Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Dallas Morning News
An unexpectedly enjoyable science-fiction adventure that should be generating louder fanboy buzz than it has so far.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
In its second half, Outlander falls apart completely, becoming nothing but a violent, mindless monster movie along the lines of Alien vs. Predator.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
There isn't a single scene in this story about a traveler from another planet who crash-lands on Earth during the Iron Age that doesn't remind you of another, better movie.

Name : Roger Ebert / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
I am tempted to describe the plot of Outlander as preposterous, but a movie about an alien spaceship crashing into a Viking fjord during the Iron Age is likely to be preposterous.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Boston Globe
By taking nonsense seriously Outlander never achieves camp. It's a comic book that's mistaken itself for scripture.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Outlander is a cheesy, low-budget, space alien Viking monster movie. And seemingly proud of it.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
In Outlander, the nuttiest hunk of junk in many months, Viking warriors and a stoic intergalactic traveler join forces to combat an enormous beetle with whiplash stingers.

Name : Tom Keogh / Alias : Seattle Times
You can think about Outlander 16 different ways, and still arrive at the same conclusion: It just doesn't work.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
An enjoyably goofy hybrid of extraterrestrial sci-fi and Iron Age action.

Name : Tasha Robinson / Alias : AV Club
An odd mishmash of genres with too much message and musing to be propulsive, and too much cornball monster movie to take seriously. But while the blend may not satisfy fans of pure action or pure drama, at least it gives them both a new flavor to try.

Name : Roger Moore / Alias : Orlando Sentinel
One of the more outlandish B-pictures to come out of the Great Movie Mash-up Machine known as The Weinstein Co.

Name : Tom Huddlestone / Alias : Time Out
Daft, obvious but hugely enjoyable, 'Outlander' is superior trash.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Fantastic Four is a synthetic bum-out, an assembly-line product, a movie a group of people made just because they could.

Name : Misha Davenport / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
At times silly and then serious, this Fantastic Four is the cinematic equivalent of multiple personality disorder.

Name : Scott Bowles / Alias : USA Today
Once you accept that Fantastic Four is not trying to be anything deeper than popcorn fare, the ride can be fun - with an ending more satisfying than Spider-Man 3.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Rise of the Silver Surfer doesn't aspire to much. It just happens to have the three things it needs - velocity, artistry and a pretty good story.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Director Tim Story does the same sort of efficient, impersonal job he did on the first movie, keeping things at such a basic, almost childish level that it seems the movie is aimed squarely, if not exclusively, at the 12-and-under set.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
The first movie's genesis story was more fun than the perfunctory doomsday scheme trotted out here.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Earnest, gee-whiz and foursquare, this simple and intentionally inoffensive sequel gets points for being easy to take and scrupulously avoiding obvious sources of irritation.

Name : Stephen Hunter / Alias : Washington Post
Sentient humans should stay away; all others may enter confident that their IQs are already in the Chernobyl-fried range and will not be affected, except for downward.

Name : Lisa Rose / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Compared with its predecessor, the new movie contains less silliness to offend purists. At the same time, there isn't much to thrill anyone, either.

Name : David Germain / Alias : Associated Press
Amid all the vapid dialogue and visual fireworks, the performances seem like afterthoughts, particularly those of Gruffudd and Alba.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
The target audience appears to be Cartoon Network fans. Anyone outside that category is likely to find Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer a dull slog no avalanche of razzle-dazzle digital hooey can camouflage.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
It's not egregiously awful like the first film. Just plain awful in that formula way that kills your spirit and all hope for summer movies.

Name : Scott Brown / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
If you swept the cosmic dust of the superhero boom into a flimsy dustpan, you'd have the Fantastic Four franchise.

Name : Amy Biancolli / Alias : Houston Chronicle
In Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, our heroes get what they deserve: a decent action flick with a jolt of visual wow.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Salon.com
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is more ambitious than its predecessor. It's also more cluttered and less fleet: The light, pleasingly casual quality of the first picture has evolved into something forced and metallic.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
Frankly, it's amazing this is watchable at all.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Fantastic Four feels like a 100-minute trailer for a movie that never happens.

