Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
There's a funny movie in Trainwreck, but you may have to sift through a lot of debris to find it.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Once the romance takes off, the entire film shifts. It becomes more of a conventional romantic comedy, albeit one with really dirty words. And it remains hilarious, because Schumer seems to be incapable of being anything else.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Trainwreck is anything but.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Apatow and Schumer know that sturdy comedy benefits from the stuff of real life, and they supply it in consistent and sneaky fashion.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
This is a film that belongs not to its director but to its star, who, if there is any justice in the world, is about to ascend from cult icon to mass phenomenon.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
There's nothing remotely fresh about this plotline (or the way Apatow, true to form, makes the movie 20 minutes longer than it should be), but "Trainwreck" works as comedy more often than it doesn't - and that's rare enough.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Schumer's performance is a tour de force of razor-sharp comedic timing.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Schumer and Hader are wonderful together. Gender inequity in the world of comedy deserves all the overdue attention it's getting, and more. But there are matters of craft, wit (no matter how crude the jokes) and timing that transcend chromosomes.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Often extremely funny, even if it never approaches the radicalness of [Schumer's] greatest, most dangerous work.

Name : Esther Breger / Alias : The New Republic
People who go into Trainwreck looking for that Amy -the subversive truth-teller, the feminist role model - are likely to be disappointed. Their loss. Trainwreck is a surprisingly old-fashioned romantic comedy, the kind that rarely gets made anymore.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
It's got no rhythm or reliable comfort zone. The jokes and ensemble scenes are all rushed, so you can't savor them or what anyone in them is doing.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Apatow and Schumer probably believe they've made a feminist picture, but the reality is something different. This is a conventional movie dressed as a progressive one.

Name : Linda Holmes / Alias : NPR
Trainwreck . has some very traditional romantic comedy elements, including a big, implausible finish. But even if you know where you're going to wind up, it takes interesting side trips along the way.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Despite Schumer's subversive instincts, the romantic comedy remains unchanged.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Beneath all of his bad-boy shtick, Apatow's always been a pretty conventional moralist. But Schumer gives their raunchy rom-com enough of her signature spikiness to prevent it from ever feeling predictable.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
"Trainwreck" is a corrective to a lot of outdated cliches. It's very funny and sweet and even a little weepy, and it has maybe the best scene ever filmed of dirty talk gone wrong.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
With films such as Funny People and This Is 40, Apatow has toyed with finding the right blend of the serious and the hilarious and finally hits it here.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Trainwreck is brash, funny, and often vulgar.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Romantic comedies can go in all sorts of directions, but they depend on the audience's believing that a couple should get together and stay together. But in "Trainwreck," that belief is hard to come by.

Name : Rebecca Keegan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
A surprisingly touching and raucously funny R-rated comedy written by and starring Amy Schumer.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
"Trainwreck" serves as confirmation that a star is born, a seemingly average woman whose above-average superpowers include reminding us of our own. Where she goes from here should be fascinating to watch.

Name : Bruce Demara / Alias : Toronto Star
A film that crackles with edgy and boundary-pushing wit.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
If you're looking for something radical, you'd be best to stick with Schumer's television show. Trainwreck is just good fun, and a lot of it at that.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : RogerEbert.com
It's a familiar rom-com dynamic, but the reversal of traditional on-screen gender roles-combined with Schumer and Hader's easy chemistry-makes "Trainwreck" feel new and fresh.

Name : Jacob Hall / Alias : New York Daily News
Schumer raises Apatow's game beautifully. Her biting, pitch-black wit and his penchant for character-driven comedy go together like gin and tonic.

Name : John DeFore / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Schumer has never had anything like a leading film role, but self-revealing stand-up and a TV series have limbered her up for the job.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Amy Schumer and Judd Apatow craft a winning portrait of a good time Sally in the grip of her first serious relationship.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Sweet is not how Schumer wants Trainwreck to go down. She wants to explode rom-com cliches and replace them with something fierce and ready to rumble. Done.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Ultimately comes down in favor of mainstream girl-gets-boy in a way that Inside Amy Schumer might find a little dubious, but it never feels like Schumer is aggressively watering down her uniquely prickly brand of comedy for a mass audience.

