Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
When critics bemoan the dumbing down of movies, they're talking about stuff like The Purge.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
There's nothing you'd want to see again, particularly served up with all these shaky closeups and off-kilter angles and a cast mostly waiting - like us - for it to be over.

Name : Simon Abrams / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Instead of being a creepy B-movie about the necessity of suppressing one's animalistic urges, "The Purge" is just a product of uninspired filmmaking.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
Somewhere between Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and the "Family Guy" episode in which Peter Griffin joins the Tea Party lies "The Purge." Unfortunately, it's as funny as the former and as thoughtful as the latter.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The Purge clearly has a lot on its mind, but it never really manages to express it.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
You hope for a purge to wipe away bad movies like this.

Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
In its own clumsy, exaggerated way, The Purge takes a strong stand against our cultural obsession with violence and our tendency to conflate justice with vengeance.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
The film morphs into a dull version of Straw Dogs .

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
No real answers are provided by writer-director James DeMonaco. He simply presents this bizarre dystopian future, and the audience is left to take it or leave it.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
The set-up is arresting, the domestic scenes well observed and acted, and the payoffs involving that Roomba toy excellent. Also, a late-film twist isn't a surprise, exactly, but it is delicious.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
A nutty if bloody lark, with a strange artificiality to the behaviors it portrays. That blunts the sharpness of any cultural critique it might aspire to.

Name : Michael Sragow / Alias : Orange County Register
Writer-director James DeMonaco's The Purge fritters away its promise in lurid, frenzied violence.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
The Purge suffers from BioShock Syndrome: Its survive-at-all-costs plot and anti-libertarian slant are incompatible.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
The message just gets louder and louder, cruder and cruder, which is too bad because Mr. DeMonaco knows how to set a stage.

Name : Peter Hartlaub / Alias : Hearst Newspapers
The blunt instrument plot allows for a few sneaky moments of satire and social commentary lite.

Name : Robert Abele / Alias : Los Angeles Times
A routine home invasion movie more interested in B-horror tropes and bloodletting than a thought-provoking look at "Hunger Games"-ish class warfare.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Too bad the film devolves into a series of home-invasion cliches. The Purge was almost on to something.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
The vague posters for "The Purge" won't prepare you for how sharp and shockingly subversive this home-invasion flick can be.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
The film has some vague things to say about class and racial differences, but they are drowned out by the sounds of blasting shotguns and huge knives being plunged into chests.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
The Purge is not subtle. But why should it be? It's not a movie about class or morality, but about the need for violence - our own. We are the audience, after all, and we must be purged, too.

Name : Nigel Floyd / Alias : Time Out
The film's would-be subversive ideas about the kneejerk appeal of social violence get lost in the mix.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
It's cultural commentary as blunt instrument - and as blunt instruments are wont to do, it achieves an end while making a bloody mess.

Name : Leslie Felperin / Alias : Variety
That old horror-movie standard, a homestead besieged by psychos, gets remixed with a bit of Occupy-era class-conflict satire in the disappointing future-set thriller The Purge.

Name : Rick Groen / Alias : Globe and Mail
Fans, gear up for rock-em-sock-em action, yet don't be disappointed if much of the goonery seems a bit tepid and, dare I say, staged.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Audiences will feel the need for a good cleansing after experiencing The Purge.

Name : Matt Patches / Alias : Film.com
A blunt takedown of 1%-er politics masquerading as a home invasion picture.

Name : Neil Young / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Gimmicky chiller lacks the robustness and distinction needed to support its social-commentary ambitions.

Name : David Thomson / Alias : The New Republic
If The Purge is as far-sighted as Network proved to be, we are in for very ugly times.

Name : Kristin Tillotson / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Its premise requires more sophisticated layering for the audience to really get on board with the notion that people leading very comfortable lives will suddenly go on a murder bender just because they can.

Name : Kevin C. Johnson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The great premise in "The Purge" - and it is a great premise, while being no "Hunger Games" - is squandered on a few levels.

Name : Kerry Lengel / Alias : Arizona Republic
"The Purge" is one of those unimaginative horror flicks that depend on skreeky music and sudden appearances to startle, but never actually frighten, the audience.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
DeMonaco clearly hopes to make a significant moral statement on the level of Shirley Jackson's literary masterpiece The Lottery. Alas, his aim at political conservatives who support the gun lobby falls flat before he can pull the trigger.

