Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
You don't go to a del Toro movie for the story (he co-wrote this one with Matthew Robins) or even the characters. You go for his all-encompassing imagery .

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
This often entertaining film feels like a mish-mash of overfamiliar elements, falling way short in the wild, weird, what-the-f--was-that department.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
All the carefully orchestrated color schemes and all the dark corridors and secret chambers and all the flowing red metaphors in the world can't accelerate the slow patches, or make us care about lead characters.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
Aflame with color and awash in symbolism, this undeniably ravishing yet ultimately disappointing haunted-house meller is all surface and no substance, sinking under the weight of its own self-importance into the sanguine muck below.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Is it too much? Oh, yeah. But if you like this kind of thing, too much is never enough.

Name : Karen D'Souza / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
This haunted house flick has all the discipline and restraint of a Spirit Halloween store. Once the suspense is gone, all that's left is the blood spatter.

Name : Scott Tobias / Alias : NPR
For genre mavens, the experience is like witnessing the revival of a lost art form.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Director Guillermo del Toro's unique visual style is on display but the story is predictable, the characters are flat, and the supernatural elements are red herrings.

Name : Katie Rife / Alias : AV Club
Unsurprisingly for a Del Toro film, the production design is the real star of Crimson Peak.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
The old-fashioned good intentions of "Crimson Peak," like the house at the center of the film, quickly get swallowed up by puddles of bright red goo.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
For the two hours it lasted I wasn't asking any questions, only giggling, squirming, screaming, and swooning.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
"Crimson Peak" is more creepy than scary (despite a couple of gruesomely violent deaths), but del Toro's imagination blooms in every frame.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
Del Toro builds a tight plot but never develops it; his frames are overdecorated with macabre clutter and smothered in shadow, but the atmosphere of dread never reaches ecstatic excesses.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"Crimson Peak" is frustrating from nearly every angle. It lets the audience race ahead of the reveals, while struggling to put all that tantalizingly rich atmosphere to effective narrative use.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
A faithful homage to a foolish genre. The risk is that audiences who don't share that love won't appreciate the work, like the world's best cover band nailing obscure nu-metal hits

Name : David Sims / Alias : The Atlantic
Though Crimson Peak's tone is arch enough that it won't be for everyone, there's definitely a gory, beating heart at its core.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
[It's] certainly unequaled in its field for the beauty of its camerawork, sets, costumes and effects. But it's also conventionally plotted and not surprising or scary at all.

Name : Steve Tilley / Alias : Toronto Sun
It's not particularly creepy, nor all that emotional, nor even (deliberately) silly.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
The real wonder is the sumptuous production design by Thomas E. Sanders, whose darkly colorful sets were inspired by Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

Name : Jason Gorber / Alias : Globe and Mail
Guillermo del Toro's latest dive into the darkness is a sumptuous, beautifully constructed tale that feels both archaic and inviting.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
The film is too busy, and in some ways too gross, to sustain an effective atmosphere of dread. It tumbles into pastiche just when it should be swooning and sighing with earnest emotion.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Guillermo del Toro doesn't merely direct movies. He paints them, dreams them, shapes them into private fantasies. Too much? Of course. But that's part of the fun.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
The insanely lush Gothic romance and ghost story plays like a hitherto unrecorded collaboration between Edgar Allen Poe, Edith Wharton, the designers of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion and whoever directed all those Bonnie Tyler music videos in the 1980s.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
As even [Del Toro's] last film, the kaiju monster movie Pacific Rim, proved, there may be no better conjurer of color in movies right now. His dreams, and nightmares, are in technicolor.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
At its worst, and best, "Crimson Peak" exists in a weird parallel world where very separate rules of logic apply. It's a true waking nightmare.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
Lurid and ghastly and immensely enjoyable and frequently spectacular and also thinner and less substantial than it wants to be, like a meal eaten in a dream.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
This often entertaining film feels like a mish-mash of overfamiliar elements, falling way short in the wild, weird, what-the-fuck-was-that department.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
The setting is spectacular, but its ghosts underwhelm. Kudos to del Toro for bucking the minimalist trend in spooky movies, but his Grand Guignol spirits are so visible they begin to resemble fun-house monsters.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
An extravagantly entertaining ghost story. Hiddleston could be our next Vincent Price.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Del Toro just goes for effect, and the effect he seems to be going for here is something like, "Ew, Guillermo, that's really gross."