Name : Lisa Schwarzbaum / Alias : TIME Magazine
In the way of most Apatow films, Trainwreck is a little too long, a little too shaggy and a little too conservative in insisting that all's square in love and war.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Schumer's pretty wonderful, and the movie - in a summer that was still waiting for its R-rated smash - is great fun.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
You forget how limited so many movies' ideas of women are until Schumer launches into an extended tampon joke. It's a film about everyday sexism and double standards.

Name : Preston Jones / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Trainwreck is a tart blend of frank sexuality and domestic drama, giving audiences something they rarely see at the movies: a woman unapologetic about wanting sex.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
What makes "Trainwreck" work is that [Schumer] approaches every beat - funny, serious and in-between - in an open, undefended state. And she's blessed with the perfect opposite number in Hader .

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
[Schumer] takes the romantic-comedy heroine and the onscreen treatment of feminism to places they've seldom, if ever, been before.

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
Unlike many comic vehicles and just as many big-city romances, it's a real, and ultimately rewarding, piece of work.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
The movie veers sharply off track toward the end. Still, the sum of its most memorable parts is great fun.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
While I can't say I felt love at first sight for "Trainwreck," it is a raw and honest romantic farce, even when it is upside-down wrong.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
This is a fully fleshed-out movie, the funniest of the year.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
So much for the promise of the title. "Trainwreck" sticks to the rails.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
"Trainwreck" is not very good, but Schumer is frequently amazing in it. Officially, her fans will not be disappointed; not far below the surface, it's a bummer.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
The absolute best thing about this film, aside from Schumer's strong, smart voice, is the promise of more to come. This lady's just getting started.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
If the best films hold you in a captive vise, entertain you, keep you spellbound and teach you something at the same time, then 12 Years a Slave is outstanding-brave, courageous and unforgettable.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
It speaks to the courage and resilience of one man, the savagery of many, and the potential, for both good and for ill, in us all.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
The cumulative emotional effect is devastating: the final scenes are as angry, as memorable, as overwhelming as anything modern cinema has to offer.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
12 Years a Slave is at times difficult to watch but always impossible to turn away from.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
It's not too soon to call 12 Years a Slave a great film-ruined, tremulously sad, surreal in its evil.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
12 Years a Slave is a movie about a life that gets taken away, and that's why it lets us touch what life is.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Slavery here is not only a great moral darkness but a sweeping canvas for depicting the emotional deformities of the people who enforced and exploited the practice.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
You won't be able to tuck this powder keg in the corner of your mind and forget it. What we have here is a blistering, brilliant, straight-up classic.

Name : Jocelyn Noveck / Alias : Associated Press
The film truly belongs to Ejiofor, whose big, soulful eyes seem to register so many things at once: Shock, pain, grit, determination, abject despair at times, cautious hope at others - and always, dignity.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
The genius of 12 Years a Slave is its insistence on banal evil, and on terror, that seeped into souls, bound bodies and reaped an enduring, terrible price.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
So overpowering is this film's simple, horrible, and almost entirely true story that it's hard to get enough distance on 12 Years a Slave to poke at its inner workings.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
It seems certain to transcend the movie realm and become a new reference point in contemporary culture-a defining vision of what slavery looked like, and felt like, in the U.S. before the Civil War.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
It's smashingly effective as melodrama. But McQueen's directorial voice-cold, stark, deterministic-keeps it from attaining the kind of grace that marks the voice of a true film artist.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
12 Years a Slave is easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
McQueen doesn't go in for a lot of flash edits or self-conscious visual flourishes to put viewers at ease; rather, he invites the audience to sit with him as he gazes, amazed, at man's inhumanity to man .

