Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Writer-director Dave Boyle is best known for his offbeat rom-coms with San Francisco musician Goh Nakamura (Surrogate Valentine, Daylight Savings), and his gift for eccentric characters redeems this standard whodunit.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
If you can hang on for close to two hours with almost no resolution, it's worth the ride.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Boyle's mystery is both maddening in how much it withholds from the viewer trying to play along, and impressive for how little you end up caring about being kept in the dark.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
The droll joke is that Asian double-crossers have it even easier than Vertigo's Kim Novak - Westerners don't even try to tell them apart.

Name : Robert Abele / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Like any good purveyor of noir, Boyle, who wrote the film with Joel Clark and Michael Lerman, understands that identifying someone is only one endgame while the mystery of identity is naggingly, tragically endless.

Name : Adam Nayman / Alias : AV Club
Man From Reno doesn't rush its revelations, instead inviting the viewer to revel in its atmosphere of cozy foreboding-the same kind you get from a good airport paperback.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
"Man From Reno" fascinates. It invites you to go back, decipher its clues and discern a grand design, if there is one.

Name : Sheri Linden / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Polished and ambitious, this crime drama puts a fresh bicultural spin on a retro-style mystery but doesn't quite sustain the suspense.

Name : David Ehrlich / Alias : Time Out
A rare delight that's laced with melancholy and a suffocating sense of menace from its first scene straight through its shocking finale, Man From Reno is made special by the collisions between its characters.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Instead of building toward a climax, the film drifts off into nothingness, with a last scene that will send people shuffling out of the theater thinking, "Who cares?"

Name : Andrew Barker / Alias : Variety
Man From Reno is hardly the equal of its inspirations, but it nonetheless makes for a pleasantly mellow, well-structured concoction.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
[A] silly metamovie based on the Amanda Knox murder case.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
Winterbottom is not out to thrill, but to lecture on the truth, which, he believes, can only be found in fiction.

Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Like the floundering filmmaker at its center, "The Face of an Angel" never seems sure of what story it wants to tell.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
The film does occasionally show a pulse when it tries to re-imagine the life of the victim - when it turns the tables on the mystery and tries to become a film about love and life, instead of doom and death. But it's too little, too late, and too lame.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
The Face of an Angel ties itself up in some strange knots, but Michael Winterbottom conjures up a haunting gothic atmosphere in Siena.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : New York Daily News
A picture that trades any suspense for endless scenes of a bored Bruhl staring at a screen, trying to find a story. Any story.

Name : Simon Abrams / Alias : Village Voice
The Face of an Angel may not be like any other whodunit you've seen, but it's also only superficially smarter than the genre it defines itself against.

Name : Jeannette Catsoulis / Alias : New York Times
Rambling, frustrating and wholly uninvolving, "The Face of an Angel" swarms with ideas that have no place to land.

Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
There's a great deal of intelligent material here. Winterbottom mounts a harsh attack on our fascination with killers and our tendency to forget the victim. Yet it's overlaid with so much navel-gazing, it's hard to take.

Name : Deborah Young / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
There are many good things in the swiftly-moving narrative, filmed with a hand-held camera to give a documentary look.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
A lovely-looking yet muddled meditation on truth.

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
Past Winterbottom films have turned "real life" into both comedy and tragedy. The Face Of An Angel turns it into a directionless skulk.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
The movie guarantees fast-paced fun without forcing anyone to think about what it all means, which is nothing.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Comic-Con nerds will have multiple orgasms. I had a blast.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : Associated Press
The dialogue sparkles as brightly as the special effects; these people may be wearing ridiculous costumes but they're well fleshed-out underneath. And so in every regard, this movie truly fulfills its hype.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Fans of the franchise will be pleased, but those looking in from the outside of comic-book culture may find themselves also looking at their watches.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Most of these characters are great fun, and there are still stories to tell. So why not do it, instead of telling and retelling the same tale, only bigger?

