Name : Christian Holub / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Risen is more entertaining than Bible-adjacent stories are usually allowed to be.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
The film ends up falling into a loop of abortive climaxes, set against an indistinguishable beige-gray backdrop of limestone, before the inevitable cheap-looking flash of CGI light in a scraggly field.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
It's not often that faith-based films, competing in the same marketplace that rewards action, embrace the deeper, more difficult idea of meeting hate with love, but Risen tries.

Name : Michael Nordine / Alias : Village Voice
Despite not doing much more than preach to the choir, Risen is still more nuanced than the lion's share of recent faith-based dramas.

Name : Kate Taylor / Alias : Globe and Mail
The film features a lush historical setting and some satisfying action scenes, but the dialogue is often laughable, a mix of the pseudo-archaic with oddly contemporary lingo.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
It's nice to finally see the Messiah portrayed by somebody who'd probably get extra attention at a U.S. airport by Homeland Security.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
Whether or not it triggers a craze for divinely inspired detective stories, "Risen" makes a decent case for itself as the "Columbo" of the genre: It's amiable, creaky and not remotely predicated on the element of surprise.

Name : Katie Walsh / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"Risen" is a fascinating cultural artifact, but as a film, it's destined for no glory greater than as an appropriate cable rerun on Easter.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
A low-IQ affair that supposes that the Gospels will sound more convincing if seen through the eyes of a skeptic. Instead, it seeks to improve the New Testament by putting a layer of Naugahyde upholstery on it.

Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
While it descends too often into the melodramatic, it's a solid, smart picture and a welcome addition to the genre.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
"Risen" was never meant as anything but a tool for the converted. Talk about preaching to the choir.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
It's intended primarily for an audience of Christian believers, but genuine drama precedes the preaching.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Fiennes is superb, portraying a man slowly transformed by events that shake his beliefs about the world and his place in it to their core.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Fiennes sticks with the brooding, stoic performance, even when Clavius is undergoing some major changes. It's not his best work.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Viewers already well-versed in the greatest story ever told might find their interest piqued by the filmmakers' unconventional take. It's unlikely, however, that "Risen" will preach to anyone outside the choir.

Name : Jeannette Catsoulis / Alias : New York Times
If you drink every time you're reminded of Monty Python's 1979 Judean jaunt, "Life of Brian," you might just make it through to the end.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : New York Daily News
Reynolds' gets many things right: the blasted look of the desert, the dusty provincial look of a far-flung Roman outpost. And the story he tells is both serious and modest.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
A fairly ambitious picture tailor-made for that slice of the Christian audience accustomed to the tropes and beats of prestige cable dramas.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
We know how it turns out, but seeing from the point of view of someone who doesn't know and doesn't believe adds more cogency.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
For a film that could have easily become bogged down in Sunday School reverence, or culture-war opportunism, Risen presents an intriguing, oblique approach to a Bible movie.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
It's not especially challenging. But it is several steps up from some faith-based fare, and it will doubtless appeal to its target audience.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : MTV
It's pointed about how we treat today's zealots, as when Clavius likens the pain of crucification to "sucking air through a wet cloth" - a description of waterboarding.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Whatever your religious affiliation, you will come away thinking that if all this did actually happen, it probably happened something like this.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
What a good surprise it was to watch a biblical feature less preachy, less stuffy and more entertaining than most. "Risen" is an original crime-fiction take on a story as old as stories get.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : TIME Magazine
The plot is clever, and its intricacies are beautifully worked out.

Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
Hell Or High Water plays out in unexpected ways, culminating in a tense final showdown that's somehow simultaneously an epilogue, the story having already concluded. (Neat trick, that.)

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
When the final showdown arrives, the men are redefined by their deeds and what began as a sharp genre piece deepens into a subtle character study.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Much more than a genre piece, "Hell or High Water" takes you places that you thought the big screen had forgotten.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Hell or High Water isn't just a great time at the movies, it's one of the year's best pictures.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Audiences have been down this dusty backroad before. The thrill of High Of High Water is in its skillful, offbeat execution.

Name : Peter Sobczynski / Alias : RogerEbert.com
It's frustrating that Hell or High Water contains so many good things that just don't coalesce into a fully satisfying moviegoing experience.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Texas is as much a riveting character in [this] fascinating crime drama as the brothers turned bank robbers at its heart or the laconic lawman who coolly follows them across the sun-hardened landscape like a hunter on the trail of his next kill.

Name : Katie Walsh / Alias : Tribune News Service
A dusty, blood-soaked myth of crime and punishment far from fantasy, a finger planted on the pulse - and the trigger.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Hell or High Water is a rare humanist Western: Finality is the true villain.

