Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
It's a gritty, confident portrait of a man whose life may have been somewhat messier than this Hollywood version.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
This movie is drowning in duty - to say nothing of hoary storytelling devices and one embarrassing scene after the next for Sienna Miller as Mrs. Kyle.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
There's no freshness in either the domestic scenes or the combat sequences.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Though it never uses the term "PTSD," American Sniper, at its best, is a devastating portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Mr. Eastwood's film lets this good and anguished man speak for himself, and discover himself, at his own pace.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
Both a devastating war movie and a devastating antiwar movie, a subdued celebration of a warrior's skill and a sorrowful lament over his alienation and misery.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
It's clearly Cooper's show. Substantially bulked up and affecting a believable Texas drawl, Cooper embodies Kyle's confidence, intensity and vulnerability.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Less a war movie than a western - the story of a lone gunslinger facing down his nemesis in a dusty, lawless place - it is blunt and effective, though also troubling.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
Just as only Nixon could go to China, only Clint Eastwood could make a movie about an Iraq War veteran and infuse it with doubts, mission anxiety and ruination.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
American Sniper lifts director Clint Eastwood out of the doldrums that have plagued his last few films.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A taut, vivid and sad account of the brief life of the most accomplished marksman in American military annals, American Sniper feels very much like a companion piece-in subject, theme and quality-to The Hurt Locker.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
The best movies are ever-shifting, intelligent and open-hearted enough to expand alongside an audience. "American Sniper," Clint Eastwood's harrowing meditation on war, is built on this foundation of uncommon compassion.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
After 40 years of Hollywood counterpropaganda telling us war is necessarily corrupting and malign, its ablest practitioners thugs, loons or victims, "American Sniper" nobly presents the case for the other side.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Eastwood's impeccably crafted action sequences so catch us up in the chaos of combat we are almost not aware that we're watching a film at all.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
American Sniper is imperfect and at times a little corny, but also ambivalent and complicated in ways that are uniquely Eastwoodian.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
As a piece of direction, it's as taut as anything [Eastwood's] ever done.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Clint Eastwood has directed war movies before, but never one that focused on a single warrior. And he has an amazing one here .

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Cautiously, Eastwood has chosen to omit Kyle's self-mythologizing altogether, which is itself a distortion of his character. We're not watching a biopic.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Bradley Cooper, as Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, and director Eastwood salute Kyle's patriotism best by not denying its toll. Their targets are clearly in sight, and their aim is true.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
This harrowing and intimate character study offers fairly blunt insights into the physical and psychological toll exacted on the front lines, yet strikes even its familiar notes with a sobering clarity .

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The film's just a repetition of context-free combat missions and one-dimensional targets.

Name : Preston Jones / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
But the adrenaline can't replace perception, and despite Eastwood's deft staging of the Iraqi scenes, they don't bring viewers any closer to understanding why Kyle insists on repeatedly returning to the war zones.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Cooper nails the role of an American killing machine in Clint Eastwood's clear-eyed look at the Iraq War.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
"The result is not unlike watching a suspenseful but highly repetitive video game, especially since nearly every Iraqi is seen through Kyle's highly perched rifle scope."

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Anderson, as always, knows exactly what he's doing with the camera. Scenes are often staged in the haze of smoke or fog; sometimes characters are introduced late into the frame, or action happens just out of it.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
A huge relief, as if a giant gas bubble had finally, with great effort, reached the surface of the pond with a cathartic blurp.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
As with Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, the director has created another vivid Los Angeles, one that doesn't lean too hard on its pop-culture references to TV's Adam-12 or Neil Young's gentle Harvest album.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Offers a only a pale and narrow physical recreation of such a vibrant place and time.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
Too often, the film gets distracted with things to giggle at, and breaks the spell.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
At first glance, Inherent Vice might seem to be a detective story. Look a little closer, however, and it becomes clear that this is Paul Thomas Anderson's idea of a comedy.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
There are, of course, two ways to experience Inherent Vice: with the brain on or the brain off. Both work. The latter is a good time, the former more illuminating.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Makes Howard Hawks' legendarily confusing 'The Big Sleep' look like a model of narrative coherence.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
"Inherent Vice," meandering even by Anderson's standards, is easily the worst of his movies, a soporific 2 /₂- hour endurance test.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Inherent Vice, brilliantly scored by Jonny Greenwood, is an Anderson head trip, impure jazz with a reverb that can leave you dazed, confused and even annoyed. But at no time do you doubt that you are in the hands of a master.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Since most of Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice was meant to be impenetrable, the best approach, as you watch it drift by, is to savor the dreamy images and druggy jokes and forget about penetrating the plot.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Mr. Anderson has condensed the book with surgical precision, ditching certain subplots, characters and locales while retaining the novel's sociopolitical tug, barbed asides and chokingly funny details.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
I can't wait to see it again.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Trying to pare back Pynchon without killing the joke was the challenge. Anderson has done a remarkable job of replicating the crazy kaleidoscope of crime, dope and raunch the novelist conjured.

Name : Ella Taylor / Alias : NPR
I love Anderson's ambition, but it is awfully hard to make a movie about a culture adrift that doesn't make its audience feel the same. Inherent Vice runs a punishing 148 minutes, not enough of which are funny or sad enough to hold us.

Name : Ben Kenigsberg / Alias : AV Club
The fact that perhaps 90 percent of the dialogue comes from Pynchon poses an authorship question that doesn't exist with Anderson's other movies. Still, the deftness with comedy and actors are at a level that few filmmakers working today could achieve.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Never quite transcending the sum of its agreeably disparate parts, IV is less groovy than gnarled and goofy, but in a studied way. Call it an acquired taste with a kinky savor.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Inherent Vice is half-baked Raymond Chandler. With too much emphasis on the baked part.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
Phoenix's extraordinary performance pulls the movie's infinite strands together. But this twisty tale takes so many foggy turns that you'll want to approach it with a plan.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
[P.T. Anderson] is a terrific stylist . and the scattershot pleasures he's peddling in 'Inherent Vice' may well satisfy those who like style more than substance, or maybe who like their style with substances.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
This "sunshine noir" bakes your brain, in a good way.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
[Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie] is a kind of companion piece to Altman's The Long Goodbye, and it's the sort of failure that only a director of his talents could make.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Anderson's seventh feature film is a groovy, richly funny stoner romp.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Think of it as a film that's meant to be experienced, more than fully understood.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
"Inherent Vice" is not only the first Pynchon movie; it could also, I suspect, turn out to be the last. Either way, it is the best and the most exasperating that we'll ever have.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
It's actually less coherent than Pynchon, no small feat. It's not shallow, though.