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
There is much to like about "The Avengers: Age of Ultron." There was much to love about "The Avengers," and therein lies the difference.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
If you're not much of a Marvel Comics person but just want to get an early start on your mindless summer moviegoing, well, I guess this picture is no stupider than anything else.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
By making the Avengers snarky rivals as well as brothers and sisters in arms, franchise Big Brain Joss Whedon injects exactly what such a noisy spectacle needs: a dollop of charm.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
Writing and directing "Avengers: Age of Ultron," Joss Whedon proves he has a superpower of his own: mediocrity.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Whedon knows how to be self-aware without getting overly cute about it. He has fun highlighting each character's neurosis and knows which personalities clash to greatest effect.

Name : Roger Ebert / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
"The Avengers" is done well by Joss Whedon, with style and energy. It provides its fans with exactly what they desire.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It feels as if this comic book franchise has become a never-ending cinema story. If future films are as well realized as Ultron, that's fine by me.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
Every now and then, director Joss Whedon executes a quirky camera set-up to assert that the film was created by him and not a team of marketing executives.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Age of Ultron, then, shows what happens when an unstoppable force (Joss Whedon's imagination) meets an immovable object (the Disney/Marvel behemoth).

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
The sharp, interpersonal dramedy that made the first movie such a delight is again present in flashes, but not infrequently it is drowned out by the noisy, inevitable need to Save the World.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
This is as close as cinema gets to a fairground ride: it's shiny, noisy and exhilarating.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Its primary purpose is not to explore or subvert the superhero movie, but to lay the groundwork for more of them.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
The film is good enough to keep all the Marvel Comics crazed audiences out there deliriously happy while keeping the rest of us earthbound types in moderate thralldom.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
At this point the Marvel superhero movies are as machine-tooled as a Prius, and this one sticks closely to the blueprint that's made them box office titans.

Name : John Anderson / Alias : Wall Street Journal
The film is a work of craft, from the actors like Mr. Downey, who can deliver a comic line with the timing of a mouse trap, to the editors, Jeffrey Ford and Lisa Lassek, upon whom so much of the movie's very elegant fluidity rests .

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Whedon takes a few wrong turns, creating a jumble when the action gets too thick. But he recovers like a pro, devising a spectacle that's epic in every sense of the word.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The Avengers kicks ass.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
A slickly packaged, effects-driven smashup.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : ChristyLemire.com
More does not necessarily equal better; here, more is just . meh.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
A middling film, yet it's so heavy with Joss Whedon's sweat that it never feels like a lazy cash-in -- which for a preordained summer megahit is an accomplishment.

Name : Glenn Kenny / Alias : MSN Movies
. the filmmakers behind The Avengers attack their task of creating a comic book superhero epic with not just conviction, but something almost resembling panache.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Whedon is the key reason why this $220-million behemoth of a movie is smartly thought out and executed with verve and precision. It may be overly long at two hours, 23 minutes, but so much is going on you might not even notice.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
You can sense that Mr. Whedon, having helped build a universal earnings machine with the first "Avengers," has now struggled mightily, touchingly, to invest this behemoth with some life.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Whedon gets the vibe and the delights of Marvel comic books in the same way that Spielberg and Lucas intuitively understood the appeal of serials in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
World-saving is no longer a surprise to these characters. It's work. Grunt work. For them. For us.

