Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
"The Age of Adaline" works best as a simple story of boy meets girl; girl falls in love; girl mulls whether or not to reveal that she'll stay young forever. Everything else is just a lot of unnecessary noise.

Name : Jon Frosch / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Lively is an odd screen presence - somehow both warm and cold, accessible and recessive. She's long been ripe for a breakthrough lead role that allows her to stretch and surprise.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Adaline is consistently gorgeous to look at-and a good reminder that love, even when it's complicated or painful or doesn't last, is a whole lot better than immortality.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
Lively's never been better, but "Adaline" is more interested in what she's wearing than what her character's thinking.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
The makings of an interesting movie are here, but the script, written by J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz, collapses on itself in the third act.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Starved of sufficient comedy or drama, "The Age of Adaline" is a pipsqueak.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
The film is as tender and endearing as a lamb, a lamb at rest in a fragrant atmosphere. It's a film that has a determined, unironic respect for things past.

Name : Katharine Pushkar / Alias : New York Daily News
Plausibility, shmausibility. This is pretty schmaltz done right.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
Lovers of the genre will find plenty to love about the stylish Age of Adaline and may find themselves rooting through pockets for a tissue at points, a romance movie equivalent of a standing ovation.

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
For a movie that emulates literature, The Age Of Adaline never fits comfortably into a particular form-literary or cinematic.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
Blake Lively's subtle, expressive performance sets the tone for this thoroughly ludicrous, thoroughly enjoyable romantic drama.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
The Age of Adaline is a modern romantic fairy tale set in San Francisco, marred by bad narration and an unnecessary desire to overexplain random magic.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Lively's performance is appropriately mysterious but too shallow to allow audiences to empathize with her character. The fault lies more in the screenplay, which doesn't give her character much depth.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Ultimately, you believe Lively as an old soul in a young body, carrying a heavy secret; you hope, somehow, that love will bring her a happy ending.

Name : John Anderson / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Okay, it's hooey. "Adaline" is not a documentary. What it is, though, is seductive.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Burstyn is as beautiful and emotionally present as always and Ford - after so many years of grumpily picking up paychecks - seems delighted to be acting again, and in a real movie.

Name : Andrew Lapin / Alias : NPR
Again and again, director Lee Toland Krieger (Celeste & Jesse Forever) allows shades of a more nuanced movie to pop up along the margins, only to steer instead toward innocent niceties.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Someone should steal this concept and make a decent movie out of it.

Name : Tom Russo / Alias : Boston Globe
Leave it to Harrison Ford to pull off a rescue that one of his signature heroes might envy. In a deftly crafted supporting role, Ford does as much as Lively herself to shape Adaline's strange predicament into something genuinely resonant.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
For a movie about a 106-year-old - albeit one trapped in the body of a 29-year-old - "The Age of Adaline" doesn't have a lot of wisdom.

Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
It fails to pursue any of the fascinating questions its premise raises. Instead, it dives headfirst into Nicholas Sparks territory and explores, though not without some charm, Adaline's romantic life.

Name : Nathalie Atkinson / Alias : Globe and Mail
Lively glides across the screen from scene to scene - like the ballroom of a grand old hotel with a suitor in hot pursuit - with all the emotional weight of a model in a perfume commercial.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
A sweeping romance beautifully wrapped in classy couture and slightly suspect in the way it uses metaphysics to manipulate matters of the heart.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Far too often here, Adaline's parade of period dresses, coats and handbags stand in for the richness of human experience.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
The Age of Adaline has a fundamental weakness: The tepid romance is supposed to structure everything else, so the film feels disjointed - a series of good, sometimes even great scenes in search of an organizing principle.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
A preposterous premise treated with great solemnity. Lively shines, though, as does Ford.

Name : Variety Staff / Alias : Variety
Birth of a Nation is a great epoch in picture making; it's great for pictures and it's great for the name and fame of David Wark Griffith. When a man like Griffith in a new field can do what he has done, he may as well be hailed while he is living.

