Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
The themes are life and death, but the tone stays breezy.

Name : Mark Matousek / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
How refreshing for a film to stare death in the face and find compassion reflected in its gaze.

Name : Randy Cordova / Alias : Arizona Republic
It never lapses into mawkishness, but remains clear-eyed and compassionate. It's not coldly clinical; instead, the characters are treated with grace and respect.

Name : Vadim Rizov / Alias : AV Club
The Farewell Party leaves no doubt as to where it stands on the right to die with dignity when facing terminal illness, but it's so clumsily made that it serves only to exasperate.

Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
For all its talk of death, The Farewell Party, featuring a terrific ensemble cast, is a story about life. Always honest, graceful and funny it explores with deep compassion its characters familial and romantic relationships.

Name : Abby Garnett / Alias : Village Voice
The Farewell Party makes drama out of right-to-die politics and asserts that just about everyone who makes it past a certain age will have to contend with the issue in one way or another.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
A bittersweet, wryly comic, keenly observed look at senescence from Israeli directors Sharon Maymon and Tal Granit.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
It's taking a strong stand on the morality of mercy killing, no doubt, but it also acknowledges the precious glory of life. It's a rare film that can smile while studying suffering.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
I can't recall any film ever making me laugh and cry in complete comic and dramatic balance like "The Farewell Party."

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
For all its sensitivity to the subject, "The Farewell Party" makes a number of tonal missteps .

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
The gags in the movie's first half are so unapologetically mordant that I was disappointed to see them dwindle to nothing in the second, as so often happens in stories like this one.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
A gentle but pointed work that walks a particular line to create a specific tone, a consistently warm and comic film about an unmistakably serious subject.

Name : Kevin P. Sullivan / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The drama falls somewhere on the spectrum between Michael Haneke's devastating Amour and the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies, but the result is a film that's frank about death without leaving you cold.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
This is straight-up commercial comedy, low-keyed division, and while it can't hold a candle to recent, dark-comic Israeli achievements such as Joseph Cedar's "Footnote," the actors more than save it.

Name : Joe McGovern / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
A dangerous comedy about a dangerous regime shouldn't be safe for suburban dads.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
It's certainly smutty-and infantile. Maybe half the jokes miss. But it is a truly savage work.

Name : Ben Kenigsberg / Alias : AV Club
Much of the film is devoted to the hit-and-miss (but strangely moving) riffing between the leading men.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
About as funny as a communist food shortage, and just as protracted.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Like their affable, ignorant characters, Rogen and Franco seem in way over their heads with "The Interview."

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The Interview fails to live up to the hype, floundering as a rowdy comedy as it grows duller by the minute.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Maybe you will love The Interview - if you can ever see the movie - as much as some people hate or fear it. But if you're hoping for any cogent political satire here, then the joke's on you.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Offers a few moments of casual brilliance but otherwise trips itself up in the threads of its contrived absurdity.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : ChristyLemire.com
This is what all the fuss was about?

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
What's wrong with The Interview is that it doesn't know how to be the singeing comedy it wants.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Bluntly funny and ever-so-slightly sweet.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
While The Interview never slacks in its mission to tell jokes, it's such a messy and meandering movie that it never quite lands as a satire of politics or the media or anything else.

Name : Aisha Harris / Alias : Slate
If you like your dictator mockery served on a sharper, smarter dish, you should probably just do what everyone else seems to be doing, and rewatch Team America: World Police.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
That something so carefully slapdash and happily juvenile actually resulted in cyber-sabotage and threats of violence is, in itself, an enormous kind of joke. Too bad it's the biggest one here.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The Interview has the comic batting average of a mediocre-to-average Saturday Night Live sketch .

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Its lesson is that American pop culture is inescapable, our great achievement and most popular export, the weapon we wield abroad and the glue trap we struggle with at home.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
"The Interview" struggles to really illuminate anything about the stranger-than-fiction Orwellian nightmare that is North Korea, but its attempt is admirable. It deserves to be seen.

Name : David Ehrlich / Alias : Time Out New York
The Interview confirms Rogen as the most ambitious mainstream comedian in Hollywood.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Everyone here is in way over his or her head.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Te best satire provokes and even outrages, and Rogen, Franco and Goldberg certainly succeed on that score.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
The remarkably dismal quality is emblematic of the mind-set that brought the movie, and its attendant crises, into being.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Characterizing it as satire elevates the creative execution of the film's very silly faux assassination of North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un far beyond what it merits.

Name : G. Allen Johnson / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Imagine "Harold and Kumar Go to North Korea," or "Bill and Ted's Excellent North Korean Adventure" or even "The Road to Pyongyang" starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. You get the idea.

Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
The film is not a dangerous weapon, or a tool for anti-Korean propaganda. It does kill, but with comedy.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
It's stupid. It's in bad taste. It impossible. I know all that. But Rogen's instinct to try anything for giggles and sticking it to dictatorial assholes is worth fighting for. Screw Kim if he can't take a joke.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
In their third film together, Franco and Rogen have a terrific banter and an underlay of affection. This kind of rapport is rare.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
Hate to say it, but this film ain't half the satire it could have been.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
There's a whip-smart, pointed comedy in "The Interview." Unfortunately it's buried in there. Really deep.