Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
It's a saga of unquenchable spirit and fast-twitch muscles shot in slow-twitch style.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
Race is the most timid, lackadaisical movie that could have been made out of potentially classic material.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
"Race" wants so badly to get every last bit of the big picture that it dashes past the little details that actually tell a story. Like an over-trained athlete who pulls a hamstring in the big race, the movie tries to do it all and comes up short.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
"Race" is disappointing in parts, but Stephan James makes for an appealing star .

Name : Ella Taylor / Alias : NPR
A handsomely mounted drama about a pivotal moment in the life of track star Jesse Owens .

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
Owens's story is certainly one that needs telling, although Race isn't as strong as it could be, even if it does include a larger narrative than one man's rise to greatness.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
A wallpaper-thin but sentimentally effective hagiography.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : New York Daily News
As a Hollywood biography of the great Jesse Owens, it's meant to be epic. But its characters feel flat and unreal. Apart from a few big moments, it's as cheap and false as a 1970s TV flick.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It's amazing, the power of drama to make audiences worry about an outcome that is part of the historical record, but "Race" accomplishes just that.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Hopkins, a prolific producer/director of B movies, moves things at a steady pace through the film's two-plus hours, getting many facts right, fudging a few and ignoring some. Those it shows with sensitivity are breathtaking.

Name : Scott Tobias / Alias : Village Voice
Race follows the pattern of so many other sports biopics in which it's white patronage that makes black triumphs possible.

Name : David Sims / Alias : The Atlantic
Race wants to end, unsurprisingly, on a note of uplift-but for a film with so much dark, unexplored potential, it's an unsatisfying finish line to cross.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
"Race" tells the story of a brave and gifted and determined man who accomplished great feats during a pivotal moment in world history - but it's a by-the-numbers sports biopic with little nuance and a penchant for saccharine-soaked dramatic moments.

Name : Andrew Barker / Alias : Variety
Making a few admirable attempts to complicate what could have been a standard-issue inspirational sports narrative, "Race" is better than it has to be, but not by too much .

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
James makes for a charismatic hero, and former "Saturday Night Live" star Sudeikis is a revelation as the steadfast Snyder.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Director Stephen Hopkins plods when he needs to sprint, but Jesse Owens is a great movie subject. His triumph at the 1936 Olympics left Hitler to suck it up and watch a black man shatter his cuckoo theories of an Aryan master race.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : TIME Magazine
Where is Owens in all of this? By the end of Race, we don't know much more about him as an individual than we did when the movie began.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
At a time when the Oscars and movies, in general, struggle with finding racial balance, two guys of different skin colors coming together for some sports-movie magic is a fitting and truly welcoming lapping of the competition.

Name : Kate Taylor / Alias : Globe and Mail
Hopkins films all the races with suitable elan - since Owens was a sprinter, accomplishing his feats in a matter of seconds, they are relatively easy to dramatize - but you don't leave the theatre with much understanding of how he did it.

Name : Alan Zilberman / Alias : Washington Post
The script and direction of "Race" are both workmanlike and serve the film well, helping us to see Owens and Snyder as ordinary people with extraordinary gifts.

Name : Christian Holub / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The title is on-the-nose but rather fitting for the story of Jesse Owens, the black track-and-field athlete who stunned the world by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Adolf Hitler's Berlin .

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"Race" can't help but engage when it gets to the games. But what's the point of telling Jesse Owens' story if you don't get into what made him tick, and drove his success as an athlete?

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
A glossy, superficial biopic set in a historical context that begs for more, Race can at least claim to be one of the two best movies ever made about Olympic hero/Hitler-embarrasser Jesse Owens.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
There are reasons to wish that Race.offered a broader, deeper portrait of the man. Yet, as a celebration and evocation of a stunning moment in time, it's an engrossing and occasionally surprising take on an iconic event in sports history.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
A so-so movie about an extraordinary athlete.

