Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : Associated Press
Notable for a chilling lead performance from Rebecca De Mornay and not much else.

Name : Jon Frosch / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A movie not even a mother could love.

Name : Jeannette Catsoulis / Alias : New York Times
Stuffed with secrets and characters who can't wait to betray one another, the film offers no one to root for except Mother, whose perverted family values at least remain consistent.

Name : Robert Abele / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The ready crackle of [De Mornay's] studiously demonic performance brings welcome distraction from this otherwise crude litany of torture and wretched death.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Too innocuous to inspire actual rage yet too utterly tepid and bland to elicit a single laugh.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
It's like a nightmare in which you are trapped in an endless Kmart aisle of horrible holiday cards.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
You can survive this comedy, which was directed by Garry Marshall and written by too many people to shame by naming, but only if you're immune to febrile calculation complicated by chronic ineptitude.

Name : Jen Chaney / Alias : Washington Post
When Aniston's character casually mentions Groundhog Day and Flag Day in conversation, I immediately thought to myself, "Be quiet, you, or Garry Marshall will get even more bad ideas."

Name : Nick Pinkerton / Alias : Village Voice
Mother's Day is distinguished, at least, by De Mornay's porcelain-smile lampoon of castigating matriarchy.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
A two-hour movie so forgettable that I'm not convinced it actually exists.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
The cinematic equivalent of a paper plate with macaroni and glitter haphazardly glued onto it, "Mother's Day" is a film only its creators could love (and even they must be having some misgivings).

Name : Glenn Kenny / Alias : New York Times
There are laughs, albeit inadvertent; the biggest comes courtesy of the production's no-doubt overworked sound department, when Ms. Robertson utters "I have abandonment issues" without moving her mouth.

Name : Molly Eichel / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
The problem with this type of movie is ingrained in the structure: There's so much going on that there's no time to build characters that make sense or any sort of meaningful relationships.

Name : Andrew Barker / Alias : Variety
Atrociously written, begrudgingly acted, haphazardly assembled and never more backward than when it thinks it's being progressive .

Name : Trevor Johnston / Alias : Time Out
Excruciatingly misguided.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Like just about everything else in Mother's Day, the nod to the earlier movies are clumsy and pointless and obvious.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
Mother's Day seems more like a contractual commitment than a creative exercise.

Name : Randy Cordova / Alias : Arizona Republic
Sure, you'll forget all about it a week after you've seen it, but it's mostly pleasant and occasionally touching, even though it's a lot closer to an episode of "The Love Boat" than "Love Actually."

Name : Charles Gant / Alias : Variety
Undistinguished apart from Rebecca De Mornay's performance as an unhinged mama.

Name : Tomas Hachard / Alias : NPR
The result neither portrays the suffering of Bahari's incarceration adequately nor lampoons the absurdities of the situation.

Name : Geoff Pevere / Alias : Globe and Mail
It's a movie made for people who prefer to take their politics while sitting on the couch.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The film goes slightly beyond rigorous earnestness and settles into a kind of stubborn atonement.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Stewart's wryly observant qualities as a TV star serve him well in his feature film debut.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
That the movie is as tense and chilling as it is owes much to first-time director Jon Stewart's keen eye for the way humor surfaces even in the dark places.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
What makes "Rosewater" different from similar entries in what might be called the Triumph of the Imprisoned Spirit genre is that the hero is hardly an ideologue, despite having sympathy for the Iranian reformers and the Green party.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
Jon Stewart's filmmaking debut "Rosewater" has much in common with "The Daily Show" - it's blaringly obvious, it's naive, it plays to the cheap seats and it's enamored with cheap jokes.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Stewart can never quite answer the question: Why this man's story, of all the ones that should be told? And why now, five years later?

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Though at times Rosewater is clearly the work of a first-timer still finding his voice, Stewart is indisputably a real filmmaker.

