Name : Martin Tsai / Alias : Los Angeles Times
A cri de coeur on the samurai flicks of a bygone era, "Uzumasa Limelight" unfolds understatedly and movingly like something from Clint Eastwood at the top of his game.

Name : Jeannette Catsoulis / Alias : New York Times
Directing with an old-fashioned tenderness toward his unassuming star, Ken Ochiai conjures a swan song to a waning art form and those who practice it.

Name : Michael Nordine / Alias : L.A. Weekly
None of this goes down with any real verve, though Kamiyama's wrinkled face is a small marvel of expressivity.

Name : Noel Murray / Alias : AV Club
While Kidnapped doesn't add anything substantially new to the tradition, Vivas hits his marks with ruthless efficiency.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
Swedish director Daniel Alfredson pushes the caper button too many times. More sly wit would have helped things come to a head.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Fairly enjoyable and credit is due to its sterling cast, led by Anthony Hopkins as Heineken .

Name : Liz Braun / Alias : Toronto Sun
The real-life kidnapping had all the elements of a thriller, so how it became such a mild-mannered movie is anybody's guess.

Name : Nick Pinkerton / Alias : Village Voice
As most of Kidnapped is devoted to watching people in extreme duress, leaving room for little else, it follows that the film exists solely to be "intense."

Name : William Goss / Alias : Film.com
Survival horror has rarely been approached so sparingly and yet, for all there is to admire. the initial sense of potential suspense gives way to the creeping contempt of familiarity.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Heineken may be weighed down by the predictable reality of actual events. Or it just may be lacking in electricity and depth. Either way, it's lacking.

Name : Aaron Hillis / Alias : Village Voice
Glossy, lifelessly paced .

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
The true story of Freddy Heineken's kidnapping is fascinating, but "Kidnapping Mr. Heineken" is a disappointingly superficial film in which neither the kidnappers nor their captives are particularly interesting.

Name : David Rooney / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Gripping but grueling, this Spanish debut feature scores on technical prowess but its nihilistic viciousness is hard to take.

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : AV Club
Much like the lager that gives the film its name, Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is bland on the palate and best pissed away.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Anthony Hopkins plays the king of the hops, and he is excellent. So is the rest of the movie, a sober, no-frills account about the highest ransom ever collected up to that time-$10 million and counting.

Name : Robert Abele / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Despite its true-events pedigree, "Kidnapping Mr. Heineken" is woefully captive to B-movie crime saga tropes.

Name : Trevor Johnston / Alias : Time Out
One capably staged chase sequence apart, it's not one to set the pulse racing.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Anthony Hopkins and a cast of erstwhile next-big-things go slumming in Daniel Alfredson's listless, fact-based kidnapping caper.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
Starting as a coldly realistic thriller, this film eventually loses its bearings as the director Miguel Angel Vivas succumbs to a fit of nihilism, transforming "Kidnapped" into gruesome tit-for-tat torture porn.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
In just a few scenes, Hopkins conjures up some sorely needed fizz. But the low-key vibe of the film doesn't match the high-stakes audacity of the crime.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
The utter lack of surprises and waste of a first-rate cast - Anthony Hopkins as Alfred "Freddy" Heineken; Jim Sturgess and Sam Worthington as kidnappers - make for a tremendous letdown.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
The sole object lesson in the true-crime drama "Kidnapping Mr. Heineken" is that not every crime deserves its own movie.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
Some kind of napping for sure.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
In 1983, five knuckleheads decided to strike it rich by kidnapping beer magnate Freddy Heineken. "Kidnapping Mr. Heineken" is a dull, trite thriller about their crime and undoing.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
My eyes never left the screen and my attention never wandered; in a restricted, technical sense of the term, "Kidnapped" is a masterpiece.

