Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
An extravagantly entertaining ghost story. Hiddleston could be our next Vincent Price.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
"Crimson Peak" is more creepy than scary (despite a couple of gruesomely violent deaths), but del Toro's imagination blooms in every frame.

Name : Jason Gorber / Alias : Globe and Mail
Guillermo del Toro's latest dive into the darkness is a sumptuous, beautifully constructed tale that feels both archaic and inviting.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
You don't go to a del Toro movie for the story (he co-wrote this one with Matthew Robins) or even the characters. You go for his all-encompassing imagery .

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"Crimson Peak" is frustrating from nearly every angle. It lets the audience race ahead of the reveals, while struggling to put all that tantalizingly rich atmosphere to effective narrative use.

Name : Karen D'Souza / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
This haunted house flick has all the discipline and restraint of a Spirit Halloween store. Once the suspense is gone, all that's left is the blood spatter.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
All the carefully orchestrated color schemes and all the dark corridors and secret chambers and all the flowing red metaphors in the world can't accelerate the slow patches, or make us care about lead characters.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
The real wonder is the sumptuous production design by Thomas E. Sanders, whose darkly colorful sets were inspired by Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
The insanely lush Gothic romance and ghost story plays like a hitherto unrecorded collaboration between Edgar Allen Poe, Edith Wharton, the designers of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion and whoever directed all those Bonnie Tyler music videos in the 1980s.

Name : Scott Tobias / Alias : NPR
For genre mavens, the experience is like witnessing the revival of a lost art form.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
Lurid and ghastly and immensely enjoyable and frequently spectacular and also thinner and less substantial than it wants to be, like a meal eaten in a dream.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Del Toro's creativity, the joy he finds in splicing together pieces of the movies and books and characters he loves, is hard to resist. This is a film that believes deeply in ghosts, and half of them are in its director's head.

Name : Steve Tilley / Alias : Toronto Sun
It's not particularly creepy, nor all that emotional, nor even (deliberately) silly.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
A loving throwback to Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe movies and Hammer's gothic chillers from the '60s, Crimson Peak is a cobwebs-and-candelabras chamber piece that's so preoccupied with being visually stunning it forgets to be scary.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
This gothic horror opus is melodrama most foul, and I mean that in terms of concept and execution, as well.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
Aflame with color and awash in symbolism, this undeniably ravishing yet ultimately disappointing haunted-house meller is all surface and no substance, sinking under the weight of its own self-importance into the sanguine muck below.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
[It's] certainly unequaled in its field for the beauty of its camerawork, sets, costumes and effects. But it's also conventionally plotted and not surprising or scary at all.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
The old-fashioned good intentions of "Crimson Peak," like the house at the center of the film, quickly get swallowed up by puddles of bright red goo.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
As even [Del Toro's] last film, the kaiju monster movie Pacific Rim, proved, there may be no better conjurer of color in movies right now. His dreams, and nightmares, are in technicolor.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Del Toro just goes for effect, and the effect he seems to be going for here is something like, "Ew, Guillermo, that's really gross."

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Crimson Peak is a fascinating conundrum of a movie. I was close to hating it as I walked out of the theater, but images and moments from it have stayed with me.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
Del Toro builds a tight plot but never develops it; his frames are overdecorated with macabre clutter and smothered in shadow, but the atmosphere of dread never reaches ecstatic excesses.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Is it too much? Oh, yeah. But if you like this kind of thing, too much is never enough.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
At its worst, and best, "Crimson Peak" exists in a weird parallel world where very separate rules of logic apply. It's a true waking nightmare.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
The setting is spectacular, but its ghosts underwhelm. Kudos to del Toro for bucking the minimalist trend in spooky movies, but his Grand Guignol spirits are so visible they begin to resemble fun-house monsters.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Director Guillermo del Toro's unique visual style is on display but the story is predictable, the characters are flat, and the supernatural elements are red herrings.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
The film is too busy, and in some ways too gross, to sustain an effective atmosphere of dread. It tumbles into pastiche just when it should be swooning and sighing with earnest emotion.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
A faithful homage to a foolish genre. The risk is that audiences who don't share that love won't appreciate the work, like the world's best cover band nailing obscure nu-metal hits

Name : David Sims / Alias : The Atlantic
Though Crimson Peak's tone is arch enough that it won't be for everyone, there's definitely a gory, beating heart at its core.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Guillermo del Toro doesn't merely direct movies. He paints them, dreams them, shapes them into private fantasies. Too much? Of course. But that's part of the fun.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
This often entertaining film feels like a mish-mash of overfamiliar elements, falling way short in the wild, weird, what-the-f--was-that department.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
For the two hours it lasted I wasn't asking any questions, only giggling, squirming, screaming, and swooning.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
This often entertaining film feels like a mish-mash of overfamiliar elements, falling way short in the wild, weird, what-the-fuck-was-that department.