Name : Chris Klimek / Alias : NPR
The 101 minutes that follow essentially comprise a feature-length Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen song, their brilliance lying in the details.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"Hell or High Water" has one foot in pulp conventions, and the other in some stimulating, morally tricky contemporary answers to those conventions. What the movie has, above all, is a dramatic line, clean and straight.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
In this bleak West Texas landscape where everyone seems to be struggling, you find yourself rooting, inexplicably, for all of them against a clear villain: the faceless, predatory bank.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
From a purely narrative perspective, there's nothing new here but like a new arrangement of a familiar tune, the slight changes make it fresh and enjoyable.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
You might have to go back to 1967's Bonnie and Clyde to find a film about bank robbers that feels as of its time as David Mackenzie's Hell or High Water.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
Director David Mackenzie tells a sad story about desperate characters that is somehow as thrilling as it is heartbreaking.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
They don't make them like this anymore - but they still can, and here's the proof.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
You've seen it all before - but hell, it's worth seeing again.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : Village Voice
Sheridan's script - filled with quotable zingers, telling character details, and topical anger - comes to vivid, exciting life with that cast, in particular Bridges, who seems to have finally found another gruff, down-home type worthy of his talents.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
The cast is uniformly magnificent, but it's Pine who steals the movie.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
The action is as schematic and artificial as a chess game, and the characters have as much identity as its pieces.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
"Hell or High Water" is a story about men, but the movie is really about a mindset, a way of life, the strength and resolution required to make a living in a world that doesn't care about you.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
In a word, "Hell or High Water" is terrific.

Name : Mara Reinstein / Alias : Us Weekly
The tension and anger in this neo-Western practically radiate off the screen.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Hot damn, this one's a goodie - a mesmerizing, modern-day western that moves with the coiled intensity of a rattlesnake ready to spring.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
Scenic, well-paced and rich in dialogue and character, the film is Coen brothers for the squares, and maybe the best middle-of-the-seat drama of the summer.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
A film with the sort of sweeping grandeur that today's filmmakers rarely aspire to, let alone fulfill.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Hell or High Water is at once a tale of desperation in hard times, and a keenly observed character study - or studies.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : New York Daily News
It's got a dry dusty power, and a dark sense of humor. And when it finally saddles up and really rides, pardner, you'd best get out of its way.

Name : Walter V. Addiego / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Despite the weighty issues at play, there's much about the movie to simply enjoy - the camaraderie of the brothers and the lawmen, and the not infrequent elements of humor.

Name : Robert Abele / Alias : TheWrap
Feels old-fashioned in its action-thriller gratification and in-the-moment about everything else.

Name : David Rooney / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A soulful outlaw tale with a socioeconomic perspective and a rich sense of place.

Name : Glenn Whipp / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"Hell or High Water" is a gripping heist drama keenly attuned to the outsider politics of our times.

Name : Danny King / Alias : Village Voice
Hell or High Water's deliberate pacing gives it the feel of a heist story with its feet stuck in mud - and that's a good thing.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
You could freeze nearly any frame of Hell or High Water and you'd be looking at a work of art. It's stark and breathtaking and gorgeous to behold.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It's not every day that we see a movie that's fresh, exciting and dangerous, slapping you from explosive laughter to stunned attention. Mood and atmosphere and interesting character acting are rarely handled as well as this.

Name : Jeannette Catsoulis / Alias : New York Times
If there's such a thing as an easygoing thriller, then "Hell or High Water" is it. The stakes may be steep, but the characters can seem more nonchalant than nervous.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
"Hell or High Water" overcomes its vapid political leanings with loads of West Texas atmosphere, smart dialogue and acutely observed relationships.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Let's make it easy: If you like sitting in a dark room looking at pictures that move, you should see "Hell or High Water." It's terrific.

Name : Liz Braun / Alias : Toronto Sun
Hell or High Water is set up like a cops and robbers drama, but it plays out like a complicated western - no black-hats-and-white-hats simplicity here. It's all moral shades of grey.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
All of the performers in this film, right down to the bit players, are quite good, but Bridges demonstrates yet again that he is one of the finest actors in America.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : MTV
We don't live in an era of white hats and black hats. Maybe we never did. Today, everyone is gray - or, in Mackenzie's color scheme, faded blue and sad beige

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
Hell or High Water is a genre film that transcends genre, an iconic American tale that is nonetheless firmly grounded in both place and time. One of the best movies of the year.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Variety
"Hell or High Water" is a thrillingly good movie - a crackerjack drama of crime, fear, and brotherly love set in a sun-roasted, deceptively sleepy West Texas that feels completely exotic for being so authentic.