Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
"Cafe Society" meanders a bit . But because it's from a veteran comedian and filmmaker, it also has some smart jokes, and beautiful images.

Name : Bill Zwecker / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
It's a beautiful thing to behold.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
As in many of Allen's period comedies, the dialogue sounds completely modern and evokes the era only in its endless name-dropping.

Name : Megan Garber / Alias : The Atlantic
For all its beauty and its star power, the movie never elevates to anything beyond a kind of storyboard sketch.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
With each succeeding year, Allen's insular version of the past feels more eccentric. Depending on the viewer, it's either happily reassuring or strangely out of touch.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It isn't a particularly great Woody Allen movie. Nor is it a particularly disappointing one. It falls into the vast middle ground on his resume - the movies you enjoy sitting through, but quickly forget once the lights come up.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Romantic, bittersweet and funny as hell, Cafe Society turns Hollywood inside out, rooting through the superficial tinsel to find the real tinsel. You go away gobsmacked, beaming and happy to be both.

Name : Alison Willmore / Alias : BuzzFeed News
It's a film that covers several years and relationships but comes across like a rambling anecdote being told by someone who keeps skipping over the interesting parts.

Name : Glenn Kenny / Alias : RogerEbert.com
It's the filmmaking around the writing that casts a particular spell. Particularly near the end, as Allen adds up the moral failings and squelched desires and doused dreams of all his characters.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
"I'm kind of half-bored, half-fascinated," Eisenberg tells his bro over the long-distance line, and the sentiment could also apply to the movie - although Storaro's sumptuous cinematography makes even its mundane moments enchanting.

Name : Joe Dziemianowicz / Alias : New York Daily News
Woody Allen's easy-to-like but lightweight "Cafe Society" serves up just you'd expect from the seasoned writer and director.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Neither especially funny nor particularly dramatic, but appealing enough in its handsome melancholia to create the phantom impression of Allen firing on all cylinders.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Cafe Society, is intermittently lovely and melancholic.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Allen narrates in a voice that, for the first time, suggests his 80 years of age. But his touch lightens with each film, and the melancholy bubbles up from below and catches you off guard.

Name : Kate Taylor / Alias : Globe and Mail
Cafe Society is mainly a small and unnervingly familiar private drama that is never funny enough nor smart enough to justify its anachronistic style.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : MTV
The film is so retro golden that old-timey miners would run the reels through a sieve.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
In the best sense, "Cafe Society" presents itself as an older director's film, dealing as it does with the difference between dreams and reality and the presence and persistence of regret.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
It's handsome, and pleasant, and polished, and sedate. You won't laugh or cry. You may, however, smile or sigh.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Variety
The movie, watchable as it is, never quite overcomes the sense that it's a lavish diagram working hard to come off as a real movie.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A small fiction of amiable appeal and vibrancy which goes down as easily as a fizzy cocktail.

Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
Watching this film feels like listening to a formerly great pianist whose fingers are now gnarled with arthritis. The notes are right, and played in the correct order, but the tempo is way, way off.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
Woody Allen has made 46 films, of which I've seen 46, and I'm not sure which of us is more tired of them.

Name : Mark Feeney / Alias : Boston Globe
It's about '30s glamour and swank. More accurately, it's about nostalgia for those things. Either way, it's not about characters or chemistry or anything much resembling emotion.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : Village Voice
Lovely visuals, terrific performances, renewed ambition: There's enough good in Cafe Society to make it worth your while - and also to make you wish it were better.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
A love story drenched in nostalgia, "Cafe Society" is a film of rare beauty.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"Cafe Society" is a good-looking nothing, but there are times - thanks more to Allen's direction than his writing, and thanks mostly to the people acting out the masquerade - when "nothing" is sufficient.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
"Life is a comedy written by a sadistic comedy writer," Bobby quips. Cafe Society, on the other hand, is a comedy written by a benumbed one.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Mr. Allen's literal voice, which supplies narration, sounds unusually sluggish and weary. The same is true of his voice as a writer and director. For every snappy scene or exchange there are three or four that feel baggy and half-written.

Name : Eric Kohn / Alias : indieWIRE
Aided by an anxious Jesse Eisenberg and the gently expressive Kristen Stewart, "Cafe Society" works about as a well as a decent-but-not-great Allen movie can.