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Crimson Peak is a fascinating conundrum of a movie. I was close to hating it as I walked out of the theater, but images and moments from it have stayed with me.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
A loving throwback to Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe movies and Hammer's gothic chillers from the '60s, Crimson Peak is a cobwebs-and-candelabras chamber piece that's so preoccupied with being visually stunning it forgets to be scary.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
This gothic horror opus is melodrama most foul, and I mean that in terms of concept and execution, as well.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Del Toro's creativity, the joy he finds in splicing together pieces of the movies and books and characters he loves, is hard to resist. This is a film that believes deeply in ghosts, and half of them are in its director's head.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
This over-crammed, disjointed, and lugubrious film is misconceived from the ground up.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : RogerEbert.com
If you liked "Frozen" but wish it had been angrier, "The Huntsman: Winter's War" is for you.

Name : Nick Pinkerton / Alias : Village Voice
A film that's considerably longer than it needs be, in which the evocative eloquence of storybook pictures is consistently garbled by the need to overexplain and psychoanalyze.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
A surprisingly fine, fantastic movie it is.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
The film has the DNA of a blockbuster and the soul of a haunting folk tale. It is as dangerous, dark, intelligent and beautiful as its wraithlike villainess.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : Village Voice
There's nothing in Huntsman to hold its pieces together. Everybody's acting up a storm, but nobody expresses any urgency or aspiration or desire - and, what's worse, none of those great actors have been given any memorable lines.

Name : Tom Russo / Alias : Boston Globe
The story loses direction like forest wanderers relying on a bread-crumb trail.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
When Snow rides into battle wielding a sword, you want to tell her to put that thing down before she pokes her eye out.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
Sanders makes all the mistakes of a neophyte filmmaker, but doing it with such a massive budget leads to a cinematic hodgepodge of fractured fairy-tale imagery, computer-generated menacing forests and gamboling, turtle-riding fairies.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Perhaps the best thing about "Snow White and the Huntsman" is it doesn't smirk at itself. It plays out as a story about mortality and greed and oppression in a fantastical world, but it doesn't act as if anything is silly.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It turns into a clangy medieval epic, full of random woodland monsters and battles, and it begins to lose the pulse of its fairy-tale mystique. It's like watching Clash of the Titans IV: Revenge of the Blood Apple.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : TIME Magazine
Gowns aside, this thing's a snooze: Events unfold tediously, and there are many scenes in which extras with dirty faces, playing demoralized townsfolk, mill about in a desultory fashion.

Name : Lisa Kennedy / Alias : Denver Post
Only Bob Hoskins as the blind seer Muir comes close to making us care. We can almost glean Snow White's heroic possibilities through his clouded eyes. As much as we'd like to, we certainly can't from Stewart's efforts.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
This "Snow White" is one of those revisionist fairy tales in which the princess takes control of her own destiny. A different actress might have been able to sell that, but Stewart can't.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
This is a film that doesn't even obtain mediocrity. This is the industrial-grade level of bad that only can be enjoyed by fans who watch films ironically for hipster laughs.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
I resisted this derivative mishmash of classic fairytale and modern epic fantasy for as long as I could, but ultimately it swept me up into its geeky but manly embrace and carried me away on a white charger.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
This incoherent screenplay seems to have been written by a roomful of the gorilla-like trolls who show up in the movie at one point.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
Vastly superior to Mirror, Mirror in every way. Great work from Charlize Theron.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
Witless, heartless and dull. Even the Twi-hards are going to want their money back.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
As befits the modern fairy tale, there isn't so much a happily ever after as there is the promise of another sequel. Or prequel. Or whatever they come up with to take the Snow White concept to the bank one. more. time.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
It serves as both a talent-squandering prequel and sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, while doing nothing more than name-check Snow White.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Sampling Tolkien, Disney, and Grimm, The Huntsman: Winter's War lays on the pastiche in slabs, but no one is slouching here.

