Name : Joe Leydon / Alias : Variety
Like most if not all faith-based entertainments, "Where Hope Grows" embraces the idea that God works in mysterious ways. But it also insists that God helps only those who help themselves.

Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Director Chris Dowling should have taken another swing at his script for the sake of clarity and dimension before cameras rolled.

Name : Neil Genzlinger / Alias : New York Times
Not to be flip, but "Where Hope Grows" has the potential to be a decent inspirational film until God shows up.

Name : Michael Nordine / Alias : Village Voice
Writer-director Chris Dowling handles [the] worrisome premise with a more even hand than this genre's ill-advised predecessors .

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
"Where Hope Grows" wears its heart on its sleeve, hawking its message of salvation through faith to anyone who's in the market for cheesy uplift and saccharine sentiment.

Name : Ethan Sacks / Alias : New York Daily News
After a first act that seems to promise a biting comedy, the film gets lost in the desert - literally and figuratively.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
A "Death of a Salesman" for the out-sourcing era, A Hologram for the King makes full use of Tom Hanks' default note, an everyman struggling painfully against the tide.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The problem is not that anything on screen is troubling, it's that nothing there, not even star Tom Hanks, is capable of holding our interest or attention for very long.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
If it sounds like Hologram is basically about a middle-aged white guy getting his groove back in the Middle East, well, yes, it is that. But if you squint hard enough, it's also a little bit more.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
The tone and rhythms are pushy, forced, strained, like the expression on Hanks' face. What should be casual punctuation, filmed in medium shot, ends up in bam-pow close-ups.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Not even the mighty Tom Hanks can save this scattershot adaptation of Dave Eggers' lost-soul novel

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : Village Voice
It may start with a big burst of energy, but this is a sad, somber film about a world that's slowly, knowingly losing touch with the real.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
Director Tom Tykwer (Cloud Atlas), who also adapted the screenplay from Dave Eggers novel, displays a fine eye and a light touch with cultural detail, and isn't nearly as harsh on his hero as he might have (ought to have?) been.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
It's true that not much happens - except cinema at its finest.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Writer-director Tykwer skillfully presents a series of fantastical scenes in a way that has us thinking: Sure, that could happen. This is quite simply a beautiful film to behold.

Name : Nick Allen / Alias : RogerEbert.com
Here's a reasonably-sized star vehicle that finds exciting purpose in presenting an existential crisis.

Name : Sheri Linden / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The focus on the way individuals adapt to and defy custom is one of the smartest aspects of the film.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Here's a case of consistently miscalibrated tone, from the first clumsy stabs at humor to the hero's default expression, which is painfully pained.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
You always trust Hanks, and he makes this "Hologram" feel real.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
It looks expensive and comes off bland.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
It takes an actor with the finesse of Tom Hanks to turn a story of confusion, perplexity, frustration and panic into an agreeably uncomfortable comedy.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
This film is surprisingly sweet.

Name : Michael Nordine / Alias : TheWrap
Even when A Hologram for a King rests on shaky narrative ground (which is often), Tykwer's confidently frenetic presentation and a host of surreal grace notes lend it a sense of urgency that keeps us on our toes, if not the edge of our seats.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
It's that rare fish-out-of-water story in which the fish miraculously manages to stop needing water, and learns to crave air instead.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It's not entirely free of stereotypes or sentimental moments. What it is, though, is amazingly likable.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
It's a sweet, deliberately meandering movie, and it took me a while to connect with it. But it won me over because ultimately it conveys so well that feeling of estrangement that is both terrifying and comic for any farflung traveler.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
An earnest but aimless-feeling adaptation of Dave Eggers' novel.

Name : Kate Taylor / Alias : Globe and Mail
You have to wonder what this film would feel like if a darker figure, a Robert Downey Jr. or Edward Norton, for example, had been cast in the lead role.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Tom Hanks exerts such a gravitational force in his movies, sometimes to his detriment, it's fascinating to watch him struggle for equilibrium in Tom Tykwer's A Hologram for the King.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
This stranger-in-a-strange-land mood piece has an appealingly serene pace.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
I guess I'll have to read the Dave Eggers novel to figure out what this thing is about.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
It's hard to imagine a more Tom Hanks-y setup than this.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Quiet existential irony, albeit diluted and distorted, still reverberates in this stranger-in-a-strange-land story.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Starring Tom Hanks and directed and written by Tom Tykwer ( Cloud Atlas, Run Lola Run), it veers from dark comedy to drama to buddy movie to romance without being particularly successful at any of them.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
To describe this as a movie about a mediocre businessman biding his time before an appointment probably makes it sound more exciting than it is.

Name : Tom Russo / Alias : Boston Globe
It's like an international-relations microcosm imagined by the Coen brothers, down to an occasional sense that the absurdity isn't taking us anywhere.

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : AV Club
A Hologram For The King is a 97-minute movie that feels like it was cut down from two-hours-plus, with whole subplots reduced or jettisoned in what was likely an arduous post-production period.

Name : Tony Hicks / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
"A Hologram for the King" is disappointing mostly in that it could have been been better. But that doesn't make it bad.

Name : Eric Kohn / Alias : indieWIRE
It's Eggers minus Eggers - a whimsical tale that aspires to make its whimsy count for something deep.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
The movie conjures no shortage of potent images, but push a bit deeper and your fist closes on empty air.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It's a strange thing: A Hologram for the King is mostly about a series of nuisances, annoyances and stresses, and yet it's a pleasure from beginning to end.