Name : Stephen Dalton / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Serena only has one key flaw: it is difficult to believe a single word of it, still less to care about these relentlessly selfish and short-sighted characters.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Beating a dead horse barely begins to describe the task of writing about "Serena"; it's more like playing coroner.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Given these unpromising circumstances, I was expecting something truly awful, and perhaps that might have been more fun to watch than this lugubrious period piece. The production values and the costumes are the true stars.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Into each life some rain eventually falls, and in a bomb called Serena, golden couple Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, united for the third time onscreen, arrive soaking wet.

Name : Guy Lodge / Alias : Variety
Bier's Danish-language work, usually structurally and emotionally cohesive to a fault, has rarely been this compellingly untidy.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
The actors don't just look uncomfortable in their period duds, they also look uneasy in their own skins, which is a feat for two such natural, physically confident screen performers.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
Absolutely nothing works. No one seems to understand the place or the people. And the only thing gleaned from the lumber industry is that you can build an entire movie from performances made of wood.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
The film is haunted by a sense that something was overlooked in translation from the book.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Funny how there are fans of Jennifer Lawrence who will never see her in "Serena." It's not her best film, but it contains one of her best performances, in a role that challenges her more than any other.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
Both actors, gracefully dressed and lightly anguished, draw deep on their professional aplomb in a bid to keep a straight face; the credible, bulked-up pain that Cooper brought to "American Sniper" seems a world away.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Left for dead since 2012, Serena would better serve its stars by burial, not resurrection.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
A Depression-era potboiler starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence that never manages to get past the feeling of a calculated Hollywood reunion.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
Lawrence is the hottest actress in Hollywood and she and Cooper share six Oscar nominations, and one win, between them. But "Serena" uses muscles the costars of "Silver Linings Playbook" and "American Hustle" stars don't often get to flex.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Although the film got stuck in editing limbo for two years, no amount of cutting could rid the project of a diseased premise. Nor is it erotic or violent enough to be an effective critique of human nature.

Name : Charlie Lyne / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
This is a film full of unremarkable compromises - the kind that result in a bland film rather than a bad one.

Name : Vadim Rizov / Alias : AV Club
There's simply not that much to see in the performances.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
It's reassuring, really, to be reminded that top-tier Hollywood stars can make lousy choices just like the rest of us.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Ah, well. All the best actors eventually get their Ishtar, right?

Name : Serena Donadoni / Alias : Village Voice
By making Serena ornamental, Bier diminishes her power, and Lawrence plays her as a petulant Lady Macbeth wannabe. Worse is Bradley Cooper, whose Pemberton comes off like an entitled scion, not a clear-cut timber king.

Name : Geoff Pevere / Alias : Globe and Mail
One of those movies that proves that the mere presence of all the right ingredients does not a happy meal make. It's all in the mixing.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
The choppily edited and thoroughly wooden "Serena'' fails to catch fire, even when everything literally goes up in flames. Basically, it's "Cold Mountain" without Renee Zellweger.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
It's painful to watch all that talent get wasted.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
In other words, a lot of people realized they had an epic clunker on their hands.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
We don't invest anything in either character, and with barely any tension, 'Serena' grabs neither head nor heart.

Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The performers are as beautiful to look at here as they are intriguing to watch.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
What were Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence thinking? Seriously?

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
Densely packed and gorgeously expressionist, the old-fashioned tragedy is very nearly a satisfying experience despite its various shortcomings.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Filmed in 2012 and finally limping into theaters like a glamorous zombie, the movie has star wattage but zero emotional voltage.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Not a whole lot happens, but you get to know an interesting trio, and leave them feeling satisfied that it was time well spent.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
Somebody needs to give Andrew Bujalski a TV series. If "Results," his unlikely but delightful new film set in and around an Austin fitness studio run by hard-bodied Guy Pearce, were a TV pilot, I would be hooked on the show already.

Name : John DeFore / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A perfectly chosen cast sells this unhurried comedy, which flows unconventionally but is still, by a long stretch, the most mainstream-friendly picture Bujalski has made.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Sharply funny slacker comedy.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
Like Bujalski's early mumblecore work, this is sensitive and meandering - and just a little bit patience-testing.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
What happens when a rigorously non-mainstream filmmaker tries to reverse-engineer a mainstream romantic comedy? The result, in all its charming perversity, is "Results."

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
A week in the outback without a cellphone would be better than Results.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
"Results" is a smooth transition for Bujalski from the fringes to more commercial work. It's heartening that he didn't give up his calling-card observational humor to do it.

Name : Ella Taylor / Alias : NPR
You'd expect Bujalski, who made Beeswax and Computer Chess and a couple of other extreme indies, to poke fun at gym culture, the ultimate soft target. And he does, but sweetly and without disparagement .

Name : Abby Garnett / Alias : Village Voice
Bujalski knows how to reveal the immaturities and hangups people hide behind money, ambition, and the pursuit of a better body.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
With Bujalski, this is business as usual, but by the standards of the contemporary indie rom-com, it's refreshingly unpredictable and thoughtful.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
This droll, intelligent farce is most poignant as a portrait of modern alienation that explores how money, service work and self-improvement leave individuals stranded and alone.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Only toward the end do you realize that the characters have been arranged into a pleasing and familiar romantic-comedy triangle and that you've been watching a beautifully played game of underhand slow-pitch screwball.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
A movie like this feels like a dream challenge for an actor. It lives and dies not sheerly by the writing and the direction of the script, but by the cast's organic adherence to both.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
Bujalski crafts a quirky romance with fitness-industry comedy Results, shaping flawed characters into people you might just admire.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
Writer-director Andrew Bujalski appreciates a grimy basement as much as he does a wide-open highway, and he aims for a slice-of-life tapestry. But he should have simply let Corrigan slouch into nirvana.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
One of the strangest and strongest of recent romantic triangles forms in the course of this lyrical, fanatically realistic comedy, written and directed by Andrew Bujalski.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
There's an absurdist edge, but with nothing of the smart aleck about it. Rather than use wit as a way of bypassing thought and emotion, Bujalski's concerns are serious and his attitude toward his characters is warm without being indulgent.

Name : Michael Rechtshaffen / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The rom-com isn't such a lost cause, after all. It was just waiting for someone like indie filmmaker Andrew Bujalski to resuscitate it.