Name : Bill Muller / Alias : Arizona Republic
Beyond a few good special-effects sequences - notably the Human Torch chasing the Silver Surfer between skyscrapers, the movie is uniformly vanilla. When the heroes aren't polishing their super-skills, they sit around and complain about their lot in life.

Name : Terry Lawson / Alias : Detroit Free Press
You don't walk out of Rise of the Silver Surfer feeling as if you've gone three rounds with the Thing. This is a case where getting less than you bargained for feels like a victory.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
For non comic book fans over the age of 13, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is a tedious, incoherent bore. For comic book fans of any age, it is an atrocity.

Name : Lisa Kennedy / Alias : Denver Post
Better than its juvenile predecessor.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
It is passable comic book stuff, dumb and loud. Loud. LOUD.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
These B-list demigods are so proudly, intergalactically mediocre that both the 2005 original and the follow-up tend to disable my super-snark beam.

Name : Bob Longino / Alias : Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Silver Surfer is watchable. But make no mistake. It's for younger filmgoers.

Name : Brian Lowry / Alias : Variety
Feels less like a blockbuster for this age of comics-oriented tentpoles than it does another also-ran - not an embarrassment, but an experiment that didn't gel.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : L.A. Weekly
As before, it's tough to know how much of the movie's hambone acting, Saturday-morning-cartoon dialogue and pubescent sexual innuendo are accidental and how much by design.

Name : Rob Salem / Alias : Toronto Star
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is a vast and significant improvement - if not quite "fantastic," then the next best thing: It does not suck.

Name : David Fear / Alias : Time Out
The performances are plywooden, the cornball visual gags are groanworthy, and Tim Story still can't direct his way out a sack with a map.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
The film fails to sustain its modest running time of 87 minutes.

Name : Keith Phipps / Alias : AV Club
Many complaints were lobbed at Fantastic Four but no one ever suggested it was too smart. Yet it would seem that everyone came to the sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer, determined to dumb it down.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Rise of the Silver Surfer is an existentially and aesthetically unnecessary sequel to the equally irrelevant if depressingly successful Fantastic Four.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
Faithfully mining one of the Marvel franchise's more intriguing mythologies, the sequel proves every bit as disposable as its predecessor, with even less character definition and several tons more poundage in the f/x department.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
As summer franchise superhero flicks go, it's tolerable.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Although FF:ROTSS comes from the same place as Spider-Man (New York, and Marvel editor Stan Lee's noggin), this sequel to the 2005 Fantastic Four debut is lackluster, even by comparison to the lackluster Spider-Man 3.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Boston Globe
The Marvel comic book this movie is based on was never as sitcom-ish as the two films it's inspired.

Name : Jack Mathews / Alias : New York Daily News
Much better than the original.

Name : Michael Rechtshaffen / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Maybe it has something to do with seriously diminished expectations, but Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is an improvement of sorts over the lifeless 2005 edition.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Yes, the too-hot Alba is still miscast, and the film suffers from clumsy moments. But when it soars, it soars, and it is both blessedly brief and bloodless.

Name : Jan Stuart / Alias : Newsday
Of all the Marvel-spawned screen franchises, the Fantastic Four is the most puerile, reducing as it does this smartly quirky comic book quartet to a fourth-grade primer in dysfunctional family psychology.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Ebert & Roeper
It's funnier and splashier than the original, but I still can't quite recommend it.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
An off-brand superhero movie, the cinematic equivalent of one of those generic breakfast cereals with a badly drawn squirrel for a mascot.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Peppier than the stale original from 2005, and it's sprinkled with more eye candy, but no one will mistake it for brain food.

Name : Rick Groen / Alias : Globe and Mail
Unlike the recent spate of blackened threequels, those bottom-of-the-bag Spideys and Shreks and Pirates and Oceans, this kernel does pop.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Director Josh Trank has assembled a quartet of engaging, charismatic performers and stranded them in a miasma of exposition and set-up. So much time is spent putting the pieces on the board that there's barely any time to play with them.

Name : Roger Moore / Alias : Orlando Sentinel
It takes a while to get going, but once it does, it clips along, entertains, and doesn't overstay its welcome.