Name : William Goss / Alias : Film.com
Survival horror has rarely been approached so sparingly and yet, for all there is to admire. the initial sense of potential suspense gives way to the creeping contempt of familiarity.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
In just a few scenes, Hopkins conjures up some sorely needed fizz. But the low-key vibe of the film doesn't match the high-stakes audacity of the crime.

Name : Noel Murray / Alias : AV Club
While Kidnapped doesn't add anything substantially new to the tradition, Vivas hits his marks with ruthless efficiency.

Name : David Rooney / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Gripping but grueling, this Spanish debut feature scores on technical prowess but its nihilistic viciousness is hard to take.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
My eyes never left the screen and my attention never wandered; in a restricted, technical sense of the term, "Kidnapped" is a masterpiece.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Anthony Hopkins and a cast of erstwhile next-big-things go slumming in Daniel Alfredson's listless, fact-based kidnapping caper.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
The utter lack of surprises and waste of a first-rate cast - Anthony Hopkins as Alfred "Freddy" Heineken; Jim Sturgess and Sam Worthington as kidnappers - make for a tremendous letdown.

Name : Trevor Johnston / Alias : Time Out
One capably staged chase sequence apart, it's not one to set the pulse racing.

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : AV Club
Much like the lager that gives the film its name, Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is bland on the palate and best pissed away.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
Swedish director Daniel Alfredson pushes the caper button too many times. More sly wit would have helped things come to a head.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
In 1983, five knuckleheads decided to strike it rich by kidnapping beer magnate Freddy Heineken. "Kidnapping Mr. Heineken" is a dull, trite thriller about their crime and undoing.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Fairly enjoyable and credit is due to its sterling cast, led by Anthony Hopkins as Heineken .

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Anthony Hopkins plays the king of the hops, and he is excellent. So is the rest of the movie, a sober, no-frills account about the highest ransom ever collected up to that time-$10 million and counting.

Name : Liz Braun / Alias : Toronto Sun
The real-life kidnapping had all the elements of a thriller, so how it became such a mild-mannered movie is anybody's guess.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
Some kind of napping for sure.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
The true story of Freddy Heineken's kidnapping is fascinating, but "Kidnapping Mr. Heineken" is a disappointingly superficial film in which neither the kidnappers nor their captives are particularly interesting.

Name : Robert Abele / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Despite its true-events pedigree, "Kidnapping Mr. Heineken" is woefully captive to B-movie crime saga tropes.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
The sole object lesson in the true-crime drama "Kidnapping Mr. Heineken" is that not every crime deserves its own movie.

Name : Geoff Pevere / Alias : Globe and Mail
Not only is Hopkins's Freddy incomparably more charismatic than any of his captors, he's the only one who, weirdly enough, seems to be enjoying the ordeal. But maybe that's simply a matter of pay scale.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
Starting as a coldly realistic thriller, this film eventually loses its bearings as the director Miguel Angel Vivas succumbs to a fit of nihilism, transforming "Kidnapped" into gruesome tit-for-tat torture porn.

Name : Aaron Hillis / Alias : Village Voice
Glossy, lifelessly paced .

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Heineken may be weighed down by the predictable reality of actual events. Or it just may be lacking in electricity and depth. Either way, it's lacking.

Name : Nick Pinkerton / Alias : Village Voice
As most of Kidnapped is devoted to watching people in extreme duress, leaving room for little else, it follows that the film exists solely to be "intense."

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
One of the best and most courageous films of the year.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
"12 Years a Slave" offers no false Hollywood catharsis along with its muted happy ending, because we're not free from the curse of slavery yet. Looking at it, as it really was, is a start.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The power of McQueen's movie is in its declaratory style: This happened. That is all, and that is everything.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
"12 Years a Slave" lays out an institution so twisted and wrong that its honest portrayal has been avoided for centuries. Yes, it's dark and brutal. It needs to be.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
You won't be able to tuck this powder keg in the corner of your mind and forget it. What we have here is a blistering, brilliant, straight-up classic.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
A brutally powerful and emotionally devastating film that takes great pains to rip any lingering vestiges of romanticism from America's most shameful institution.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Channeling the evils of human bondage through the experiences of one weary figure, McQueen has constructed another intensely physical character study about a man trapped in his own flesh.

Name : William Goss / Alias : Film.com
Northup's story was a true, terrible thing, and by virtue of telling it, the burdens of all American slaves are unflinchingly realized by Ejiofor and McQueen alike.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, written by John Ridley and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a necessary corrective to the antics of Django Unchained, not to mention Mandingo and its ilk.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
A harrowing, unforgettable drama that doesn't look away from the reality of slavery and, in so doing, helps us all fully, truly confront it.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
McQueen doesn't go in for a lot of flash edits or self-conscious visual flourishes to put viewers at ease; rather, he invites the audience to sit with him as he gazes, amazed, at man's inhumanity to man .

