Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
Laden with witty ironies, the film by Anne Fontaine suggests men may not play exactly the roles they think they do in women's lives.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
Think of "Gemma Bovery" as an airy puff pastry, dripping with honey.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
A tad too slapstick and not nearly modern enough in its social sensibilities to offer a truly updated version of Madame Bovary, Gemma Bovery still has its charms .

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
A somewhat reserved but sensual and gratifying movie that finds and polishes connections between literature and the screen while further catapulting the wonderful British actress Gemma Arterton several notches up the ladder toward international stardom.

Name : Mark Jenkins / Alias : NPR
Christophe Beaucarne shoots the countryside, the baked goods, Gemma and Martin's playful dogs, and of course Arterton with sun-dappled rapture. No 19th-century novelist saw the world like this.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
After a while, the film feels more like a cute conceit that hasn't really been developed further. It's intriguing, and very well-acted, but empty.

Name : Jay Weissberg / Alias : Variety
The script flattens the main characters and makes one nostalgic for Flaubert's observational acumen.

Name : Nathalie Atkinson / Alias : Globe and Mail
A transmogrified Flaubert, recast, upturned and rich with observational and satirical contemporary details.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
Literary obsession proves to be a weak spine for this wry French drama.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
How is it possible that such blatant male wish fulfillment came from a female director and a graphic novel by a woman, writer-artist Posy Simmonds?

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
Arterton proves again that she has starrier magnetism in movies that slow down enough to appreciate it, even if she winds up as much a symbol as her own person.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
The scenery's lovely and the bread-kneading surprisingly erotic.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
The whole contrivance falls flat in the end.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
Anne Fontaine's Flaubert-inspired meta-pleasure Gemma Bovery takes as its subject the act of watching the lives around us - and of wishing those lives were literature.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
We are offered a handful of sketchy observations on the extent to which art either does or does not mimic life. These are, at best, unchallenging, and would have drawn barks of laughter from the derisive Flaubert.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Underscores the notion that what we're watching isn't merely the life of a complicated woman, but rather the actions and choices of that woman as seen through a man's eyes and a man's judgment.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
A nice little gem for anyone intrigued by the concept of having fun with a giant of 19th century literature.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
The novel, of course, is one of the towering achievements in literature, and this trivial movie has no idea what to do with it.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Like Chabrol, Fontaine has a way of making you laugh, on an off, for 90 minutes, before leaving you feeling a little queasy from too much truth.

Name : Jordan Mintzer / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
As pure entertainment it certainly does the job, although much of the text's existential weight is lost in the process.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
This is the first Fontaine movie I've seen that qualifies as lightweight.

Name : Sheri Linden / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Fans of "Madame Bovary" might enjoy the chance to nod knowingly at references to the novel, but that's not enough to sustain a feature .

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
It's hard to imagine a more Tom Hanks-y setup than this.

Name : Eric Kohn / Alias : indieWIRE
It's Eggers minus Eggers - a whimsical tale that aspires to make its whimsy count for something deep.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
You always trust Hanks, and he makes this "Hologram" feel real.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
The movie conjures no shortage of potent images, but push a bit deeper and your fist closes on empty air.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Quiet existential irony, albeit diluted and distorted, still reverberates in this stranger-in-a-strange-land story.

Name : Kate Taylor / Alias : Globe and Mail
You have to wonder what this film would feel like if a darker figure, a Robert Downey Jr. or Edward Norton, for example, had been cast in the lead role.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
A "Death of a Salesman" for the out-sourcing era, A Hologram for the King makes full use of Tom Hanks' default note, an everyman struggling painfully against the tide.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
To describe this as a movie about a mediocre businessman biding his time before an appointment probably makes it sound more exciting than it is.

Name : Nick Allen / Alias : RogerEbert.com
Here's a reasonably-sized star vehicle that finds exciting purpose in presenting an existential crisis.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
It's that rare fish-out-of-water story in which the fish miraculously manages to stop needing water, and learns to crave air instead.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Not even the mighty Tom Hanks can save this scattershot adaptation of Dave Eggers' lost-soul novel

Name : Tony Hicks / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
"A Hologram for the King" is disappointing mostly in that it could have been been better. But that doesn't make it bad.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
I guess I'll have to read the Dave Eggers novel to figure out what this thing is about.

Name : Tom Russo / Alias : Boston Globe
It's like an international-relations microcosm imagined by the Coen brothers, down to an occasional sense that the absurdity isn't taking us anywhere.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
It takes an actor with the finesse of Tom Hanks to turn a story of confusion, perplexity, frustration and panic into an agreeably uncomfortable comedy.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The problem is not that anything on screen is troubling, it's that nothing there, not even star Tom Hanks, is capable of holding our interest or attention for very long.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : Village Voice
It may start with a big burst of energy, but this is a sad, somber film about a world that's slowly, knowingly losing touch with the real.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
Director Tom Tykwer (Cloud Atlas), who also adapted the screenplay from Dave Eggers novel, displays a fine eye and a light touch with cultural detail, and isn't nearly as harsh on his hero as he might have (ought to have?) been.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It's not entirely free of stereotypes or sentimental moments. What it is, though, is amazingly likable.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
It looks expensive and comes off bland.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
It's true that not much happens - except cinema at its finest.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
This stranger-in-a-strange-land mood piece has an appealingly serene pace.

Name : Ethan Sacks / Alias : New York Daily News
After a first act that seems to promise a biting comedy, the film gets lost in the desert - literally and figuratively.

Name : Sheri Linden / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The focus on the way individuals adapt to and defy custom is one of the smartest aspects of the film.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Writer-director Tykwer skillfully presents a series of fantastical scenes in a way that has us thinking: Sure, that could happen. This is quite simply a beautiful film to behold.

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : AV Club
A Hologram For The King is a 97-minute movie that feels like it was cut down from two-hours-plus, with whole subplots reduced or jettisoned in what was likely an arduous post-production period.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
An earnest but aimless-feeling adaptation of Dave Eggers' novel.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Here's a case of consistently miscalibrated tone, from the first clumsy stabs at humor to the hero's default expression, which is painfully pained.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Tom Hanks exerts such a gravitational force in his movies, sometimes to his detriment, it's fascinating to watch him struggle for equilibrium in Tom Tykwer's A Hologram for the King.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
This film is surprisingly sweet.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
The tone and rhythms are pushy, forced, strained, like the expression on Hanks' face. What should be casual punctuation, filmed in medium shot, ends up in bam-pow close-ups.

Name : Michael Nordine / Alias : TheWrap
Even when A Hologram for a King rests on shaky narrative ground (which is often), Tykwer's confidently frenetic presentation and a host of surreal grace notes lend it a sense of urgency that keeps us on our toes, if not the edge of our seats.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Starring Tom Hanks and directed and written by Tom Tykwer ( Cloud Atlas, Run Lola Run), it veers from dark comedy to drama to buddy movie to romance without being particularly successful at any of them.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It's a strange thing: A Hologram for the King is mostly about a series of nuisances, annoyances and stresses, and yet it's a pleasure from beginning to end.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
If it sounds like Hologram is basically about a middle-aged white guy getting his groove back in the Middle East, well, yes, it is that. But if you squint hard enough, it's also a little bit more.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
It's a sweet, deliberately meandering movie, and it took me a while to connect with it. But it won me over because ultimately it conveys so well that feeling of estrangement that is both terrifying and comic for any farflung traveler.