Name : Will Leitch / Alias : The New Republic
Replacement Level Allen. There are pleasures to be found. But you have to look a little harder than usual.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
A pretty, rambling, minor distraction.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
If it doesn't reach the heights of Woody's best - 2013's "Blue Jasmine" was his last great film - it still has several rich touches, including a luminous performance by Kristen Stewart.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Allen is confident that he can skip scenes, shift locations and more or less take his audience anywhere he wants, so long as he's entertaining, and in this he's right.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
The film doesn't totally upend Allen's notion that L.A. is a seductively shallow place that has to resort to celebrating the ability to make a right turn on red to feel better about itself. In Cafe Society, it just looks so gorgeous while doing it.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
There is a gravity to it, and a tug of sadness, that cannot be accounted for by the story.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
The whole film feels charmingly insubstantial, just as it's meant to, with beautiful settings, amusing people and, for philosophical context, a classic Woody Allen one-liner.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Buoyed by the nuanced performances of Stewart and Eisenberg, the 80-year-old Woody Allen creates a ravishing romance shot through with humor and heartbreak.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Woody Allen's new period piece is no match for "Midnight in Paris," but the fine cast and bittersweet themes carry the day.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Maybe Woody Allen waited too long to make "Cafe Society"; it seems, weirdly, to be an uninspired remake of itself.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
It'll probably never make it into anyone's list of the 10 most-important Allen films. But I'd watch it again over a few movies that would.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Stewart is irresistible here. Allen is a legendary director of women, and Stewart's performance is shockingly good, awards-caliber work.

Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
What a pleasure to see a simple, finely tuned dramedy about real adults with real emotions in a real-life situation.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton have unexpectedly great chemistry in this warm and funny comedy about a couple who contemplate leaving a walk-up apartment in Brooklyn they've occupied for their entire 40-year marriage.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
The duo provide a bit of wit and warmth amid the contrived subplots and the self-satisfied moralism.

Name : John Anderson / Alias : Newsday
A couple of pros, playing attractive characters in an amiable yet topical story.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
"5 Flights Up" is far from perfect, but it's also undeniably touching.

Name : Pete Vonder Haar / Alias : Village Voice
What starts as a somewhat charming - if prosaic - story of love in the time of gentrification inexplicably spends most of its third act mired in the finer points of apartment hunting, like a tastefully lit HGTV show.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : RogerEbert.com
What begins as a sweetly sentimental story ends up being cloyingly melodramatic.

Name : Isabella Biedenharn / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Based on Jill Ciment's wry novel Heroic Measures, the film is at its best when it sticks with the everyday .

Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
If 5 Flights Up is worth seeing, it's primarily for the pleasure of Keaton and Freeman's company, plus maybe for some tips on buying and selling an apartment.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
The lead performances are so perfectly in sync that Alex and Ruth really feel like an old married couple who know each other's foibles and cherish every tic.

Name : John Hartl / Alias : Seattle Times
The movie ends just as you expected it to end, and there are almost no surprises along the way.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Sometimes you see a play and you can imagine it being a movie. Sometimes you see a small movie like this, and you can imagine it working better as an intimate stage play.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
It's good to see first-rate artists devoted to a film that doesn't pander to an unsophisticated audience with a thirst for violence and smut.

Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
5 Flights Up is a sweet film with a few nicely turned lines, some good jokes, and some very lovely dialogue. But it's not much more than fluff and air.

Name : Gerry O / Alias : Kid First
From the story line, it may seem that this film will be boring to kids. But, when I started watching this film I fell in love with it. Morgan Freeman's perfect timing of jokes and Diane Keeton's wonderful and priceless emotions make this film entertaining and heartfelt from the very start to the last second. It is a bit hard to say what the main genre is. Of course, there is a lot of romance between the two characters, Alex (Morgan Freeman) and Ruth (Diane Keeton), there is also that funny side that makes it all that more enjoyable. And, there is still a serious dramatic side which keeps you on the edge of your seat till the end. The story starts when an elderly couple, Ruth and Alex, live in a high up, massive apartment in New York City, Brooklyn actually. However, the five flight of stairs they need to take is getting more and more challenging so they decide to move to a location with an elevator. To add to the challenges, their dog is in the hospital undergoing treatment for spinal injury. The director, Richard Loncraine makes this movie feel authentic and rustic and also shows how current society stereotypes elderly people, how they truly feel about it and how wrong it is. The cast is wonderful and the acting is just superior with serious and comedy scenes mixed together and standing out all the time. I also like how they lightly touch upon problems of the past as well as problems of today. For example, Ruth and Alex got married in a time when bi- racial couples were not welcomed with open arms. Then it shows how today a gay couple is making an offer on a house. They submit it along with a note telling how they tried to adopt a child and finally were able to adopt one. It is something Ruth and Alex wanted to do when they were younger but were denied. My favorite scene is when they have an open house to sell their apartment and a huge crowd of people comes through, looking at everything and touching everything. Alex doesn't like it but Ruth tries to see the positive side but fails. I like that scene because it shows how the couple's life isn't perfect and also makes the film feel very real. Not only this moment does that but many others as well. This film has perhaps several moments of adult content but none that is too mature. I recommend it to kids ages 10 to18 and give it 5 out of 5 stars.

Name : Graham Fuller / Alias : New York Daily News
Diane Keaton and Morgan Freeman are pleasantly entertaining in "5 Flights Up." But the movie's far too pleasant for far too long.