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
In the epic form of 12 Years a Slave, his most approachable, emotional film, McQueen escalates the tension.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
Brave performances throughout this magnificent film.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
The film is both brutal to watch and stunning to contemplate, powerfully challenging audiences - particularly white audiences - to examine their consciences.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
It speaks to the courage and resilience of one man, the savagery of many, and the potential, for both good and for ill, in us all.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
This epic account of an unbreakable soul makes even Scarlett O'Hara's struggles seem petty by comparison.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
When a director who never ever blinks takes on a horrific subject, a nightmare in broad daylight is the inevitable result. Welcome, if that is the right word, to the world of 12 Years a Slave.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Slavery is revealed for the unrelenting horror that it was. About time.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Other movies and books have gone here, but few so far and with such overwhelming clarity of purpose.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Believe the Oscar buzz. Britain's Steve McQueen (Hunger, Shame) nails the horror of America's slavery shame but also finds humanity in one man's determination to free himself and return to his family.

Name : David Thomson / Alias : The New Republic
It is a film that necessity and education demand seeing.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
But the much talked-about 12 Years a Slave is more than a beautifully shot art piece. It's history made violently real.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
12 Years a Slave is likely the most painful, clear-eyed feature ever made about American slavery. In that light, it almost seems faint praise to add that it will also likely prove to be the best film of the year.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A strong, involving, at times overstated telling of an extraordinary life story.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
It seems certain to transcend the movie realm and become a new reference point in contemporary culture-a defining vision of what slavery looked like, and felt like, in the U.S. before the Civil War.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The film offers a formidable indictment of the cruelty of which human beings are capable.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
It's smashingly effective as melodrama. But McQueen's directorial voice-cold, stark, deterministic-keeps it from attaining the kind of grace that marks the voice of a true film artist.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Aside from a characteristically nuanced lead performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor. it's a picture that stays more than a few safe steps away from anything so dangerous as raw feeling.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
"12 Years a Slave" isn't easy to watch, and it shouldn't be; it's one man's tragedy, but it's also the tragedy of countless thousands of souls beaten down, literally and metaphorically.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
12 Years a Slave is a movie about a life that gets taken away, and that's why it lets us touch what life is.

Name : Jocelyn Noveck / Alias : Associated Press
The film truly belongs to Ejiofor, whose big, soulful eyes seem to register so many things at once: Shock, pain, grit, determination, abject despair at times, cautious hope at others - and always, dignity.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The harrowing 12 Years a Slave is a mesmerizing period drama for the ages.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
It is Ejiofor - bewildered, sorely tested, morally towering - whose staggered dignity anchors the film.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
The genius of 12 Years a Slave is its insistence on banal evil, and on terror, that seeped into souls, bound bodies and reaped an enduring, terrible price.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
The cumulative emotional effect is devastating: the final scenes are as angry, as memorable, as overwhelming as anything modern cinema has to offer.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
"12 Years a Slave" works on so many levels - some topical, some timeless - that it's almost impossible to count them.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
This is not medicine for America to swallow; it's filmmaking of the highest caliber.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
A film this good, and this quietly distinctive in its style, is always welcome.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
If the best films hold you in a captive vise, entertain you, keep you spellbound and teach you something at the same time, then 12 Years a Slave is outstanding-brave, courageous and unforgettable.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
So overpowering is this film's simple, horrible, and almost entirely true story that it's hard to get enough distance on 12 Years a Slave to poke at its inner workings.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
12 Years a Slave is easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
It's not too soon to call 12 Years a Slave a great film-ruined, tremulously sad, surreal in its evil.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Every scene of 12 Years a Slave, and almost every shot, conveys some penetrating truth about America's original sin.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Remarkable.

Name : Michael Sragow / Alias : Orange County Register
One of the finest historical movies ever made.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
12 Years a Slave is at times difficult to watch but always impossible to turn away from.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
12 Years a Slave, British director Steve McQueen's antebellum Southern drama, sets a new standard in realistically depicting American slavery.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Slavery here is not only a great moral darkness but a sweeping canvas for depicting the emotional deformities of the people who enforced and exploited the practice.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It provokes recognition in us of the very heart of darkness. It makes the unimaginable imaginable.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
McQueen and Ridley seem determined to obliterate any lingering Gone With the Wind-inspired notions that the antebellum South was a place of grace and charm, or that slavery was, in the euphemism of the day, merely a "peculiar institution."