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Believe the Oscar buzz. Britain's Steve McQueen (Hunger, Shame) nails the horror of America's slavery shame but also finds humanity in one man's determination to free himself and return to his family.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
"12 Years a Slave" lays out an institution so twisted and wrong that its honest portrayal has been avoided for centuries. Yes, it's dark and brutal. It needs to be.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
Brave performances throughout this magnificent film.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Aside from a characteristically nuanced lead performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor. it's a picture that stays more than a few safe steps away from anything so dangerous as raw feeling.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
This is not medicine for America to swallow; it's filmmaking of the highest caliber.

Name : Michael Sragow / Alias : Orange County Register
One of the finest historical movies ever made.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
One of the best and most courageous films of the year.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
"12 Years a Slave" works on so many levels - some topical, some timeless - that it's almost impossible to count them.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
McQueen and Ridley seem determined to obliterate any lingering Gone With the Wind-inspired notions that the antebellum South was a place of grace and charm, or that slavery was, in the euphemism of the day, merely a "peculiar institution."

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, written by John Ridley and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a necessary corrective to the antics of Django Unchained, not to mention Mandingo and its ilk.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A strong, involving, at times overstated telling of an extraordinary life story.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
A film this good, and this quietly distinctive in its style, is always welcome.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
It is Ejiofor - bewildered, sorely tested, morally towering - whose staggered dignity anchors the film.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Channeling the evils of human bondage through the experiences of one weary figure, McQueen has constructed another intensely physical character study about a man trapped in his own flesh.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The film offers a formidable indictment of the cruelty of which human beings are capable.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
A harrowing, unforgettable drama that doesn't look away from the reality of slavery and, in so doing, helps us all fully, truly confront it.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
When a director who never ever blinks takes on a horrific subject, a nightmare in broad daylight is the inevitable result. Welcome, if that is the right word, to the world of 12 Years a Slave.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The harrowing 12 Years a Slave is a mesmerizing period drama for the ages.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
12 Years a Slave is likely the most painful, clear-eyed feature ever made about American slavery. In that light, it almost seems faint praise to add that it will also likely prove to be the best film of the year.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
12 Years a Slave, British director Steve McQueen's antebellum Southern drama, sets a new standard in realistically depicting American slavery.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Every scene of 12 Years a Slave, and almost every shot, conveys some penetrating truth about America's original sin.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
In the epic form of 12 Years a Slave, his most approachable, emotional film, McQueen escalates the tension.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Other movies and books have gone here, but few so far and with such overwhelming clarity of purpose.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Remarkable.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
"12 Years a Slave" isn't easy to watch, and it shouldn't be; it's one man's tragedy, but it's also the tragedy of countless thousands of souls beaten down, literally and metaphorically.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
"12 Years a Slave" offers no false Hollywood catharsis along with its muted happy ending, because we're not free from the curse of slavery yet. Looking at it, as it really was, is a start.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The power of McQueen's movie is in its declaratory style: This happened. That is all, and that is everything.

Name : David Thomson / Alias : The New Republic
It is a film that necessity and education demand seeing.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It provokes recognition in us of the very heart of darkness. It makes the unimaginable imaginable.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
This epic account of an unbreakable soul makes even Scarlett O'Hara's struggles seem petty by comparison.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Slavery is revealed for the unrelenting horror that it was. About time.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
A brutally powerful and emotionally devastating film that takes great pains to rip any lingering vestiges of romanticism from America's most shameful institution.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
But the much talked-about 12 Years a Slave is more than a beautifully shot art piece. It's history made violently real.

Name : William Goss / Alias : Film.com
Northup's story was a true, terrible thing, and by virtue of telling it, the burdens of all American slaves are unflinchingly realized by Ejiofor and McQueen alike.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
The film is both brutal to watch and stunning to contemplate, powerfully challenging audiences - particularly white audiences - to examine their consciences.