Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
Jon M. Chu, who directed the concert doc Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, maintains a lively pace, and there's some cute business involving a robot that communicates through music.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
The movie's poky and confused, never clearly setting up its conflicts and blowing far too much of its running time on a National Treasure clue-hunt for messages Jem's father programmed into a sassy dancing robot.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
Director Jon Chu stretches "Jem" to a ridiculous 2 hours, via endless amateur-musician YouTube clips. Anyone can be a star, they attest - and always be yourself! (Except when you're Jem. I guess.)

Name : Scott Tobias / Alias : NPR
Jem and the Holograms is Mac and Me to Josie and the Pussycats' E.T.

Name : Julia Cooper / Alias : Globe and Mail
There's hardly tension, barely any drama and the sugar high you might expect from an eighties redux is replaced by a dull aspartame buzz.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
Its one saving grace is that Chu's direction is so wildly inconsistent that it manages to produce a handful of genuinely gorgeous images alongside all of the cruddy ones.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
Jem has lost her outrageousness and gained a robotic sidekick in an overlong, low-budget big-screen reboot of the 1980s toy-selling cartoon series.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
As silly and sometimes nonsensical as it is, the movie is surprisingly sweet and well-intentioned.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
After a few crackling, resonant digital-age scenes in the opening act, the filmmakers settle in and make Jem into a mediocre Disney Channel movie - with, for no good reason, a pet robot.

Name : Molly Lambert / Alias : Grantland
What it lacks in humor it makes up for in sheer weirdness - it's a master class in How Did This Get Made? It feels focus-grouped to within an inch of its life, but it's so strange that it's impossible to imagine what process led us here.

Name : Patrick Dunn / Alias : Detroit News
Hardcore fans won't find much of the Jem they loved under the movie's achingly hip millennial trappings, while young newcomers will be left wondering what a robot has to do with a rock band.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Even though I wish the songs themselves were stronger, there's an energy and a vibrancy to the movie that its young target audience will appreciate.

Name : Frank Scheck / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Not being part of the generation that watched the show, I can't vouch for its merits. But it's safe to say that it must be miles ahead of this wan, bloated screen version which forgoes the original's sci-fi and thriller aspects.

Name : Neil Genzlinger / Alias : New York Times
It seems to be merely tossing ideas into the pot that it thinks might appeal to 9-year-olds.

Name : Rebecca Keegan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
In revisiting the pop rock quest of a multiracial group of adopted sisters in suburban California, Chu has made a stylish and self-aware musical fantasy for the YouTube generation.

Name : Geoff Berkshire / Alias : Variety
The film seems inexplicably embarrassed by its roots, instead serving up half-baked and self-consciously contemporary drama that no one in the sure-to-be minimal theatrical audience will remember quite so fondly some 30 years on.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
Sometimes you go to a movie and know from the first image that whoever made it knows what she's doing. You don't need convincing. You're there with her. Jennifer Kent's The Babadook is like that.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
I like to imagine watching this chilling Australian horror film with late, great authors Shel Silverstein, Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey - all of whom would have relished its twisted children's storybook at the center of things.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Director Kent has made the kind of striking film that is going to have mainstream Hollywood haunting her like a Babadook in a bad mood. For the sake of her idiosyncratic vision, let's hope she doesn't frighten easily.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Jennifer Kent's startling debut is an artful horror-chiller that gets under your skin and into your psyche.

Name : David Rooney / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
This is a different kind of nail-biter that has less to do with demonic possession than with the renegade power of an untamed imagination.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
No matter how successful The Babadook turns out to be - and Jennifer Kent's horror story deserves all the success it gets - the prospects of a best-selling kid-lit tie-in don't look good.

Name : William Goss / Alias : Film.com
An impressively chilling exercise in old-school restraint.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
In an age when horror movies have mostly become lazy and toothless, here's one with ambition and bite.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
A small film that packs a horribly big punch.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
This is a dark and shivery story about motherhood, a common subject for horror movies, but one that's rarely treated with such intelligence or seriousness of intent.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
Credit writer-director Jennifer Kent for lending her Australian indie a healthy dose of brains and subtlety, giving it a distinct advantage over most modern horror films.

Name : Ella Taylor / Alias : NPR
The Babadook makes the most of its special effects as needed, but this smart little frightener keeps its head close to the rising anxiety of a young widow whose husband died a violent death.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
"An exceptionally rich psychological portrait of a woman, it's an enormously compassionate and sadly relevant film about misplaced blame and the often impossible demands of motherhood."

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
This psychological thriller from gifted first-time filmmaker Jennifer Kent will have you climbing the walls simply by plumbing the violence of the mind. Brace yourself.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Manages to deliver real, seat-grabbing jolts while also touching on more serious themes of loss, grief and other demons that can not be so easily vanquished.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
Who thinks up a film like The Babadook? Actress-turned-debuting-feature-director Jennifer Kent has the narrative chutzpah to show her entire hand in the pop-up story and then make us squirm as foretold events come true.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Shot in chilly shades of blue, "The Babadook" will haunt anyone who's ever heard a cry in the night - or wondered what was under the bed, in the dark.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
With its mixture of frights both literal and literary, "The Babadook" will, I suspect, satisfy horror's devotees as much as the genre's doubters.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
As someone who has developed a pretty thick Critic's Shield from years of watching standard haunted house/possessed human/mythological-creature fare, I have to say I was genuinely freaked out by some of the passages in The Badabook.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
A potent journey through the fears, anxieties, and repressed rages of motherhood.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
In the running with Boyhood as my favorite movie of 2014 is another work that turns on the challenges of parenting. This one is a tad more insane.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Kent has taste, an eye and a knack for brisk, accelerated pacing. In the case of "The Babadook," familiarity breeds an eerily gratifying contentment.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
This is a really scary movie.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
Let a law be passed, requiring all horror films to be made by female directors.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
It's the most horror I've felt at a horror film since Neil Marshall's The Descent, one where the scares don't release the tension - they harrow.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
The Babadook makes everyday domestic life seem like the most natural possible place to encounter monsters of every description, including the monsters that we ourselves have the capacity to become.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
What really distinguishes The Babadook, however, is the metaphorical potency of its narrative.

Name : Drew Hunt / Alias : Chicago Reader
The Babadook makes a convincing argument for classy, psychological horror cinema even as it fails to meet its own lofty standard.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"The Babadook" is a smart, darkly drawn modern-day horror movie of monsters, memories and mothers.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
You will be scared. And also, perhaps even more scarily, moved.

Name : Jordan Hoffman / Alias : New York Daily News
One of the smartest and most effective horror films in years.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
"The Babadook" is urgent, uncanny and entirely disturbing, a dream within a dream within a nightmare. It is the best English language supernatural film of this new century.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Although the supernatural seems the likeliest answer, it's not the only one, and audiences can read the film either way.