Name : Tina Hassannia / Alias : Globe and Mail
Regardless of its flimsy emotional interior, Ricki is a worthy addition in this year's growing canon of strong female-centred films, and it would be wise to remember Streep's stunning performance come awards season.

Name : Sheri Linden / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Even with its well-observed moments, the movie's nonmusical interactions, whether reaching for laughs or poignancy, too often feel flat and forced.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Director Jonathan Demme, with music in his DNA, offers a heartfelt salute to those who play the underside of rock & roll because, well, they have to. Too bad the rest of the movie is dime-a-dozen family soap opera.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Streep and Springfield make a surprisingly sweet pair of retirement-age rockers, but the scattered story line keeps losing the beat.

Name : Spencer Kornhaber / Alias : The Atlantic
Just when the story beats start to feel unbearably obvious, the film changes keys, becoming less family dramedy than a concert film.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
What might have been must be better than what's here, because what's here isn't much.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The movie is mature in the way it handles the regrets of absentee parents and the ways in which their children relate to them. There's a little Hollywood artifice here but not so much that the emotions feel inauthentic.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Streep's performance, like lightning, jolts everything.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
"Ricki and the Flash" seems like a squandered opportunity for this humane, curious and liberal-minded filmmaker to reflect on some uncomfortable realities. This isn't really rock 'n' roll. It's easy listening.

Name : Susanna Schrobsdorff / Alias : TIME Magazine
Streep's latest mom role, as Ricki Rendazzo in Ricki and the Flash, has a light, Mamma Mia! vibe, but it still hits all those hot buttons.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
There are fleeting moments of real fun. Still, it's hard not to wonder why so much in the movie went so wrong.

Name : Preston Jones / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
The film roars to life too intermittently.but, sadly, too much of Ricki and the Flash is just the same old song.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Ricki and the Flash swerves near stereotypes and swerves away at every turn.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
It's a crowd-pleaser every bit as calculated and earnestly defanged as a Golden Oldies bus-and-truck tour. It's fun while it lasts, even if the Bic lighters stay safely pocketed at the end of the show.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Quite a few filmgoers lament the shortage of movies for adults. "Ricki and the Flash" goes against that trend with rock 'n' roll attitude.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Creating a film with solid drama beside good humor is tough. It's harder still to balance them against a complicated character so they don't sprawl lopsided, and to send the audience home feeling satisfied.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Worth watching, and rocking to.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Diablo Cody's dispiriting screenplay is all about everyone coming to love Ricki, faults and all, and that is just not convincingly done.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
While there are some bright notes in Cody's writing, the situations feel a little tired, and the characters unexplored.

Name : Andrew Barker / Alias : Variety
This is a shaggy, easily distractible film that consistently defies expectations to both charming and baffling effect.

Name : Scott Tobias / Alias : NPR
A warmth radiates through Ricki and the Flash like a song sung true. A film that adores its characters this much is sure to be adored in kind.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
The screenplay doesn't lack for memorable zingers, and thanks to Cody's script and Streep's performance, Ricki emerges as a complex, self-contradictory person (even if most of the supporting characters don't).

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
An assemblage of almost-characters in an almost-story, resulting in a very disappointing almost-movie.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The film, which Diablo Cody wrote and Jonathan Demme directed, is a work of bulk-size bogusness. Barely a single scene is convincing.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
The story here, like a lot of bar bands, goes loud to cover up mediocrity. When Streep sings, though, so does the film.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Despite Streep's best efforts, Ricki seems more of a contrivance than a flesh-and-blood character.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
The result is cold porridge.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
"Ricki and the Flash" feels like "Stella Dallas" as remade by Jean Renoir - it's a humanist suburban fable.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
The skilled veteran Demme alternates dysfunctional family confrontations with easy comedy, expertly peppering in just the right rock tunes along the way. It's hard not to like Ricki, but the film makes no excuses for her actions.

Name : Patrick Dunn / Alias : Detroit News
Streep may have just been looking for some variety and an Oscar. But why is Demme, the great director of "The Silence of the Lambs," wasting his time on this?

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
As in Demme's best early work (Handle With Care, Melvin & Howard), there is both an affection for a uniquely American type of oddball and a clear-eyed sense of their foibles.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
Ultimately, spending time with these people is pleasant, lived-in, honest and even thought-provoking. And when the dialogue stops, there's a fun, golden not-too-oldies live music soundtrack to hum along with too.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
All good protagonists are contradictory tangles of experience and disappointment, but Cody is so tentative in her approach, nothing gathers steam or sticks in emotional terms.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Demme has already made a messed-up family matrimonial get-together way better than this, with a way better screenplay than the one Juno writer Cody has tossed off.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
Streep finds her way to the soul of several songs. There's devastating connection and tears in these moments: delicate gratitude in "Drift Away," nothing short of maternal redemption in a roaring version of Springsteen's "My Love Will Not Let You Down."

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
If only Streep would have put down the microphone and let Springfield sing "Jessie's Girl," "Ricki and the Flash" might have had half a chance.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
If only Demme had shot a scene of Ricki stubbing out a joint on a "Cathy" comic strip.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
The movie itself seems equally divided between the sensibilities of hyperverbal writer Diablo Cody and music-centric director Jonathan Demme, and ends up falling into a muddy gap between the two.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Ricki raises smart questions about why a mother's musical ambitions are so much more selfish than, say, seven-time dad Mick Jagger's, and even the shamelessly corny sing-along finale wrings a few real tears out.