Name : Tom Charity / Alias : CNN.com
Theron gives the picture some spine. As Snow White, Kristen Stewart supplies the heart.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
A slow, boring film that has no charm and is highlighted only by a handful of special effects and Charlize Theron's truly evil queen.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
Even the good bits lack zip and verve, and the bad bits leave you wondering why director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan (who did visual effects on the first entry) isn't doing more with the super-powered sibling rivalry that clearly sparks his interest.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Fails to realize the full potential of its ambitiously dark vision.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
A virtual orchard of toxic excess, starting with the unnecessarily sprawling cast of characters.

Name : David Sims / Alias : The Atlantic
When people gripe about Hollywood's reliance on sequels and cheap franchise cash-ins, this is the kind of movie they mean: no Grimm's Fairy Tale, but a grim tale nonetheless.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
As far as live-action reimaginings of fairy tales are concerned, this is one of the more inventive ones and is unquestionably better than 2011's Red Riding Hood misfire.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Overall, "The Huntsman: Winter's War" feels like a movie that didn't need making, but at least it justifies it existence.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
By cramming far too much material into 114 minutes, The Huntsman: Winter's War feels rushed and incomplete.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Some of the fairy tale effects are marvelous; but the odyssey from darkness to light is unduly long and sloggy, and Stewart, with her contemporary edge, seems to be acting in the wrong era.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Everyone here is punching a clock, or punching a blue screen, and everyone's glad when it's over.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Snow White and the Huntsman has a darkness that seeps into the soul - but it's also definitely a missed opportunity. Director Rupert Sanders loses his nerve just when the story starts cooking.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
At least now we have an answer to the question, "Who's the dullest franchise of them all?"

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : Time Out
The film . proceeds with a deliberateness rare in a big-budget franchise starter; you can sense the hand of coscreenwriter Hossein Amini (Drive) in the story's always involving, slow-build structure.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
After a while, you just sit back and let the thing wash over you, marveling and giggling as necessary.

Name : Andrew Lapin / Alias : NPR
There would be use for a properly dark Frozen retelling, more in line with the original tale, where the afflicted actually uses her power for malfeasance. But Freya is a snow day late and a dollar short.

Name : Jason Solomons / Alias : TheWrap
All fairly silly, but unfortunately the filmmakers don't quite realize it - along with banning love, decent gags seem to have been outlawed, too.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
It is an absolute wonder to watch and creates a warrior princess for the ages. But what this revisionist fairy tale does not give us is a passionate love - its kisses are as chaste as the snow is white.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
It's a dunderheaded follow-up, for sure, but it's at least buoyed by Chris Hemsworth's charisma and the few times where Winter's War embraces complete camp.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
There will be lots of versions of Theron's evil queen running around West Hollywood this Halloween; it's a performance that's one part Tilda Swinton to 30 parts Faye Dunaway, the sort of over-the-top craziness that spawns midnight screenings.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : New York Daily News
The film borrows plenty, but it brings nothing new.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
There needs to be urgency, shape, and emotional investment. In a word, a script. Otherwise, it's just a two-hour Vogue fashion shoot highlighted by Emily Blunt riding bareback on a polar bear.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
The only one who comes out of this odd pairing unscathed is Walt Disney, looking smarter than ever for boiling the tale down to its mythical essence way back in 1937.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : Associated Press
Astonishingly beautiful and breathtaking in its brutal imagery, Snow White & the Huntsman is thrilling and frightening in equal measure, yet as bereft of satisfying substance as a poisoned apple.

Name : Leslie Felperin / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Great costumes can't quite compensate for a lackluster concept.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
Feels like a Russian oligarch has thrown a 'Game of Thrones' party and hired his favourite Hollywood actors to come in fancy dress.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
There is a decent movie buried in here somewhere, but with such powerhouse actresses, it's dismaying that it feels so regressive from the first.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
The movie's revisionist tone is startlingly enough to carry you along.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Is this movie trying to be "Excalibur" or "My Little Pony"?

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
Really, Winter's War is superior to its predecessor in almost every way, with better pacing, funnier dwarves, a less overcast tone, and vastly more goblins.

