Name : Edward Douglas / Alias : New York Daily News
The type of edge-of-your seat thrills promised by its commercials, but also takes you into far darker territory than anticipated.

Name : Eric Kohn / Alias : indieWIRE
The ending leaves room for a sequel, but it's not just a half-baked teaser. As with all strong horror stories, the conclusion of one dangerous scenario feeds the fear of more to come.

Name : John DeFore / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A trapped-in-a-house thriller pitting thieves against an unexpectedly resourceful victim, the lean and mean pic offers scares aplenty and at least a couple of game-changing twists.

Name : Dennis Harvey / Alias : Variety
A muscular exercise in brutal, relentless peril.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
Writer-director Andrew Bujalski appreciates a grimy basement as much as he does a wide-open highway, and he aims for a slice-of-life tapestry. But he should have simply let Corrigan slouch into nirvana.

Name : Abby Garnett / Alias : Village Voice
Bujalski knows how to reveal the immaturities and hangups people hide behind money, ambition, and the pursuit of a better body.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Sharply funny slacker comedy.

Name : John DeFore / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A perfectly chosen cast sells this unhurried comedy, which flows unconventionally but is still, by a long stretch, the most mainstream-friendly picture Bujalski has made.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
What happens when a rigorously non-mainstream filmmaker tries to reverse-engineer a mainstream romantic comedy? The result, in all its charming perversity, is "Results."

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Not a whole lot happens, but you get to know an interesting trio, and leave them feeling satisfied that it was time well spent.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
A week in the outback without a cellphone would be better than Results.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
Somebody needs to give Andrew Bujalski a TV series. If "Results," his unlikely but delightful new film set in and around an Austin fitness studio run by hard-bodied Guy Pearce, were a TV pilot, I would be hooked on the show already.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
This droll, intelligent farce is most poignant as a portrait of modern alienation that explores how money, service work and self-improvement leave individuals stranded and alone.

Name : Ella Taylor / Alias : NPR
You'd expect Bujalski, who made Beeswax and Computer Chess and a couple of other extreme indies, to poke fun at gym culture, the ultimate soft target. And he does, but sweetly and without disparagement .

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
"Results" is a smooth transition for Bujalski from the fringes to more commercial work. It's heartening that he didn't give up his calling-card observational humor to do it.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
With Bujalski, this is business as usual, but by the standards of the contemporary indie rom-com, it's refreshingly unpredictable and thoughtful.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
Like Bujalski's early mumblecore work, this is sensitive and meandering - and just a little bit patience-testing.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
One of the strangest and strongest of recent romantic triangles forms in the course of this lyrical, fanatically realistic comedy, written and directed by Andrew Bujalski.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
There's an absurdist edge, but with nothing of the smart aleck about it. Rather than use wit as a way of bypassing thought and emotion, Bujalski's concerns are serious and his attitude toward his characters is warm without being indulgent.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
A movie like this feels like a dream challenge for an actor. It lives and dies not sheerly by the writing and the direction of the script, but by the cast's organic adherence to both.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
Bujalski crafts a quirky romance with fitness-industry comedy Results, shaping flawed characters into people you might just admire.

Name : Michael Rechtshaffen / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The rom-com isn't such a lost cause, after all. It was just waiting for someone like indie filmmaker Andrew Bujalski to resuscitate it.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Only toward the end do you realize that the characters have been arranged into a pleasing and familiar romantic-comedy triangle and that you've been watching a beautifully played game of underhand slow-pitch screwball.

Name : James Rocchi / Alias : TheWrap
A startlingly enjoyable and well-made action film leavened by humor and slicked along by style, made by, for, and about people who've seen far too many Bond films.

Name : Sheri Linden / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Firth enters new territory with style and grace, anchoring a smart, high-energy movie that eventually runs out of steam.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
Whether it's "Alex Rider," "Agent Cody Banks" or "Spy Kids," plenty have tried to adapt the 007 shtick to younger characters, with demonstrably dopey results. In the end, the reason it works for Vaughn is that he's making the film for adults.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Right or wrong, "The Homesman" belongs to Jones and Swank, and for Western aficionados it's worth seeing.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
If only things had started out on more solid ground and headed toward some sort of resolution. If only.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
There's a thrilling undercurrent of rebellion in the way this straightforward, seemingly old-fashioned Western takes up the feminist cause.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The development probably works in Glendon Swarthout's novel of the same name, where Swank is nowhere in sight. But not in the theater. You're tempted to give up on the movie because it feels as if the movie has given up on her.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
The film has more surprising turns than a honeycomb has bees. Absurdity and calamity collide without warning.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"The Homesman" may sound like a title conferred on a man, and George Briggs may be driving the wagon. But it is Mary Bee's persistence and prayers that carry the women, and the film, flawed as it sometimes is, home.

