Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
A striking portrait of addiction that doesn't say anything new - drugs are bad, kids - but it leaves a lasting and chilling impression.

Name : Danny King / Alias : Village Voice
Together, the images and the sounds turn Harley's reality into a pulverizing grind from which escape is barely even a distant thought.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
There's never a false moment.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
All this desperation and squalor reeks of authenticity.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
Even if you don't know the place used to be called Needle Park, Josh and Benny Safdie's extraordinary indie will put you in mind of that 1971 NYC classic. It may even become one itself.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
For much of the movie, [the Safdies] keep the camera discomfitingly close to the characters, blurring out the background and immersing us in their telescoped world.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Holmes has a face that reveals everything and nothing. Besides being strikingly photogenic, she's a natural.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It's just a portrait of emptiness, but it feels a lot like the real thing.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
I'm glad I saw this film; considered on its own merits, in terms of what I understand as its artistic goals, it's a wrenching and finely wrought piece of work.

Name : Barry Hertz / Alias : Globe and Mail
Although the film is raw, intense and even beautiful at times, the queasy knowledge of how it all came together constantly threatens to uproot any artistry.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Fans of the cinematic street poet Larry Clark (Kids, Bully) might go for this, though the unexpected moments of dignity and compassion that deepen his characters are in short supply here.

Name : Nicolas Rapold / Alias : New York Times
At the very least, the directors, Josh and Benny Safdie, have created a small, beautiful classic of street theater by rendering these public disputes within a vibrant Manhattan setting through ingenious photography.

Name : David Rooney / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
It also helps that Holmes, Jones and Duress, as well as the mainly non-actors in secondary roles, all inhabit their characters with real conviction.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Obeys many conventions of the genre, trying its best to plunge viewers into a world that, while seemingly liberated of bourgeois proprieties, is actually a narrowly constricted prison of desperation and need.

Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
One junkie story tends to be much like another, so give brothers Josh and Benny Safdie credit for crafting one that's genuinely distinctive.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Heaven Knows What feels like an authentic, sometimes painfully accurate portrait of life in New York City as experienced by the homeless, ever-hustling teenagers.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Heaven Knows What quickly obtains an oddly charming rhythm, a sense of eavesdropping on sometimes unlikable, but fully realized, social outsiders.

Name : Michael Rechtshaffen / Alias : Los Angeles Times
When going for gritty realism, it doesn't hurt to have your lead actress essentially playing herself.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
By the end of Heaven Knows What, you see Ilya's fragile, unguarded soul through Harley's eyes, and the film's discordances sound like the music of the spheres.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
Heaven Knows What [has] a backstory precisely as fraught as what happens on screen. And that's pretty fraught.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
New York-based brothers Josh and Benny Safdie look past Manhattan's glossy surfaces to reveal an underworld of homeless young heroin addicts hidden in plain sight.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Unpleasant moral ambiguity is served boiling hot in this drug-poisoned love story.

Name : Melissa Anderson / Alias : Village Voice
It centers on electrifying newcomer Arielle Holmes as a homeless junkie named Harley, a character largely shaped by the performer's own extremely recent past.

Name : Sophie Gilbert / Alias : The Atlantic
Its finest and most moving moments are when Lipstadt and Rampton go to Auschwitz on a research mission, where the camera lingers on the piles of rubble that cover a destroyed gas chamber.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Another illuminating performance by Rachel Weisz and a brilliant screenplay by the distinguished British playwright David Hare make Denial one of the most powerful and riveting courtroom dramas ever made.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : New York Daily News
There are people today who will claim that all opinions are equal; that facts are boring; that there is no such thing as objective truth. "Denial" reminds us of what the verdict should be.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
With chatty urgency, Jackson dramatizes the 2000 trial in which a flinty Brit Holocaust denier sued Penguin Books for libel.

Name : Farran Smith Nehme / Alias : New York Post
The movie sneers at the journalists covering the trial, but for those of us who followed it at the time, the newspaper accounts were a lot more engrossing than this film.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Tom Wilkinson is brilliant as always as the barrister who takes on the case, complicated by England's labyrinthine libel laws. But there's too little actual tension in the climactic courtroom drama.

Name : Deborah Young / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A compelling, true courtroom drama touches on the lingering pain of the Holocaust.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
You wonder if the material would have been more effective as a courtroom procedural adapted for the stage.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
The jury remains out on this one.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
"Denial" is carried less by the normal theatrics of courtroom dramas than a staunch sense of duty to protect the truth. It's an argument for the patient, methodical dismantling of fools.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Variety
The crucial thing missing is what should be the essence of a courtroom drama: our immersion in how Lipstadt's lawyers stake out their strategy.

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
As an actual procedural narrative, the film is only passably interesting, afflicted with the kind of stop-start rhythms endemic in movies that compress a legal battle spanning years into a two-hour movie.

Name : Eric Kohn / Alias : indieWIRE
This isn't a debate, it's a sledgehammer; it's not inherently compelling drama, but it's immensely satisfying catharsis to watch as it flattens Irving's nonsense into nothingness.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Because Hare's script grapples with serious themes and singular events whose ramifications are still being felt, it is effective when it counts.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : TheWrap
The film is talky and well-mannered, which are not usually the highest of compliments. But it works.