Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
Dope digs into racial culture in a real way with Malcolm struggling with the fact that he doesn't fit being a geek or a menace to society, and it's a hoot to root him on as he finds his place somewhere in between.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Here is the rare movie overstuffed with memorable moments that would have been better if there had been fewer of them.

Name : Dennis Harvey / Alias : Variety
The cast, drawn from comedy, rap, TV, modeling and other spheres, is sharply on form throughout, as is Famuyiwa's direction; the pic's esprit is amplified by every editorial trick in the book, from split-screen to freeze-frames.

Name : Kevin C. Johnson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Dope" is funny, slick and sharp.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The film's ability to confound expectations while delivering some big laughs may be its most crowd-pleasing characteristic but the anti-stereotype message rings clear as a bell throughout.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Shameik Moore is a forceful, sympathetic locus, with an appealing gentleness of spirit that in no way seems entirely innocent. There's a drive there. As for Zoe Kravitz, she is having one terrific year.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
This vibrant film is a bit of a mess, but it's a beautiful one.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
Writer-director Rick Famuyiwa . doubles down on an applying-to-Harvard satire that both upends demographic expectations while insisting (at times a bit strenuously) that we all aim a little higher.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
"Dope" may be the perfect movie for the summer of 2015.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
In an era full of indifferent, cookie-cutter indies, an excess of ideas and personality is hardly a bad thing.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
The tone of "Dope" is very interesting - funny, but rarely stupid-funny. The film does not wear its serious observations, about aspirations and realities and hypocrisies of all kinds (not just racial), in a heavy fashion.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
As a comedy, the film isn't especially funny, and as a screwball drug caper a la "Go," it's raggedly plotted, with ridiculous coincidences popping up everywhere.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Shameik Moore gives a smashing breakout performance in a comedy of social expectation that plays like an exhilarating gift.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
It's a remorselessly entertaining, Frankenstein's monster of pop-culture borrowings and appropriations. So much so that it becomes very much its own thing.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
"Dope" is the bomb.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Be sure to stay for the end credits. No other summer-movie credit crawl is going to get audiences dusting off their old Running Man and Cabbage Patch dance moves like this one. Take that, Jurassic World.

Name : Julian Carrington / Alias : Globe and Mail
Even as Famuyiwa acknowledges the preconceptions that Malcolm's blackness engenders, he invites audiences to identify with the character on the basis of his relatable interests, aspirations and vulnerabilities.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
The acting is uniformly good. This is Moore's first big role, and he delivers a performance both entertaining and believable.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
Again and again, Dope puts us in Malcolm's Air Jordans, letting us sweat or fear or hope right with him.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It's downright dainty as far as plot, but a mostly tasty layer cake of drugs, jokes, sex, jokes, cool young cast members, jokes, 1992 hip-hop, cartoony characters, a heist and a lot more jokes.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
If "Dope" were as earnest as Malcolm seems to be, you might expect it to be a bit of a bore. No worries on that count, though.

Name : Boyd van Hoeij / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A funny and often intelligent crowd-pleaser about three geeks who get smart about drug-dealing.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
A narrative as freewheeling as this one might ordinarily daze and confuse. But Malcolm makes for such a forceful character, it's easy to go along with whatever direction he's headed in.

Name : Patrick Dunn / Alias : Detroit News
When so many black movie characters are simple stereotypes, it's a pleasure to see a film with real wit about the benefits and pitfalls of playing to and against those expectations.

Name : Robert Abele / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"Dope" is, in the end, just another unfunny grab bag of stereotypes. Don't believe the hype.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Moore, who's done some TV work and is also a singer and dancer, emerges as a genuine movie star in "Dope." He's very good looking and has charisma to burn, and he controls the screen in every scene he's in. Which is practically every scene.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
A freewheeling comedy about sex, drugs and identity politics.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Mr. Famuyiwa . shoves disparate genre elements together as if pulling jigsaw puzzle pieces from a half-dozen different boxes, and if the finished work isn't quite convincing, it's still fun to look at.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
While Famuyiwa deserves the lion's share of acclaim for making "Dope" such an inventive, hyperactive and electrifying comedy, it is Moore who gives "Dope" its big heart.

Name : Jordan Hoffman / Alias : New York Daily News
The tone is fast and funny, with a modern "Risky Business" or "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" vibe, but there's an additional layer that stems from the violence of the neighborhood.

Name : Mark Feeney / Alias : Boston Globe
"Dope" is too smart and lively to be dismissed. It's even original in its mixing of ingredients, however unoriginal those ingredients may be. But it's also unfeeling and, beneath its in-the-hood surface, as much a bit of artifice as a Wes Anderson movie.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
A fantastical, slight, and occasionally fun, hip hop-scored romp.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Dope's biggest strength lies in its affectionate and honest portrait of a different kind of young urban blackness than we're used to seeing on movie screens.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
I doubt The Gunman will do much to advance Penn's foray into action-hero bankability, and that's probably a good thing. He's too fine an actor to be mired in nonstop shootouts while flashing his pecs and looking scowly.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Mr. Penn, aiming for weary, battered intensity, settles into a zone somewhere between fatigue and indigestion.

