Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
Feels like a sixth-form production of the Bourne series.

Name : Leslie Felperin / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
It ends up playing like a shoddy blend of V for Vendetta and Mr. Robot but without the budget bandwidth or style of either.

Name : Guy Lodge / Alias : Variety
It's Watkins' lean, keen instinct for choreographing and cutting action set pieces that keeps "Bastille Day" afloat.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
Phoenix's extraordinary performance pulls the movie's infinite strands together. But this twisty tale takes so many foggy turns that you'll want to approach it with a plan.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
There are, of course, two ways to experience Inherent Vice: with the brain on or the brain off. Both work. The latter is a good time, the former more illuminating.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Since most of Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice was meant to be impenetrable, the best approach, as you watch it drift by, is to savor the dreamy images and druggy jokes and forget about penetrating the plot.

Name : Ella Taylor / Alias : NPR
I love Anderson's ambition, but it is awfully hard to make a movie about a culture adrift that doesn't make its audience feel the same. Inherent Vice runs a punishing 148 minutes, not enough of which are funny or sad enough to hold us.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Think of it as a film that's meant to be experienced, more than fully understood.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
[Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie] is a kind of companion piece to Altman's The Long Goodbye, and it's the sort of failure that only a director of his talents could make.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
[P.T. Anderson] is a terrific stylist . and the scattershot pleasures he's peddling in 'Inherent Vice' may well satisfy those who like style more than substance, or maybe who like their style with substances.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Trying to pare back Pynchon without killing the joke was the challenge. Anderson has done a remarkable job of replicating the crazy kaleidoscope of crime, dope and raunch the novelist conjured.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
It's actually less coherent than Pynchon, no small feat. It's not shallow, though.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Anderson, as always, knows exactly what he's doing with the camera. Scenes are often staged in the haze of smoke or fog; sometimes characters are introduced late into the frame, or action happens just out of it.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
Too often, the film gets distracted with things to giggle at, and breaks the spell.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
I can't wait to see it again.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Offers a only a pale and narrow physical recreation of such a vibrant place and time.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Never quite transcending the sum of its agreeably disparate parts, IV is less groovy than gnarled and goofy, but in a studied way. Call it an acquired taste with a kinky savor.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Mr. Anderson has condensed the book with surgical precision, ditching certain subplots, characters and locales while retaining the novel's sociopolitical tug, barbed asides and chokingly funny details.

Name : Ben Kenigsberg / Alias : AV Club
The fact that perhaps 90 percent of the dialogue comes from Pynchon poses an authorship question that doesn't exist with Anderson's other movies. Still, the deftness with comedy and actors are at a level that few filmmakers working today could achieve.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
As with Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, the director has created another vivid Los Angeles, one that doesn't lean too hard on its pop-culture references to TV's Adam-12 or Neil Young's gentle Harvest album.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Inherent Vice is half-baked Raymond Chandler. With too much emphasis on the baked part.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
This "sunshine noir" bakes your brain, in a good way.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Makes Howard Hawks' legendarily confusing 'The Big Sleep' look like a model of narrative coherence.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
A huge relief, as if a giant gas bubble had finally, with great effort, reached the surface of the pond with a cathartic blurp.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Anderson's seventh feature film is a groovy, richly funny stoner romp.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
"Inherent Vice" is not only the first Pynchon movie; it could also, I suspect, turn out to be the last. Either way, it is the best and the most exasperating that we'll ever have.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
"Inherent Vice," meandering even by Anderson's standards, is easily the worst of his movies, a soporific 2 /₂- hour endurance test.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
At first glance, Inherent Vice might seem to be a detective story. Look a little closer, however, and it becomes clear that this is Paul Thomas Anderson's idea of a comedy.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Inherent Vice, brilliantly scored by Jonny Greenwood, is an Anderson head trip, impure jazz with a reverb that can leave you dazed, confused and even annoyed. But at no time do you doubt that you are in the hands of a master.