Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
As silly and sometimes nonsensical as it is, the movie is surprisingly sweet and well-intentioned.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
Jon M. Chu, who directed the concert doc Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, maintains a lively pace, and there's some cute business involving a robot that communicates through music.

Name : Neil Genzlinger / Alias : New York Times
It seems to be merely tossing ideas into the pot that it thinks might appeal to 9-year-olds.

Name : Patrick Dunn / Alias : Detroit News
Hardcore fans won't find much of the Jem they loved under the movie's achingly hip millennial trappings, while young newcomers will be left wondering what a robot has to do with a rock band.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
Its one saving grace is that Chu's direction is so wildly inconsistent that it manages to produce a handful of genuinely gorgeous images alongside all of the cruddy ones.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
Director Jon Chu stretches "Jem" to a ridiculous 2 hours, via endless amateur-musician YouTube clips. Anyone can be a star, they attest - and always be yourself! (Except when you're Jem. I guess.)

Name : Rebecca Keegan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
In revisiting the pop rock quest of a multiracial group of adopted sisters in suburban California, Chu has made a stylish and self-aware musical fantasy for the YouTube generation.

Name : Molly Lambert / Alias : Grantland
What it lacks in humor it makes up for in sheer weirdness - it's a master class in How Did This Get Made? It feels focus-grouped to within an inch of its life, but it's so strange that it's impossible to imagine what process led us here.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
Jem has lost her outrageousness and gained a robotic sidekick in an overlong, low-budget big-screen reboot of the 1980s toy-selling cartoon series.

Name : Geoff Berkshire / Alias : Variety
The film seems inexplicably embarrassed by its roots, instead serving up half-baked and self-consciously contemporary drama that no one in the sure-to-be minimal theatrical audience will remember quite so fondly some 30 years on.

Name : Scott Tobias / Alias : NPR
Jem and the Holograms is Mac and Me to Josie and the Pussycats' E.T.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
The movie's poky and confused, never clearly setting up its conflicts and blowing far too much of its running time on a National Treasure clue-hunt for messages Jem's father programmed into a sassy dancing robot.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
After a few crackling, resonant digital-age scenes in the opening act, the filmmakers settle in and make Jem into a mediocre Disney Channel movie - with, for no good reason, a pet robot.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Even though I wish the songs themselves were stronger, there's an energy and a vibrancy to the movie that its young target audience will appreciate.

Name : Julia Cooper / Alias : Globe and Mail
There's hardly tension, barely any drama and the sugar high you might expect from an eighties redux is replaced by a dull aspartame buzz.

Name : Frank Scheck / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Not being part of the generation that watched the show, I can't vouch for its merits. But it's safe to say that it must be miles ahead of this wan, bloated screen version which forgoes the original's sci-fi and thriller aspects.

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.