Name : Geoff Pevere / Alias : Globe and Mail
Not only is Hopkins's Freddy incomparably more charismatic than any of his captors, he's the only one who, weirdly enough, seems to be enjoying the ordeal. But maybe that's simply a matter of pay scale.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Rock the Kasbah morphs into a pretty implausible feel-good movie that's nearly as maudlin as it is unconvincing.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Rock the Kasbah, does not rock at all - not even a little bit.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
A white-savior showbiz fable of a particularly dubious and retrograde variety.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
It's a movie that's half-over before it tells us what it's really about.

Name : Tasha Robinson / Alias : AV Club
A comedy that's openly afraid to seem too sincere or too mawkish, and doesn't fully commit either to its comedy or its uplift. Like Murray, it's wry and presented largely in air quotes, with an accompanying eye-roll.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
This dismal comedy, scripted by Murray's old pal Mitch Glazer (Scrooged), evinces only enough interest in Afghanis to keep the story rolling.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
This movie is all over the place.

Name : Natalie Daher / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It fumbles a bit by prioritizing the goofy antics of its white cast over what turns out to be a smart depiction of non-Western life.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Some projects are just too misguided for the star to mug and shrug his way out of. Consider Rock the Kasbah at the top, or the bottom, of that list.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
As one-liner after one-liner misses its mark, you begin to feel sorry for Murray, who's really too old to be playing a guy who has a little daughter . and likes to get kinky with Kate Hudson as a raucous, Dolly Parton-style hooker-businesswoman.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
Not Murray's best and not Levinson's either.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Murray, idiosyncratic as always, dominates, but his performance can't save this misconceived mess.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
"Rock the Kasbah" is the mausoleum where comedy was buried.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
If it were any worse, they'd be screening it as evidence at The Hague.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Bill Murray is Bill Murray is Bill Murray in a comedy that's little more than a schtick delivery system with some third-act personal growth thrown in for good measure.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
The movie wants to be both glib and emotionally resonant, but it can't seem to figure out what the stakes are - even as people are getting shot.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
An ongoing war is no setting for a musical comedy, especially one this glib and inane.

Name : David Lewis / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Murray does his best to hold up the movie, but there's only so much he can do. Ultimately, his latest fish out of water never makes it back upstream.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
Levinson never seems to know what to point his camera at, or when to cut, and Glazer never seems to know when to leave a joke alone and let the cast work.

Name : Andrew Barker / Alias : Variety
Bill Murray heads to Afghanistan in director Barry Levinson's dreadfully misguided farce.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Rock the Kasbah goes fierce to quietly touching and back to funny again.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
It needs a smarter script. It needs at least two or three perfectly engineered, joke-after-joke sequences. It needs a smart director - did you really do "Wag the Dog," Levinson? - whose idea of political satire goes beyond freshman-year sarcasm.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : TIME Magazine
Its music-industry gags sit awkwardly next to war-zone jokes and cultural quips, landing all involved on a peace train to nowhere.

Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
An acclaimed film director, a legendary comic actor, lots of fun rock and pop songs, and a noble story at its core can't save "Rock the Kasbah" from being one hugely misguided dud.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
A lot of the actor's usual mercurial charm isn't used to full effect and is actually tempered when it doesn't feel like it should be.

Name : Randy Cordova / Alias : Arizona Republic
There might be a decent movie in here somewhere, if the focus had been on the right character.

Name : Mark Jenkins / Alias : NPR
Rock the Kasbah's timing is so slack, and its screenplay so shapeless, that the movie doesn't even rise to the level of an Afghan-war Stripes. It's almost as laugh-free as the latest news from Kunduz.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Your enjoyment of all this will probably depend heavily on your willingness to let the words romp and Taliban coexist for approximately two hours.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Quite possibly [Murray's] worst movie ever.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Cliched, enervating, insulting - it's tough to settle on a single pejorative for "Rock the Kasbah," though abysmal might do.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
For every moment of desert beauty, or insight into the twilight economies that flourish in a war zone, there's a key scene that appears truncated or even missing.