptance that comes with settling down .

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Only the motives of Baumbach's alter ego are pure. Meanwhile, the most entertaining questions - Can people transcend wide age gaps? Should they want to? - turn out to be beside the point.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
Baumbach's confidently charming latest, plays more like a Woody Allen-ish parody than any of his other movies, but the shift hasn't required a sacrifice in insight, heart or bite.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Even at its most confected, this is a film that tells the truth.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
A knotty exploration of the dialectic between sincerity and authenticity, or the shifting relationship between truth and fiction in an age where we're no longer sure what those words mean .

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
A sharply observed and witty dark comedy.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
Baumbach's own acutely observed this-is-life laffer features his most relatable characters yet.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : RogerEbert.com
The observant and mocking humor that makes the film's first two-thirds so breezy and enjoyable gives way to shattering realizations, but Baumbach ultimately tempers that instinct somewhat by exhibiting genuine sympathy for Stiller's character.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Baumbach is never less than shrewd in the way he links his protagonists through insecurity.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Baumbach, whose films include the searingly funny, autobiographical The Squid and the Whale and the brilliantly uncomfortable Margot at the Wedding, writes wry, sharp, poignant stuff.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
It's well-acted, nicely crafted and imaginatively envisioned; it shows yet another side to an interesting and rapidly developing filmmaker.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
"A Most Violent Year" presents an honorable man struggling to stay true to his values in the face of temptation. It is also the portrait of a brilliant hustler working a very long con. It's a terrific movie either way.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
It brings to mind the fierce New York-based productions of Sidney Lumet in particular but also the whole notion of character-driven, the-clock-is-ticking melodramas in general.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
Further clarifies what might be the most promising career in American movies: an urban-headed filmmaker attuned to economies of place and time, with an eye on the vacant throne of Sidney Lumet.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
It's a gangster movie that tries to be more than that, not always successfully.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
A revelation: meticulously constructed, brilliantly acted, suspenseful and sharply written.

Name : Tomas Hachard / Alias : NPR
It bears all the hallmarks of depth except for actual wisdom.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Just when we're settling into the film being a Lumet-ian character-driven drama, Chandor will, on more than one occasion, organically segue to an adrenaline-packed truck chase that's as exciting as any big action-movie moment of recent memory.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
A movie that quietly but ferociously immerses us in a time and place, with atmosphere done in minimal yet evocative strokes.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
A tough, gritty, richly atmospheric thriller .

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Mr. Chandor gives Mr. Isaac everything he needs for a tour de force performance, and the actor makes the most of what he gets.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
Some of the menacing atmosphere, and even a few scenes, descend from the first two "Godfather" movies. But, in fact, Chandor has done something startling: he has made an anti-"Godfather."

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
[Chandor] peels back the layers of his story and characters with the skill of an expert dramatist.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It's the kind of uncompromising movie we don't see much of anymore. And it makes you nostalgic for a time when the world was worse and the movies were better.

Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
Can Chandor make a first-rate film that isn't a testosterone fest? That's the next challenge-one that he shares with the industry as a whole.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Chastain is killer good, and Isaac is an implosive powerhouse in a film that reflects a world where nothing is held sacred. You watch with nerves clenched, holding on tight.

Name : Andrew Lapin / Alias : NPR
The beats of the movie, not to mention the winking title and the time period, make A Most Violent Year feel like it should be another bloody tale about the dark side of American greed. But Chandor is too smart to go down that path.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
It's really just sort of.dumb.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
"A Most Violent Year" is a small picture, but each brushstroke is laden with detail and craftsmanship.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
All this is rendered . in memorable and exemplary fashion. And it's all just a little more boring than it ought to be.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
It holds you with its gravity and forces your respect. It's also talky, repetitive, thesis-driven, and often strangled by its own solemnity.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
For me A Most Violent Year remained an abstract idea of a great period crime drama, rather than a fleshly incarnation of one.