Name : Tony Hicks / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
The sheer force of Straight Outta Compton steamrolls its flaws. Director Gray, who is from Compton and made a name for himself directing some of hip-hop's best music videos, has given us a movie that feels honest and urgent.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
Straight Outta Compton makes that same thudding power echo in the thrill of a fresh track and the first rhymes from five young men who changed the music landscape nearly 30 years ago.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
There's little to distinguish the movie from any number of overlong hit-by-hit music biopics of the nodding-approvingly-from-behind-a-mixing-console variety.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Director F. Gary Gray turns the meteoric rise and fractious fall of rap supergroup N.W.A. into a sprawling, exhilarating Los Angeles hip-hop epic.

Name : John DeFore / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
It does for the most part fulfill its mission, breathing life into the origin story of a group whose influence is still being felt.

Name : Kevin C. Johnson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The group members' stories are overly familiar to rap fans, as are portrayals of the big bad music industry in general, but that doesn't take away from the film's dramatic tension.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
Like its subjects, the iconic late rap conglomerate N.W.A., F. Gary Gray's "Straight Outta Compton" starts out strong, peaks quickly, and then gets tangled in complications and compromise and falls apart.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
The core of the story is business, the object is power, and the quirks of desire and twists of the unconscious are given no place in the struggle-which the movie sharply carries ahead to the present day.

Name : John Swansburg / Alias : Slate
While no one will mistake this for a protest film-there are too many pool parties-the movie's portrait of a militarized police force all too eager to assault young black men can't help but resonate in our own moment.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
This movie burns so hot that it's bound to run out of steam. It does. But what stands is an amazement, an electrifying piece of hip-hop history that speaks urgently to right now.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : ChristyLemire.com
It's very easy to imagine sing-along showings cropping up for years to come.

Name : Donnell Alexander / Alias : TIME Magazine
Despite Straight Outta Compton's energetic acting and Gray's capture of in-studio Eureka! moments, it never manages to transcend biopic hagiography .

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
"Straight Outta Compton," F. Gary Gray's biopic of pioneering gangsta rappers N.W.A., manages to feel urgent and alive, even as it plays like the coolest episode of VH1's "Behind the Music" ever.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
It's clear what producers Ice Cube and Dr. Dre are most interested in: the money.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
There's way too much inside-baseball money talk here, when a simpler plot - one about a band whose apocalyptic vision comes to pass - would have been plenty.

Name : Tom Horgen / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
In the small pool of big-budget hip-hop biopics, "Straight Outta Compton" is near the top.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
A sprawling, overstuffed, formulaic but highly entertaining story of pop stardom and its discontents in which the pioneers of gangsta rap are burnished to a high mythological gloss.

Name : James Rocchi / Alias : TheWrap
Underneath the gunshots and the battle raps, "Straight Outta Compton" is a fairly conventional movie about a music group, somewhere between hero-making and the honest truth.

Name : Jim Farber / Alias : New York Daily News
"Straight Outta Compton" goes right to the heart of what made N.W.A. one of the most defiant groups of all time.

Name : Tyler Daswick / Alias : Chicago Reader
This movie about a group of risk-takers should have taken more risks itself.

Name : Peter Hartlaub / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Policemen, journalists who dislike rap and Suge Knight will find little to enjoy in this movie - all are portrayed as villains with zero subtlety. But the film as a whole is critical of its heroes' mistakes.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
But as a depiction of a time and place, Straight Outta Compton - from its low-rider Chevys on hydraulics blaring hip-hop to police battering ram vehicles crashing into suspected crack houses - nails it.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
Director F. Gary Gray has too big a story to tell, enough for a TV miniseries (or a season's worth of Behind the Music episodes), and you can see him straining to cram everything in even as the film stretches to the two-and-a-half hour mark.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"Straight Outta Compton" ends up juggling more story lines and moods than it can handle.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
It's a story driven by classic tensions: struggle and triumph, division and conquest, group and individual.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
A riveting film about the birth of not just one rap group but an entire genre.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
Brashly winning and unapologetically self-serving.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Straight Outta Compton manages to keep its sharp teeth despite its adherence to form. The movie doesn't neuter N.W.A.'s story so much as mold it to a familiar model.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
Straight Outta Compton is so beholden to the appeasement of so many artists and legacies and estates that none of it coheres as a movie.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
As enlightening as it is entertaining, as sobering as it is exhilarating, "Straight Outta Compton" reminds viewers not only who N.W.A. were and what they meant, but also why they mattered - and still do.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
If you're like me, you'll forgive its more melodramatic cliches and just surrender to its raw, brass-knuckle force.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Jackson Jr. artfully evokes Ice Cube's tough-guy charisma. Mitchell's Eazy emerges as the film's most complicated figure, throwing his lot in with a manager who may not have his best interests at heart.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
There's a grittier, grimier story in here, but it needed a different script and probably a different director than the uncritical F. Gary Gray, whose resume is studded with old-school rap videos and Ice Cube projects.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Straight Outta Compton aims to cross cultures and sanctify the wisdom of the street-to make a universal underdog story. It succeeds on a visceral level.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
One of the summer's most entertaining and provocative movies .

Name : Scott Tobias / Alias : NPR
If any film should be forgiven its excesses, it's Straight Outta Compton, which is about the clashes and camaraderie among men whose unruliness sparked a cultural moment that was beyond their ability-and their willingness-to contain.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
The casting in Straight Outta Compton is universally pitch perfect, including brief cameos by Keith Stanfield as Snoop and Marcc Rose as Tupac that are fantastically spot on.

Name : John Semley / Alias : Globe and Mail
Straight Outta Compton functions as both a compelling, damnably topical political statement and a slickly produced piece of commercial art.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
An explosively entertaining biopic about the hip-hop group that brought gangsta rap into the mainstream of popular culture in the 1980s.