Name : Stephen Farber / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
No movie with such a limp ending can be fully satisfying, and the beginning also falters. But the long middle section is a rousing good show.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
"Exodus" is an exercise in visual trickery that reaches for nothing beyond the obvious.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
"Exodus" turns out to be part of a time-honored tradition: the old-fashioned, super-spectacular Hollywood bomb.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Admirably cogent, even colloquial, Exodus plows through its stages efficiently, methodically and without much Old Testament passion.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Exodus: Gods and Kings is as uneven as Ridley Scott's career; at times, it seems to be a journey through the director's greatest strengths and weaknesses. The good news is that his strengths eventually win out .

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
Director Ridley Scott ticks the visual "epic" box with Exodus: Gods and Kings, but leaves emotion in the dust by trading spectacle for a compelling story.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
For all of the care and imagination that have been lavished on the production. the film's impact is best expressed by frequent aerial shots that are visually impressive and emotionally remote.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
'Exodus: Gods and Kings' is spectacular.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
It's understandable that people were angry about the whitewashing of Egypt. But no aspiring actor of color should think of this as an opportunity missed so much as a bullet dodged.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
You'll leave humming the plagues.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
We have no idea. What's the point of a Moses movie without a message from the mountaintop? Scott has broken the second commandment of a Bible movie: Have something to say and someone majestic to say it.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Its grandiose set pieces feel empty and imitative (Scott pulled off this kind of thing much more successfully in "Gladiator"), and the whole picture feels glitzy and hollow at the core.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Ridley Scott can't decide if making rivers run with blood is heroic or horrific - you sense he'd rather make Gladiator II: Attack of the Frogs.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The screenplay (credited to four screenwriters) is a mess, the pacing is uneven, the acting is inconsistent, and the experience as a whole is a letdown.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
This is the first portrayal of God I've ever encountered who looked like he could use a good spanking.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Bland, overly long and otherwise forgettable.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
For an epic, there are, at best, only two clearly seen characters in Exodus.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
The result feels less like a straightforward retread of the biblical narrative than an amped-up commentary on it: This "Exodus" comes at you in a heady and violent onrush of incident .

Name : Mark Jenkins / Alias : NPR
Crowd-wowing CGI spectacle and the inevitable if inconsequential 3-D effects make Exodus look like pure product, without any defining vision.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
"Exodus: Gods and Kings" does a fair job of giving us what might be called The Second-Greatest Story Ever Told. What it never convinces us of is why.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
A mish-mash - part half-committed melodrama, part half-thought-out political provocation.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
While the pale skin tones (bronzer is selectively applied) and haphazard mix of American and British accents is distracting, it barely scratches the surface of Exodus's ungainly artificiality.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
The movie works well as big-budget spectacle despite a ho-hum script.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
An even better special effect would have been having a main cast that actually reflects the Mediterranean/North African desert environment.There are darker-skinned actors on the screen, though they just happen to be all slaves, servants and soldiers.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
This is spectacular entertainment, practically a theme park ride, that could have used more spirituality and soul.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
"Exodus" is ludicrous only by accident, which isn't much fun and is the surest sign of what we might call a New Testament sensibility at work. But the movie isn't successfully serious, either.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Momentous conversations periodically grind any retelling of the Moses story to a halt, but Scott keeps his head down, plows through and then gets out of the way while visual effects supervisor Peter Chiang and his slave army take it on home.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
An utterly clueless, relentlessly grim and rambling action epic guaranteed to displease devout Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, amuse atheists - and generally bore everyone.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
After a strong opening and a sagging middle, "Exodus: Gods and Kings" regains its stride and surpasses itself in the last third, when the God of Abraham unleashes a series of calamities on Egypt and the royal household.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : RogerEbert.com
A numbing and soulless spectacle of 3-D, computer-generated imagery run amok, Ridley Scott's "Exodus: Gods and Kings" presents an enduring tale by pummeling us over the head with it.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Computer-generated imaging has advanced spectacularly over the decades, but moviegoers, and gamers, have been there every step of the way. Miracles aren't as impressive as they used to be.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Scott departs from Scripture enough to raise hackles. For example, this Moses sees God in the person of an insolent schoolboy (Isaac Andrews).

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Before you're able to get too distracted by Exodus' flaws, Scott reaches back into his bag of pixie dust and whips up another grand illusion.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
What this 3-D extravaganza gets spectacularly right is in putting the epic back into the biblical epic.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
This eye-rollingly bad movie is silly, sluggish and miscast.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
"Exodus: Gods and Kings" has drawn fire for casting White actors in the major roles, but don't get too bogged down in that. Really, that's hardly the only reason to not like it.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Scott is nothing if not a master orchestrator of chaos, and, both intentionally and otherwise, "Exodus: Gods and Kings" offers plenty of that.

Name : David Ehrlich / Alias : Time Out New York
The ultimate takeaway is that if you can't finance a $140 million epic about ancient Egypt with racially appropriate actors, maybe you shouldn't make a $140 million epic about ancient Egypt.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Moses is imagined as if Scott met him on an awkward first date.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
At least DeMille knew how to put on a show; the best this offers are a few bursts of Old Testament camp .