Name : Jocelyn Noveck / Alias : Associated Press
OK, we've seen the biceps and the abs. Very nice. Now, back to the brain.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
Watching Penn pump iron and denounce capitalism for two hours would be roughly as illuminating as this monotonous Euro-thriller.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It succeeds, partly because the moral climate it presents seems so confused, but mainly because of Penn's particular aura of irascible integrity.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Penn's need to be seen as a guy of integrity is left naked in The Gunman, but at least he's having some fun with the action-movie trappings, and with taking his shirt off.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
A dull, generic retread, made far worse by Penn's self-seriousness as an actor, by the banal political pieties he's grafted on as producer and co-writer, and by the presence of a pitifully retrograde female lead role.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
The actors are good and the action is thrilling. And if the film isn't quite as seriously political as I'm guessing Penn told himself it was, it's definitely an offbeat change of pace for us.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Whatever else we might think of Sean Penn's bid for an active middle age via The Gunman, we can't doubt his enthusiasm.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The kind of film that can't be bothered to do any more with its Spanish setting than have a showdown at a bullfight.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
"The Gunman" may start as a genre exercise of promising purpose, but it winds up being just a lot of bull.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Part of the contract that movies of this sort forge with moviegoers is that the reasons for all the running and gunning won't get in the way of the action. "The Gunman" doesn't play by those rules.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
I object to The Gunman because it's unconvincing and incoherent.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
The Gunman is too disorganized and sloppy to make sense as political commentary or to work on the most basic level as a globe-trotting chase thriller.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
If the film's intent is to condition the audience into a distaste for violence through boredom, it succeeds.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Penn and his fellow actors are fine at conversation, but there are more dialogue-driven subplots here than a movie full of bullets and land mines requires.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
A lightweight thriller posing as a heavy political drama, or vice-versa. Not thoughtful and no fun.

Name : Andrew Lapin / Alias : NPR
A dum-dum action picture that briefly pretends to be about world aid before returning to muscular, middle-aged men beating the snot out of each other.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Obviousness prevails.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Penn remains a furiously committed method actor, even in a paycheck role such as this one. But he's not enough to prevent the film from becoming the same-old.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
What begins and ends as an exploration of Western exploitation of the Congo mostly follows the standard track of the retired hit-man who realizes that he hasn't quite yet eluded the sins of the past.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Unfortunately, nobody ever won an Oscar for washboard abs. And nobody is going to win five seconds of admiration for 115 minutes of tedium in The Gunman.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
A well-executed thriller that leaves us stirred but not shaken.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Yes, there are plot holes aplenty, but the action is tautly staged by Morel and that makes "The Gunman" a satisfactory time-passer.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
I can imagine Sean Penn agreeing to star in this Taken knockoff on the condition that it educate moviegoers about humanitarian crises in Africa; it does, but the film feels misshapen as a result.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
Too often feels like just another slice of brainless Eurotrash, packed with saw-it-coming plot twists, half-hearted car chases and an angsty hero with zero charisma.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
There's a grubby, redemptive quality that makes this tough-minded flick feel like the son of "Serpico" and "Salvador."

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
"The Gunman" is a predictable slog through action-movie tropes, and Penn's intensity isn't a good fit.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
I've pretty much always enjoyed watching Penn in everything, not despite of his hambone tendency to milk every moment of every shot but because of it. This stupid movie is no exception .

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
The Gunman degenerates into dreary setups for guns and gore. Penn merits more. So do we.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The only redeeming feature about The Gunman is its exotic locations.

Name : Guy Lodge / Alias : Variety
Sadly, Penn's veiny, sweat-glazed biceps are the most objectively impressive feature of this rote, humorless thriller, a distinctly unconvincing attempt to refashion the star . as a middle-aged action hero in the Liam Neeson mold.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Rarely, though, have two Academy Award-winning actors been so stunningly off the mark in the same movie.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
It's a tasty cast, but the script does not do its job in crucial areas, letting the audience get way, way out ahead of the reveals.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Penn is dour and not the least bit heroic in this movie. He survives the action sequences but neither they nor his participation in them gets the blood pumping.

Name : Tony Hicks / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
It devolves into a mess of worn plot lines. If Morel wanted to give Penn's career new life as a world-weary action hero, he missed his target.

Name : Leslie Felperin / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Ultimately this feels like a vanity project designed to do for Penn's bankability, Africa, Spain and mercenaries what the Taken franchise did for Liam Neeson, Paris and Albanian gangsters.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
Like a queasy blend of Still Alice and The Bourne Identity.