Name : Mary Houlihan / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
With Rosewater, Stewart proves he can pull back from the satirical comedy and become a thoughtful, incisive and questioning filmmaker.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
The hard-focus clarity of the images (Bobby Bukowski did the cinematography) leads to an intimacy with anguish that passes into expressionism.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
This is Jon Stewart's directorial debut; the talk show comedian has a handle on the material and conveys it clearly.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
A strong, striking political drama.

Name : Jocelyn Noveck / Alias : Associated Press
A clear-headed, sensitive and thoroughly impressive directorial debut for the Comedy Central host.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Stewart acquits himself solidly, though not thrillingly, as a beginning director .

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Rosewater" is a reminder that America may have its critics, but at least there's little danger of the average citizen being arrested for appearing on a fake news show.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Stewart's enthusiasm for his story and passion about injustice ring clear, but throughout what could have been a dreadfully somber film, he remembers to breathe.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
Centrist mush-basic, boilerplate human-interest stuff that's too shapeless to completely work as drama, and too depoliticized to be taken seriously as anything else.

Name : Joe McGovern / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Rosewater, starring the geeky-charismatic Gael Garcia Bernal as Bahari, is a gripping drama, smartly calibrated for Western audiences who still need an education in the bright, progressive, fight-back impulses in Iranian culture.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
In outline, Rosewater sounds earnest, one-note, relentless - something you'd watch out of a sense of duty. But it turns out to be a sly, layered work, charged with dark wit along with horror.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Mr. Stewart's interest in the material is obviously personal, but his movie transcends mere self-interest.

Name : Esther Breger / Alias : The New Republic
The main question Rosewater grapples with is whether Stewart can hack it as a filmmaker. The answer: sort of?

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Stewart lets the truth roll out, the best he can, believing in the sanitizing effect of sunlight and the inevitable fate that awaits all despots.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
While it may seem like another triumph-over-adversity tale, the movie is really about what sustains us during impossible moments.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
While the film keeps telling us that Bahari survived his ordeal by freeing his mind from imprisonment and eventually outsmarting his rosewater-scented interrogator, we are told that he's doing so more than we're seeing it.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
A solid, powerfully acted political drama about human endurance in the face of ideological oppression.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
The film settles into the kind of sobriety you've seen too often .

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Rosewater is an earnest picture, but it's also got some juice - there's vitality and feeling in it, the secret ingredients so often missing from even the most well-intentioned first features.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Stewart does a solid job of handling the facts of the time; it feels true to the moment, like a filmed Newsweek story. Creative acting, dramatizedthemes, gifted cinematic styling? Not so much.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
The virtue of this movie is its commitment to political ambiguity and emotional truth.

Name : James Rocchi / Alias : Film.com
"Rosewater" marks the debut of a director whose brains and guts are the equal or the better of his eye and heart .

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Rosewater certainly has merit as an act of atonement on Stewart's part and a tribute to people like Bahari. In the end, however, the movie needs to stand on its own, apart from its noble intentions and the popularity of its writer-director.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
Rosewater . has an urgency that's all about the storytelling smarts of its first-time writer-director.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Stewart and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski cover it all in a straightforward, watchable way, the performances are all sincere and solid and the situation is easy to respond to emotionally.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
A persuasive production despite its limited budget .

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
A finely wrought, powerful drama that tells the true story of an Iranian-born journalist's imprisonment and torture by the Islamic regime in Iran.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Stewart does a credible job of maintaining the story's immediacy, but I must say I felt relieved that the film wasn't a masterpiece. If it was, we'd have more reason to fear Stewart will leave The Daily Show.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Stewart has created an informative, dark and witty story imbued with black humor surrounding Bahari's confinement.

Name : John Anderson / Alias : Newsday
Earnest, well-acted, less than urgent, but more than a vanity project.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
For a first effort, Stewart hasn't done a bad job. There's just the nagging feeling with "Rosewater" that a better movie was possible.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Stewart proves to be an able filmmaker in "Rosewater." But he also shows hints of being something more.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
"Rosewater" doesn't hector, nor does it giggle about the issue of press freedom. It's an impressive and important piece of storytelling.