Name : Tony Hicks / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
Lovable characters, just the right amount of humor and spectacular action make "Ultron" a worthy bridge to whatever happens next in The Avengers' universe.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Boston Globe
You don't need to be a "comic-book person" to find the set pieces exhilarating. But if you are such a person, or a fan of the movies that comic books turn into, "The Avengers" feels like the moment you've been waiting for.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
After years of buildup, it's a reward to patient audiences who've been waiting for this team-up for years.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
As before, the greatest fun is in watching the original Avengers, all fine actors who've made the characters their own.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
This movie is fine, honestly. I rather liked it.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Age of Ultron disappoints not because it's irredeemably bad but because it fails to achieve the level of its predecessor in nearly every facet.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
A slow start, a single star performance surrounded by indifferent acting and an onslaught of computer effects that range from seen-it-all-in-"Transformers" to a whole sky full of spectacular stuff in the midtown Manhattan climax.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
It's a first-class production all around, from the acting to the 3-D special effects to the touches of wit throughout. It delivers, in grand style, the thing we demand most from a comic-book movie: fun.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
The climactic act of "Age of Ultron" is full of colossal ka-booms and special effects, but it also has heft and reason and a bass-note of emotion.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
If this is what the apotheosis of branded, big-studio entertainment has come to look like in 2015, we could be doing much worse. Unlike its title character, "Age of Ultron" most definitely has soul.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Whedon pulls off a stunning feat in bringing balance to this superhuman circus, engineered to charm the geek core and non-fans alike.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
If you are a Marvel fan, then The Avengers will feel like Christmas. Thanks to the merry doings of the director, Joss Whedon, all your favorite characters are here, as shiny and as tempting as presents under the tree.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
This film is stylish, intelligent and, one hopes, influential on the next generation of superhero movies; it should leave a lasting legacy.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
The banter has zip, the effects are fun, the climactic battle is decently spectacular, and if the 3-D is mostly expendable, there are a few scenes where it adds a nice kick.

Name : Karina Longworth / Alias : Village Voice
Really, who cares about another battle? We know how this is going to end.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
"Avengers: Age of Ultron" is a sometimes daffy, occasionally baffling, surprisingly touching and even romantic adventure with one kinetic thrill after another. It earns a place of high ranking in the Marvel Universe.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
This is a movie that knows and deeply loves its audience, but it's funny, smart and good-natured enough to please the rest of us, too.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
Even those who don't know a Marvel hero from a DC caped crusader will find themselves having a grand time. That's because Whedon manages to tap the inner fanboy and fangirl dormant in us all.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
This mega-entertaining "Avengers" film is something comic fans have dreamed of since Marvel debuted the title almost 50 years ago.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
I walked out of the theater feeling like the survivor of an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
Like a superior, state-of-the-art model built from reconstituted parts, Joss Whedon's buoyant, witty and robustly entertaining superhero smash-up is escapism of a sophisticated order.

Name : Laremy Legel / Alias : Film.com
A spectacle in the grandest sense of the word .

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
One of the great joys of Marvel's The Avengers is its sense of humor about itself.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
The thing's a behemoth. And as the franchise thunders on, it's also becoming more and more a bore.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Marvel movie die-hards will come away having found nuggets of pleasure, but those who complain about superhero sagas will find plenty to support their arguments here.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
Whedon, the pop savant responsible for TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, straddles the line between sarcastic gab and pulp solemnity like Eli Manning on a fourth-down, go-it-alone jag.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
A saga guaranteed to pass muster with the Comic-Con cognoscenti, without forsaking regular popcorn munchers who just hope to see the planet get saved with maximum firepower and a few laughs.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Thin on story, crowded with characters and padded with extraneous action. In other words, a sure hit!

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
The Avengers has a knockout final 30 minutes, all gee-whiz crash and bang and eye candy that makes grand use of 3D and IMAX and all the other toys. But the Transformers movies did that, too.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Audiences have been eagerly anticipating this first all-hero extravaganza for years. The wait was worth it.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
The movie's action sequences and sequel-baiting suck up much of its oxygen, and the magnitude of battles dwarf the smaller moments.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
'The Avengers" is neither overwhelming nor underwhelming. What it expertly is, is whelming.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
The performances are so well-pitched in The Avengers, meshing with such vividness and ease, that it's tempting to overpraise the good but not great movie that surrounds them.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
The light, amusing bits cannot overcome the grinding, hectic emptiness, the bloated cynicism that is less a shortcoming of this particular film than a feature of the genre.