Name : Ella Taylor / Alias : NPR
The Homesman joins a stark, stripped-down beauty to a languid pace and a spare soundtrack to create an ambience that reeks of loneliness and alienation.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
A film that looks at first glance like a conventional Western but goes to unusual places.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Everyone has a favorite Tommy Lee Jones performance. Until now I didn't have my least favorite, but "The Homesman" provides it, and is ruined by it.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
A wrenching, relentless and anti-heroic western that stands among the year's most powerful American films. Not everyone will like "The Homesman," but if you see it you won't soon forget it.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
Integrity and personality can go a long way, especially in a movie as unquestionably flawed as The Homesman.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
Certainly, there is a sturdiness to it, and a stubborn want of haste, that might have earned an approving growl from John Ford.

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : Time Out New York
It doesn't help that Swank never finds a way into this highly unappealing character, or that Jones (mostly phoning in the pitiable surliness) avoids delving very deeply into the story's proto-feminist undercurrents.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Swank and Streep are big stars with famous faces, and yet disappear into their roles; these characters convey both quiet strength and gentle kindness.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
"The Homesman" is both a captivating western and a meticulous, devastating feminist critique of the genre.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
As the protagonists near their final destination, The Homesman offers a critique of civilization that's almost as pessimistic as its critique of frontier life, suggesting that in every corner of America there have always been more losers than winners.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Title and director notwithstanding, Tommy Lee Jones' "The Homesman'' is very much a feminist Western - one painting a vivid picture of how difficult it was for even a strong and determined woman to survive in frontier days.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Swank, an Oscar winner for "Boys Don't Cry" and "Million Dollar Baby," is outstanding, getting to the essence of Mary Bee's pride and pain. And in the showier role, Jones impressively peels away layers of rambunctiousness to reveal George's humanity.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Few will regret having seen "The Homesman," and yet it's not exactly an enjoyable experience.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Parts of The Homesman are a slog to sit through, but the movie ends on a note of absurd comedy that also breaks your heart, suggesting that some people, no matter the circumstances, are incapable of change.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
For a movie headlined by two Oscar-winning Hollywood stars - and directed and co-written by one of them - "The Homesman" is awfully close to outsider art.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
An absorbing, melancholy look at the hard lot of women in the Old West.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
The melancholic balance isn't always quite right and the momentum wanes when it should be gaining.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The Homesman aims for a story that's poignant and told sparely, but comes across as mawkish, tedious and self-indulgent.

Name : Jordan Hoffman / Alias : Film.com
If this is a revision to the revisionist westerns ushered in by "Unforgiven," I'll stay back East(wood.)

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
Some recent interviews with Jones paint him as a bit of a curmudgeon. But he's right to push back against being put into a box. "The Homesman" succeeds mainly because it and he don't neatly fit into one.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
This fem-centric Western from actor-director/co-writer Tommy Lee Jones walks the tightrope between comic and tragic. Jones and Hilary Swank ignite combustibly.

Name : Pete Vonder Haar / Alias : Village Voice
Glendon Swarthout's 1988 novel offered a rare approach to . Old West stories by shifting the focus to the women and children who often bore its brunt the worst, and Jones has - for the most part - successfully captured this .

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
"Tommy Lee Jones' riveting Western is bleak and very nearly misanthropic, but it's also passionate, earthy, unpredictable, sensitive, and gloriously distinct."

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
A strange, and beautiful movie, full of odd touches - a knife fight in the middle of a desolate wasteland, a gravestone made from a bed's headboard, a piece of embroidery that stands in for a much-missed keyboard - that haunt after the film's done.

Name : Geoff Pevere / Alias : Globe and Mail
It's as stubbornly and cantankerously eccentric as both its wagon drivers, not to mention driven to blaze its own trail through the narrative and mythological landscape of America's defining story form.

Name : John Anderson / Alias : Newsday
Wanders along the lonesome trail, then heads off into the underbrush.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
The Homesman is a western hard and true, one that probably comes closer to depicting the hardships of frontier life than any number of more conventional oaters.

Name : Jon Frosch / Alias : The Atlantic
Jones continues to craft evocative, painterly images, and he takes real risks with tone, shifting from tragic to comic without the usual cues or transitions.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
While the film is bathed in a beautiful magic-hour glow courtesy of cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, Jones' journey doesn't quite take off.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
At a certain point, The Homesman will take you by surprise. By the end . it will take your heart.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
I was impressed with how Jones's uncomfortable mixing of tones in the first half of the film gave way to something more elegiac and evocative by the end.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
Unlike other actor-directors, Jones never seems to indulge excess on the part of his cast. Though the characters are strong, the performances are understated.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
A grand, shocking saga of a movie, The Homesman is the kind they don't make much anymore.