Name : Tasha Robinson / Alias : AV Club
Huntsman feints at being the Snow White retelling no one has ever seen before, but ultimately becomes the "been there, done that" of fairy-tale filmmaking.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A bold rethinking of a familiar old story and striking design elements are undercut by a draggy mid-section and undeveloped characters in Snow White and the Huntsman.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
Snow does earn top billing, but don't be fooled: This film belongs to the Oscar-winning Theron, who sinks her talons into the killer part, making every snarl and outburst such wicked, cruel fun to behold.

Name : Bill Zwecker / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
[A] less-than-satisfying if occasionally entertaining fantasy romp that does feature some of the more talented actors on the planet.

Name : Brian Lowry / Alias : Variety
Handsome but hollow.

Name : Rebecca Keegan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Nearly every major character dies and comes back to life at least once and a convoluted narrative yields not a single, palpable moment of drama.

Name : Rick Groen / Alias : Globe and Mail
There are many splendid reasons to see Snow White and the Huntsman - enough, maybe, not to care that neither Snow White nor the Huntsman rank high among them.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
"Snow White and the Huntsman," a solemn but mostly savvy rewrite, is a welcome upgrade.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
Sanders does not (yet) share Guillermo del Toro's gifts, but he, too, has an eye for the beautiful and the grotesque, and for that entrancing borderline where the two meet.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
At its best, "Snow White and the Huntsman" feels less like a desperate blockbuster and more like a handmade object.

Name : Bruce Kirkland / Alias : Toronto Sun
The Huntsman: Winter's War is as beautiful as its macho lead actor Chris Hemsworth is handsome. The movie is also as vacuous, silly and boring as Hemsworth is awkward and awful in the title role.

Name : Roger Ebert / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
"Snow White and the Huntsman" reinvents the legendary story in a film of astonishing beauty and imagination.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
"Snow White and the Huntsman" never quite delivers on its promise - a dark retelling of the fairy tale in which women hold the true power, good and evil - but it certainly is an attractive misfire.

Name : Caitlin Moore / Alias : Washington Post
While the funny, action-packed sequences are the best parts, they are indicative of the film's main problems: an inability to focus and an overly complicated plot.

Name : Mary F. Pols / Alias : TIME Magazine
Rare among the recent fairy tale adaptions (from Mirror Mirror to the dreadful Red Riding Hood) the invigorating Snow White and the Huntsman actually breathes new life into an old story.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
The script lifts so much plot from Disney's animated Frozen that it could qualify as a remake. No one sings "Let It Go," but my advice to audiences is to do just that.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
There is something exciting about how seriously "Snow White and the Huntsman" takes its themes.

Name : Scott Bowles / Alias : USA Today
Stunningly shot and inconsistently acted and written, Snow White has enough visual fireworks to keep the film afloat, even if star Kristen Stewart can't get out of Twilight mode.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
"The Huntsman" is a flabby mess - yet another sequel with no reason to exist.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Every resonant theme or intriguing story possibility is stripped away and replaced with a ready-made franchise-movie conceit.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
The director sets a heart-pounding pace, pausing only for such interludes as Snow White's encounter with seven dwarfs who could not be more distant from their Disney forebears.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
[It] all feels like serious, pay-attention-now, schoolroom stuff - Shakespeare without the poetry, "Braveheart" without the performances.

Name : Glenn Kenny / Alias : MSN Movies
This slightly overstuffed entertainment rises, in part thanks to [Hemsworth], to one of the most pleasant surprises of the summer movie season so far.

Name : Mara Reinstein / Alias : Us Weekly
Charlize Theron is offscreen for a full hour, presumably reading better scripts.

Name : Linda Holmes / Alias : NPR
What dooms Snow White and the Huntsman is ultimately not how over the top it is, but how dull it is.

Name : Guy Lodge / Alias : Variety
Doubled-up diva-tude, however, can't ignite a rhythmically flat, seemingly committee-helmed franchise outing that never decides on its dramatic center.

Name : Kate Taylor / Alias : Globe and Mail
Freya is given the barest veil of a backstory while Ravenna just oozes ribbons of black bile (literally) for her own evil reasons. These women may be strong but they are never deep.