Name : Amy Biancolli / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Whedon, a pop-genre magician best known for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is a master of viewer manipulation - because he never gives up his own seat in the crowd.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Entertaining as much of "Avengers 2" is, especially when it's just hanging out with the gang in between scuffles (the "Guardians of the Galaxy" lesson, learned), Whedon's picture meets expectations without exceeding them.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
As he did in the first "Avengers," writer-director Joss Whedon avoids the fatal trap of comic-book self-seriousness, leavening a baggy, busy, overpopulated story with zippy one-liners, quippy asides and an overarching tone of jaunty good fun.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
First, you try to understand what the hell is going on. Then you slowly realize that you will never understand what is going on. And, last, you wind up with the distinct impression that, if there was anything to understand, it wasn't worth the sweat.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"The Avengers" is both a culminator and a set-up for more, more, more.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
There's great entertainment in "The Avengers" - big bold, action-filled silliness with just enough human spirit to sell itself. This is a comic book movie done right.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Sure, this is the A Team of comic book superstars, but overextended sequences don't make them any more impressive.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Writer-director Joss Whedon attempts to inject just enough human drama into these noisy proceedings to keep it from turning into a Transformers-style crashathon.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
"Avengers: Age of Ultron" is supercharged and lifeless, frenetic and stone-cold dead, a barrage of action scenes that look fake, yet make you wonder if fake is the new real.

Name : Tom Charity / Alias : CNN.com
Never underestimate the entertainment value of the Hulk Smash.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The best thing about The Avengers, a multi-tentpole blockbuster that gathers half a dozen Marvel superheroes and unfurls them on a baddie from another planet, is that it also unleashes them on each other.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Age of Ultron" has self-aware laughs, grandiose themes and the best effects that money can buy. But at this point, it will take true vision to plot the umpteen sequels without getting trapped in a time loop.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
It would be silly to pretend that Avengers: Age of Ultron isn't good at what it does, that it's not proficient at delivering superhero thrills for those who crave them most.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Biff! Bam! Boring!

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
The amazing thing about Avengers: Age of Ultron is that it's reasonably enjoyable while feeling less like a movie than an epic sowing of seeds for multiple Marvel properties.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
All hail Joss Whedon, the warrior king of this dizzying, dazzling 3D action epic. The Avengers is Transformers with a brain, a heart and a working sense of humor.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
It has a definite mid-season feel to it, telling a compelling but never game-changing story while laying the foundations for the epic, two-part Infinity War due in 2018.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Age of Ultron is all rush and sensation with little substance. But what a feeling.

Name : Lev Grossman / Alias : TIME Magazine
Like the first one, Avengers: Age of Ultron was written and directed by Joss Whedon, among whose many virtues is an indelible, infallible touch with character, which is important because in Ultron he has to introduce them at a furious rate.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
An entertaining package of characters and ideas that manages to be a whole lot more than the first film while also being a little bit less.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Whedon gets the elastic physical reality of comic books, and he knows how to frame a shot as though it were a splash panel come to life. But by the fifth digital showdown, the endless CGI spectacle begins to feel a little numbing.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
Joss Whedon shows his considerable gifts for multicharacter air traffic control in a massive 3-D spectacle while demonstrating reserves of insouciance.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Avengers: Age of Ultron succeeds in the top priority of creating a worthy opponent for its superheroes and giving the latter a few new things to do, but this time the action scenes don't always measure up .

Name : Andrew Lapin / Alias : NPR
It is, in short, more disposable than the mere mortal blockbusters it was designed to outpace. This should defy Marvel Studios mathematics. How can a movie with more stuff than its predecessors be less fun?

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Whedon's investment in building this world is so complete that it captures the audience, as well.

Name : Rick Groen / Alias : Globe and Mail
To watch another comic book transformed into another blockbuster is to "marvel" at much and to feel nothing - that's a safer bet than the converse, perhaps, which may explain the genre's popularity.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
Ultimately, it all comes back to Whedon: His clear vision for each character and how they might be profitably intermingled; his unexpected knack for action choreography; his funny, tender, immaculately constructed script.

Name : Keith Phipps / Alias : AV Club
Tasked with meeting the many requirements necessary for any Avengers movie to work, Whedon checks off all the boxes, then sets about creating new expectations for what a big superhero movie ought to be.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
"Avengers: Age of Ultron" is a kinetic, wicked mix of muscle and magic. Look no further if you want a world of superpowered freaks and geeks.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
For the most part, "Avengers: Age of Ultron" is the hard-charging, mind-boggling spectacle fans are looking for. Smash indeed.