Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Mr. Eastwood's film lets this good and anguished man speak for himself, and discover himself, at his own pace.

Name : Preston Jones / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
But the adrenaline can't replace perception, and despite Eastwood's deft staging of the Iraqi scenes, they don't bring viewers any closer to understanding why Kyle insists on repeatedly returning to the war zones.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Cautiously, Eastwood has chosen to omit Kyle's self-mythologizing altogether, which is itself a distortion of his character. We're not watching a biopic.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
It's a gritty, confident portrait of a man whose life may have been somewhat messier than this Hollywood version.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
Just as only Nixon could go to China, only Clint Eastwood could make a movie about an Iraq War veteran and infuse it with doubts, mission anxiety and ruination.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
As a piece of direction, it's as taut as anything [Eastwood's] ever done.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Though it never uses the term "PTSD," American Sniper, at its best, is a devastating portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
American Sniper lifts director Clint Eastwood out of the doldrums that have plagued his last few films.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
After 40 years of Hollywood counterpropaganda telling us war is necessarily corrupting and malign, its ablest practitioners thugs, loons or victims, "American Sniper" nobly presents the case for the other side.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
There's no freshness in either the domestic scenes or the combat sequences.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Less a war movie than a western - the story of a lone gunslinger facing down his nemesis in a dusty, lawless place - it is blunt and effective, though also troubling.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
This harrowing and intimate character study offers fairly blunt insights into the physical and psychological toll exacted on the front lines, yet strikes even its familiar notes with a sobering clarity .

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
Both a devastating war movie and a devastating antiwar movie, a subdued celebration of a warrior's skill and a sorrowful lament over his alienation and misery.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
This movie is drowning in duty - to say nothing of hoary storytelling devices and one embarrassing scene after the next for Sienna Miller as Mrs. Kyle.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
American Sniper is imperfect and at times a little corny, but also ambivalent and complicated in ways that are uniquely Eastwoodian.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
"The result is not unlike watching a suspenseful but highly repetitive video game, especially since nearly every Iraqi is seen through Kyle's highly perched rifle scope."

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Clint Eastwood has directed war movies before, but never one that focused on a single warrior. And he has an amazing one here .

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
It's clearly Cooper's show. Substantially bulked up and affecting a believable Texas drawl, Cooper embodies Kyle's confidence, intensity and vulnerability.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
The best movies are ever-shifting, intelligent and open-hearted enough to expand alongside an audience. "American Sniper," Clint Eastwood's harrowing meditation on war, is built on this foundation of uncommon compassion.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Eastwood's impeccably crafted action sequences so catch us up in the chaos of combat we are almost not aware that we're watching a film at all.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The film's just a repetition of context-free combat missions and one-dimensional targets.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Bradley Cooper, as Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, and director Eastwood salute Kyle's patriotism best by not denying its toll. Their targets are clearly in sight, and their aim is true.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A taut, vivid and sad account of the brief life of the most accomplished marksman in American military annals, American Sniper feels very much like a companion piece-in subject, theme and quality-to The Hurt Locker.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Cooper nails the role of an American killing machine in Clint Eastwood's clear-eyed look at the Iraq War.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Variety
The movie, watchable as it is, never quite overcomes the sense that it's a lavish diagram working hard to come off as a real movie.

Name : Bill Zwecker / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
It's a beautiful thing to behold.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
As in many of Allen's period comedies, the dialogue sounds completely modern and evokes the era only in its endless name-dropping.

Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
Watching this film feels like listening to a formerly great pianist whose fingers are now gnarled with arthritis. The notes are right, and played in the correct order, but the tempo is way, way off.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
With each succeeding year, Allen's insular version of the past feels more eccentric. Depending on the viewer, it's either happily reassuring or strangely out of touch.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It isn't a particularly great Woody Allen movie. Nor is it a particularly disappointing one. It falls into the vast middle ground on his resume - the movies you enjoy sitting through, but quickly forget once the lights come up.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Maybe Woody Allen waited too long to make "Cafe Society"; it seems, weirdly, to be an uninspired remake of itself.

Name : Mark Feeney / Alias : Boston Globe
It's about '30s glamour and swank. More accurately, it's about nostalgia for those things. Either way, it's not about characters or chemistry or anything much resembling emotion.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
"I'm kind of half-bored, half-fascinated," Eisenberg tells his bro over the long-distance line, and the sentiment could also apply to the movie - although Storaro's sumptuous cinematography makes even its mundane moments enchanting.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : MTV
The film is so retro golden that old-timey miners would run the reels through a sieve.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Mr. Allen's literal voice, which supplies narration, sounds unusually sluggish and weary. The same is true of his voice as a writer and director. For every snappy scene or exchange there are three or four that feel baggy and half-written.

