Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Few will regret having seen "The Homesman," and yet it's not exactly an enjoyable experience.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
Integrity and personality can go a long way, especially in a movie as unquestionably flawed as The Homesman.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
If only things had started out on more solid ground and headed toward some sort of resolution. If only.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The development probably works in Glendon Swarthout's novel of the same name, where Swank is nowhere in sight. But not in the theater. You're tempted to give up on the movie because it feels as if the movie has given up on her.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
As the protagonists near their final destination, The Homesman offers a critique of civilization that's almost as pessimistic as its critique of frontier life, suggesting that in every corner of America there have always been more losers than winners.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
"Tommy Lee Jones' riveting Western is bleak and very nearly misanthropic, but it's also passionate, earthy, unpredictable, sensitive, and gloriously distinct."

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The Homesman aims for a story that's poignant and told sparely, but comes across as mawkish, tedious and self-indulgent.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
While the film is bathed in a beautiful magic-hour glow courtesy of cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, Jones' journey doesn't quite take off.

Name : Pete Vonder Haar / Alias : Village Voice
Glendon Swarthout's 1988 novel offered a rare approach to . Old West stories by shifting the focus to the women and children who often bore its brunt the worst, and Jones has - for the most part - successfully captured this .

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
A strange, and beautiful movie, full of odd touches - a knife fight in the middle of a desolate wasteland, a gravestone made from a bed's headboard, a piece of embroidery that stands in for a much-missed keyboard - that haunt after the film's done.

Name : John Anderson / Alias : Newsday
Wanders along the lonesome trail, then heads off into the underbrush.

Name : Geoff Pevere / Alias : Globe and Mail
It's as stubbornly and cantankerously eccentric as both its wagon drivers, not to mention driven to blaze its own trail through the narrative and mythological landscape of America's defining story form.

Name : Ella Taylor / Alias : NPR
The Homesman joins a stark, stripped-down beauty to a languid pace and a spare soundtrack to create an ambience that reeks of loneliness and alienation.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Everyone has a favorite Tommy Lee Jones performance. Until now I didn't have my least favorite, but "The Homesman" provides it, and is ruined by it.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
"The Homesman" is both a captivating western and a meticulous, devastating feminist critique of the genre.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
There's a thrilling undercurrent of rebellion in the way this straightforward, seemingly old-fashioned Western takes up the feminist cause.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Swank, an Oscar winner for "Boys Don't Cry" and "Million Dollar Baby," is outstanding, getting to the essence of Mary Bee's pride and pain. And in the showier role, Jones impressively peels away layers of rambunctiousness to reveal George's humanity.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
Unlike other actor-directors, Jones never seems to indulge excess on the part of his cast. Though the characters are strong, the performances are understated.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Title and director notwithstanding, Tommy Lee Jones' "The Homesman'' is very much a feminist Western - one painting a vivid picture of how difficult it was for even a strong and determined woman to survive in frontier days.

Name : Jon Frosch / Alias : The Atlantic
Jones continues to craft evocative, painterly images, and he takes real risks with tone, shifting from tragic to comic without the usual cues or transitions.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
At a certain point, The Homesman will take you by surprise. By the end . it will take your heart.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Right or wrong, "The Homesman" belongs to Jones and Swank, and for Western aficionados it's worth seeing.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
A grand, shocking saga of a movie, The Homesman is the kind they don't make much anymore.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
The Homesman is a western hard and true, one that probably comes closer to depicting the hardships of frontier life than any number of more conventional oaters.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
For a movie headlined by two Oscar-winning Hollywood stars - and directed and co-written by one of them - "The Homesman" is awfully close to outsider art.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
The melancholic balance isn't always quite right and the momentum wanes when it should be gaining.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Swank and Streep are big stars with famous faces, and yet disappear into their roles; these characters convey both quiet strength and gentle kindness.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Parts of The Homesman are a slog to sit through, but the movie ends on a note of absurd comedy that also breaks your heart, suggesting that some people, no matter the circumstances, are incapable of change.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
An absorbing, melancholy look at the hard lot of women in the Old West.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
A film that looks at first glance like a conventional Western but goes to unusual places.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
Some recent interviews with Jones paint him as a bit of a curmudgeon. But he's right to push back against being put into a box. "The Homesman" succeeds mainly because it and he don't neatly fit into one.

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : Time Out New York
It doesn't help that Swank never finds a way into this highly unappealing character, or that Jones (mostly phoning in the pitiable surliness) avoids delving very deeply into the story's proto-feminist undercurrents.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
I was impressed with how Jones's uncomfortable mixing of tones in the first half of the film gave way to something more elegiac and evocative by the end.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
This fem-centric Western from actor-director/co-writer Tommy Lee Jones walks the tightrope between comic and tragic. Jones and Hilary Swank ignite combustibly.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"The Homesman" may sound like a title conferred on a man, and George Briggs may be driving the wagon. But it is Mary Bee's persistence and prayers that carry the women, and the film, flawed as it sometimes is, home.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
A wrenching, relentless and anti-heroic western that stands among the year's most powerful American films. Not everyone will like "The Homesman," but if you see it you won't soon forget it.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
The film has more surprising turns than a honeycomb has bees. Absurdity and calamity collide without warning.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
Certainly, there is a sturdiness to it, and a stubborn want of haste, that might have earned an approving growl from John Ford.

Name : Jordan Hoffman / Alias : Film.com
If this is a revision to the revisionist westerns ushered in by "Unforgiven," I'll stay back East(wood.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 : 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 : 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.