Name : Katie Rife / Alias : AV Club
Unsurprisingly for a Del Toro film, the production design is the real star of Crimson Peak.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
More a series of similar events than a story, and lacks an underlying message except that torture hurts.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
This will be a tough film for some to take. But it also has strong appeal as an extraordinary survival story, and Laura Hillenbrand's first-rate book that inspired it has not been on the best-seller lists for four years for nothing.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It's moving, admirable, and occasionally exhilarating. What it's missing is the one thing that could always be counted on with Jolie as a star: the spark of danger.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
The truest testament to the film's strength is the degree to which it all but achieves greatness.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
This passion project for Angelina Jolie shines with her abiding love for Louis Zamperini and his courage under fire. In honoring Louis' endurance, she does herself proud.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
As a castaway story, a historical drama and a portrait of an Olympian turned soldier, "Unbroken" is a touching and important work.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Jolie has made a grand, solid movie of the Zamperini story, but O'Connell is the part of Unbroken that was truly worth the wait.

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : AV Club
Though Jolie is shooting for Christ-like passion and redemption, she only ends up slathering one man's very real, very morbid struggles in the usual reductive "greatest generation" sentiment.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
This great, tough-skinned movie can stand with the muscular action dramas that are a crucial part of American movie canon.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
An interminable, redundant, unnecessary epic devoted to suffering, suffering, suffering.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
Angelina Jolie's film as a director is a gorgeously shot and hardhitting old-school war drama - but still somehow fails to get under its subject's skin.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
A straightforward and entirely commendable story about the triumph of the human spirit, etc.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
A bit embalmed in its own nobility, it's an extraordinary story told in dutiful, unexceptional terms, the passionate commitment of all involved rarely achieving gut-level impact.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
A good 45 minutes of the movie consists of showing Louis getting beaten up, then healing; getting beaten up, then healing, over and over.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
A tale of endurance, "Unbroken" takes endurance to sit through.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Despite its many impressive elements, "Unbroken" plays incomplete and unbalanced.

Name : Connie Ogle / Alias : Miami Herald
The bigger problem is that neither Jolie nor the script bothers to flesh Louis out as a fully formed person with faults and fears and regrets, which keeps the film from ever capturing you emotionally.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Jolie is more fixated on gore than grace. In making us feel every crushing blow - the better to burnish her reputation as a serious director - we're shortchanged on the beauty of Zamperini's story

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Well-crafted and compelling, but director Angelina Jolie's best contribution was casting the unknown Miyavi in a pivotal role.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
In a well-made, but one-note film.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
Given its subject, it should have been great, but it turns out to be simply good.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"Unbroken" makes for a grueling experience, which is not quite the same as a memorable one.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
The film boasts both sheen and efficiency without always delivering an equivalent emotional impact. It's easier to be awed or impressed by it than moved.

Name : David Hiltbrand / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Unbroken is a fitting title for this excruciating cinematic treatment of the flyboy's ordeal. It plays like an endless, unrelieved gauntlet of suffering, an onslaught untempered by grace or redemption.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
Jolie hasn't done a disservice to Zamperini's life, but it's hard to know what she was trying to tell. It's Zamperini's story in fact and circumstance, but somehow, he feels like an enigma.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
You find yourself happy that this film exists, but wishing it were better.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Zamperini's life story is genuinely inspirational, but the movie seems fashioned as a standard-issue profile in courage.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
"Unbroken" is a rousing old-fashioned yarn with numerous exciting set-pieces and an uncomplicated hero you root for all the way through. It's entertaining throughout and made with a high level of technical skill.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Jolie gets the dirty/ennobling job done.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Handsome, alert and intensely focused, little-known English actor Jack O'Connell is a fine choice as Louis. And Japanese pop star Takamasa "Miyavi" Ishihara shines as "The Bird,' Louis' sadistic captor and war criminal in training.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
If nothing else, it's certainly better than the last time a good-looking Hollywood star decided to direct a movie about WWII. But the less said about George Clooney's The Monuments Men, the better .

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
If you can take it, "Unbroken" will lift you like the classics of adventure cinema.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
"Unbroken" stirs a moviegoer by default; it's an astounding story of human endurance that has been brought a little too safely to the screen.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
A beautifully shot, well-acted, and worthy-to-a-fault Second World War survivor story that only intermittently achieves the kind of emotional impact for which it aims.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
All the movie's tension comes down to whether Zamperini can withstand Watanabe's abuse, which is probably when it's helpful to forget the title.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Though O'Connell's vulnerable lead performance is terrific, Unbroken's unrestrained hero worship undermines the story.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
There's a lot to like about the movie. Its presentation is straightforward, chronicling Zamperini's amazing tale without flinching.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
One of the finest achievements of the 2014 film year.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
For Jolie, it's all about the suffering, without much meaning.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
It is a harrowing journey, and an inspirational one. But, as director, Jolie takes far too long to tell it, particularly in such a conventional manner.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
What the movie ends up in desperate need of is a sense of life made real and palpable through dreadful, transporting details, not a life embalmed in hagiographic awe.