Name : Dave Kehr / Alias : Chicago Reader
Griffith's later films are unquestionably superior. But here, in a very real sense, is where the movies began, both as an art and as a business.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
Debuting writer-director Nate Parker stars in this searingly impressive account of the Nat Turner slave rebellion.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The film offers up more than enough in terms of intelligence, insight, historical research and religious nuance as to not at all be considered a missed opportunity .

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
Problematically, Birth of a Nation wasn't just a seminal commercial spectacle but also a decisively original work of art - in effect, the founding work of cinematic realism, albeit a work that was developed to pass lies off as reality.

Name : Alison Willmore / Alias : BuzzFeed News
Turner deserves this treatment; he deserves a film that doesn't soften the era or apologize in any way for his anger; and he deserves a salute for making it happen.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
More than a movie about a slave rebellion, it's about the difficulty of reconciling the great moral chasms between thought, vision, and deed.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
As Vera, the rebellious, moneyed young woman whose dream of graduating from Oxford is deferred when the war breaks out, Alicia Vikander is such a ferociously intuitive performer that you can't take your eyes off her.

Name : Nathalie Atkinson / Alias : Globe and Mail
In what is a well-acted but fairly typical prestige period drama, it's Vikander's nuanced performance as the resolute but still-vulnerable Vera who gives the film its depth.

Name : Jordan Hoffman / Alias : New York Daily News
[D]elivers one rich and emotional scene after another

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
We don't need movies to tell us war is hell. But at their best, they humanize its unfathomable losses in a way that history books never quite can.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
A beautifully acted but disappointingly stiff period drama.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
From first to last, "Testament of Youth" sweeps you away.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
[Vikander's] performance is a subtle tour de force of feeling and restraint, made all the more remarkable by the whiplash highs and lows of this true but melodramatic tale.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Vikander and Harington provide the spark this World War I epic needs to get us through the tribulations and tragedies that pile on with numbing regularity.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
Evokes the march of history with a balance and restraint exhibited by few movies with such grand ambitions.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
In World War I, a generation learned that war was not the answer. In World War II, another generation learned that pacifism was not the answer. It would seem that there just isn't an answer.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Tough-minded and sometimes harrowing.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
This is Vikander's film and she is very good here.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
The book is still is in print to this day, selling like crumpets at high tea. The movie is a proud collation of its reflected glory. Don't miss it.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
The World War I-set "Testament of Youth" makes a passionate and sensible case for [pacifism] through devastating, melancholy, persevering drama.

Name : Marsha McCreadie / Alias : Village Voice
Without the epic sweep of a Doctor Zhivago, it's an intellectual and emotional landscape Vera traverses: grief to survival and, finally, pacifism.

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : AV Club
There's a good movie in Brittain's story, but you wouldn't know it from this lethargic, BBC-produced bore.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Vera Brittain's celebrated memoir of the British home front in World War I gets a polished Masterpiece Theatre treatment that fails to diminish the story's wrenching emotional content.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
The film is elegantly done, mainly because it wisely expends most of its energy on Alicia Vikander's face.

Name : Leslie Felperin / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Striking an elegantly sustained balance between intimacy and historical scope, director James Kent's WWI-set epic Testament of Youth encompasses nearly all of the virtues of classical British period drama and nearly none of the vices.

Name : Elaine Teng / Alias : The New Republic
Just once, it would be refreshing to see Britain look like something other than a country-living catalogue.

Name : Ella Taylor / Alias : NPR
Vikander crisply holds the screen as a naive rebel transformed by unspeakable suffering into a mature, independent young woman who remains open to the possibility of a new love and a rebuilt England.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Mournful, very fine .

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
This is World War I from a woman's point of view, a different perspective than we usually see. It's the story of someone who doesn't fight . but for whom the horrors of war are just as vivid and devastating.

Name : Guy Lodge / Alias : Variety
Kent presents the female experience of war with crisp, tactile practicality . Unabashedly romantic the film may be, but little about Brittain's grief-ridden personal awakening is needlessly romanticized.