Name : Joe Dziemianowicz / Alias : New York Daily News
Woody Allen's easy-to-like but lightweight "Cafe Society" serves up just you'd expect from the seasoned writer and director.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
"Life is a comedy written by a sadistic comedy writer," Bobby quips. Cafe Society, on the other hand, is a comedy written by a benumbed one.

Name : Alison Willmore / Alias : BuzzFeed News
It's a film that covers several years and relationships but comes across like a rambling anecdote being told by someone who keeps skipping over the interesting parts.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
The whole film feels charmingly insubstantial, just as it's meant to, with beautiful settings, amusing people and, for philosophical context, a classic Woody Allen one-liner.

Name : Kate Taylor / Alias : Globe and Mail
Cafe Society is mainly a small and unnervingly familiar private drama that is never funny enough nor smart enough to justify its anachronistic style.

Name : Eric Kohn / Alias : indieWIRE
Aided by an anxious Jesse Eisenberg and the gently expressive Kristen Stewart, "Cafe Society" works about as a well as a decent-but-not-great Allen movie can.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
It's handsome, and pleasant, and polished, and sedate. You won't laugh or cry. You may, however, smile or sigh.

Name : Glenn Kenny / Alias : RogerEbert.com
It's the filmmaking around the writing that casts a particular spell. Particularly near the end, as Allen adds up the moral failings and squelched desires and doused dreams of all his characters.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Neither especially funny nor particularly dramatic, but appealing enough in its handsome melancholia to create the phantom impression of Allen firing on all cylinders.

Name : Will Leitch / Alias : The New Republic
Replacement Level Allen. There are pleasures to be found. But you have to look a little harder than usual.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
There is a gravity to it, and a tug of sadness, that cannot be accounted for by the story.

Name : Megan Garber / Alias : The Atlantic
For all its beauty and its star power, the movie never elevates to anything beyond a kind of storyboard sketch.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
The film doesn't totally upend Allen's notion that L.A. is a seductively shallow place that has to resort to celebrating the ability to make a right turn on red to feel better about itself. In Cafe Society, it just looks so gorgeous while doing it.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Woody Allen's new period piece is no match for "Midnight in Paris," but the fine cast and bittersweet themes carry the day.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Allen narrates in a voice that, for the first time, suggests his 80 years of age. But his touch lightens with each film, and the melancholy bubbles up from below and catches you off guard.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : Village Voice
Lovely visuals, terrific performances, renewed ambition: There's enough good in Cafe Society to make it worth your while - and also to make you wish it were better.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Stewart is irresistible here. Allen is a legendary director of women, and Stewart's performance is shockingly good, awards-caliber work.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"Cafe Society" is a good-looking nothing, but there are times - thanks more to Allen's direction than his writing, and thanks mostly to the people acting out the masquerade - when "nothing" is sufficient.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
A love story drenched in nostalgia, "Cafe Society" is a film of rare beauty.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
A pretty, rambling, minor distraction.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Cafe Society, is intermittently lovely and melancholic.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Romantic, bittersweet and funny as hell, Cafe Society turns Hollywood inside out, rooting through the superficial tinsel to find the real tinsel. You go away gobsmacked, beaming and happy to be both.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
"Cafe Society" meanders a bit . But because it's from a veteran comedian and filmmaker, it also has some smart jokes, and beautiful images.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
Woody Allen has made 46 films, of which I've seen 46, and I'm not sure which of us is more tired of them.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Allen is confident that he can skip scenes, shift locations and more or less take his audience anywhere he wants, so long as he's entertaining, and in this he's right.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
In the best sense, "Cafe Society" presents itself as an older director's film, dealing as it does with the difference between dreams and reality and the presence and persistence of regret.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Buoyed by the nuanced performances of Stewart and Eisenberg, the 80-year-old Woody Allen creates a ravishing romance shot through with humor and heartbreak.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A small fiction of amiable appeal and vibrancy which goes down as easily as a fizzy cocktail.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
It'll probably never make it into anyone's list of the 10 most-important Allen films. But I'd watch it again over a few movies that would.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
If it doesn't reach the heights of Woody's best - 2013's "Blue Jasmine" was his last great film - it still has several rich touches, including a luminous performance by Kristen Stewart.