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
Ultimately, it offers history told as a series of passing anecdotes.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
A dull portrait of an extraordinary man.

Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
The film delivers what it promises - an education and a thrill.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
"Race" reminds us that long before television elevated black sports heroes into gods, there were athletes like Jesse Owens who paved the way.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The bare necessities are there, the performances are competent, and there are some strong moments but Race suffers from a lack of ambition. It's too safe and that quality mutes its impact and limits its ability to be more than a history lesson.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Directed by Stephen Hopkins from a screenplay by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, "Race" is a well-made biopic about Owens at the Berlin Games and the events leading up to his extraordinary accomplishment.

Name : Tony Hicks / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
"Race" is the story of Owens in his finest moments, and it succeeds in telling it. Just don't expect more than that.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
A keen exploration of how to make a political statement without saying a word, and how best to stay true to one's self while making necessary compromises and calculations.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
A striking portrait of addiction that doesn't say anything new - drugs are bad, kids - but it leaves a lasting and chilling impression.

Name : Danny King / Alias : Village Voice
Together, the images and the sounds turn Harley's reality into a pulverizing grind from which escape is barely even a distant thought.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
There's never a false moment.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
All this desperation and squalor reeks of authenticity.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
Even if you don't know the place used to be called Needle Park, Josh and Benny Safdie's extraordinary indie will put you in mind of that 1971 NYC classic. It may even become one itself.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
For much of the movie, [the Safdies] keep the camera discomfitingly close to the characters, blurring out the background and immersing us in their telescoped world.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Holmes has a face that reveals everything and nothing. Besides being strikingly photogenic, she's a natural.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It's just a portrait of emptiness, but it feels a lot like the real thing.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
I'm glad I saw this film; considered on its own merits, in terms of what I understand as its artistic goals, it's a wrenching and finely wrought piece of work.

Name : Barry Hertz / Alias : Globe and Mail
Although the film is raw, intense and even beautiful at times, the queasy knowledge of how it all came together constantly threatens to uproot any artistry.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Fans of the cinematic street poet Larry Clark (Kids, Bully) might go for this, though the unexpected moments of dignity and compassion that deepen his characters are in short supply here.

Name : Nicolas Rapold / Alias : New York Times
At the very least, the directors, Josh and Benny Safdie, have created a small, beautiful classic of street theater by rendering these public disputes within a vibrant Manhattan setting through ingenious photography.

Name : David Rooney / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
It also helps that Holmes, Jones and Duress, as well as the mainly non-actors in secondary roles, all inhabit their characters with real conviction.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Obeys many conventions of the genre, trying its best to plunge viewers into a world that, while seemingly liberated of bourgeois proprieties, is actually a narrowly constricted prison of desperation and need.

Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
One junkie story tends to be much like another, so give brothers Josh and Benny Safdie credit for crafting one that's genuinely distinctive.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Heaven Knows What feels like an authentic, sometimes painfully accurate portrait of life in New York City as experienced by the homeless, ever-hustling teenagers.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Heaven Knows What quickly obtains an oddly charming rhythm, a sense of eavesdropping on sometimes unlikable, but fully realized, social outsiders.

Name : Michael Rechtshaffen / Alias : Los Angeles Times
When going for gritty realism, it doesn't hurt to have your lead actress essentially playing herself.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
By the end of Heaven Knows What, you see Ilya's fragile, unguarded soul through Harley's eyes, and the film's discordances sound like the music of the spheres.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
Heaven Knows What [has] a backstory precisely as fraught as what happens on screen. And that's pretty fraught.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
New York-based brothers Josh and Benny Safdie look past Manhattan's glossy surfaces to reveal an underworld of homeless young heroin addicts hidden in plain sight.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Unpleasant moral ambiguity is served boiling hot in this drug-poisoned love story.

Name : Melissa Anderson / Alias : Village Voice
It centers on electrifying newcomer Arielle Holmes as a homeless junkie named Harley, a character largely shaped by the performer's own extremely recent past.