Name : Ian Buckwalter / Alias : NPR
The Purge is mostly a genre picture trying to layer on some prestige by way of social commentary. The latter falls flat; the film is actually stronger when it just goes for our baser instincts.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
After a wickedly promising start, this pointed political satire quickly deteriorates into a fairly routine, if sporadically quite effective, home-invasion thriller.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
The gap between the celestial art of the great English romantic painter Joseph Mallord William Turner and the brutish details of his life is vividly explored in Mike Leigh's tragicomic movie Mr. Turner.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Despite his own failings and faults, Leigh and Spall's Turner is a man consumed by the search for truth and beauty, even in the midst of the less than pretty truths of his times.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
It's a painfully uneven movie, but its best moments are ravishingly good.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Writing about Mr. Turner a few weeks after seeing it, I feel a craving to be again immersed in its world, which is rich with colors, textures, and, it sometimes almost seems, smells .

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Epic in breadth and length (2 1/2 hours), and gorgeously photographed (digitally) by Bill Pope, Mr. Turner is intimate in incident.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Keen observer Mike Leigh brings his hawk's eye to a vibrant rendering of J.M.W. Turner, the celebrated British "painter of light."

Name : Keith Staskiewicz / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
To use a word often associated with Turner and his art, it's sublime.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
"Mr. Turner" is a harsh, strange, but stirring movie, no more a conventional artist's bio-pic than Robert Altman's wonderful, little-seen film about van Gogh and his brother, "Vincent and Theo."

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Timothy Spall - best known to mainstream audiences as Wormtail in the Harry Potter series - delivers an Oscar-caliber tour de force reminiscent of Charles Laughton

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
This is less your standard-issue biopic than a foray into the mystery of human feeling.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The sprawling, loosely structured 2 1/2 hour drama has some of the year's most stunning visuals, many of which appear as artfully composed scenes in Turner's work.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
Timothy Spall - a veteran of Mike Leigh's films - plays this eccentric, determined London bohemian like a bronchial, cantankerous, randy old toad with backache.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Any expectations of reverential biography are quickly dispelled by Mr. Leigh's sharp, scintillating script and Mr. Spall's uncanny daring.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Leigh shows us the world as Turner sees it-harsh and ravishing. His beauty of a movie touches the heart not by sentimental gush but by the amplitude of its art.​

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Timothy Spall gives an admirably warty and unpleasant performance as Turner, an arrogant and uncompromising man who's annoyed by his celebrity in Britain but shocked when the public turns against his work.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
J.M.W. Turner, arguably the greatest of British painters, was an uncommonly difficult man, and "Mr. Turner," the exceptional film Mike Leigh has made about him, does not do things the easy way either.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
Spall may make a grotesque of Turner - piggish, rutting, whoring - but he finds such incandescence in the world around him. And director Mike Leigh lets you see that incandescence as Turner saw it: Everywhere.

Name : Bill Zwecker / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
I can't say enough about the power of Spall's performance.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Without a speck of pomposity Leigh's film - one of the year's best - honors its subject in all his tetchy ambiguity.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Mike Leigh takes on the topsy-turvy life of J.M.W. Turner in an exquisitely detailed, brilliantly acted biopic.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
It's not a pretty portrait of the artist. But it is a real one.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
Leigh and lead Timothy Spall make full use of their canvas, creating a sprawling portrayal of a wonderfully messy personality.

Name : Leslie Felperin / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Mr. Turner manages to illuminate that nexus between biography and art with elegant understatement.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
With his incomparable Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh continues to make other directors look simpleminded.

Name : Sasha Stone / Alias : TheWrap
As is usual with any Mike Leigh film - a style unique and trademarked by now - his ensemble is a collection of remarkably adept actors who know their characters so well they could stay in character for weeks, continually improvising, as they often do.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
A portrait of the artist as visionary oddball, for whom life was an endless source of both beauty and the irritating distractions blocking his view of said beauty.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
"Mr. Turner" is a rich, ruthless and profoundly compassionate study of life and love and art, for those who find themselves on its wavelength, but it also presents itself as a challenge.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Mr. Turner" is a rich portrait of England at a particularly scabrous period.

Name : Katie Kilkenny / Alias : The Atlantic
A gorgeous, important film.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
A vacuous endurance test about an abstract loser.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Failure isn't only the province of the lazy and uninspired. No, even the gifted and conscientious must occasionally take a stroll through that blasted landscape, and with Mr. Turner Leigh does it, for 2 1/2 hours. Don't go with him.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
"Mr. Turner" is a mighty work of critical imagination, a loving, unsentimental portrait of a rare creative soul.