Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
It's hard to tell how much time has passed between scenes, or just why, as the twists come, the characters would suddenly turn so dumb.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
Triple 9 imagines itself a sprawling, nihilistic epic, and it floats along for a while on the shoulders of its prestige filmmaking and cast, but ultimately the storytelling just isn't up to the task.

Name : Katie Walsh / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Hillcoat directs with a sense of immediacy and grimy realism, bringing the audience into the shootouts and bloodshed on the streets. Atlanta becomes another war zone for the men who have seen war, battling an enemy of a different race and culture.

Name : Liz Braun / Alias : Toronto Sun
Triple 9 races past in a blur of crime and action scenes, with plenty of violence and the odd spot of gallows humour to keep things interesting.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Hillcoat's approach is to craft a pulse-pounding experience that employs a mixture of conventional footage and hand-held work. There's an immediacy to the most gripping scenes.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The most impressive thing about Triple 9 is that it somehow manages to be both predictable and incoherent at the same time. Well, that and the fact that it manages to make half a dozen good actors look really lost.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
Though compelling in the acting and cinematography, Triple 9's plot is by the numbers and about nothing.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Triple 9 is no Reservoir Dogs, but it is a twisty, terrific ride. And Kate Winslet has a blast with the Russian accent, the wig, the attitude.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
John Hillcoat packs a binge watch of characters and incidents into this corrupt-cop thriller.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
[Hillcoat is] an expert in creating and sustaining gut-twisting tension. Good qualities all, but used here in the service of a story that is truly unappetizing.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
The slam-bang opening bank robbery and chase channels the best of Michael Mann from his Heat days. But Triple 9 soon bleeds out and becomes a perfunctory hodgepodge of other crime movies.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
There's a blue-chip cast running the gamut from A (Casey Affleck) to W (Kate Winslet) and terrific action sequences in Triple 9 - but in the end, this relentlessly nihilistic crime-caper thriller adds up to less than the sum of its impressive parts.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
The uneven thing [here] is John Hillcoat's direction: a tense, sustained journey through an apartment while lined up behind a bulletproof shield alternating with indulgent zooms and cuts depicting local color.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Matt Cook's maiden feature-length screenplay-something about dirty Atlanta cops being blackmailed by the Russian Jewish mafia-is so murky it leaves the whole cast looking tentative, if not defensive.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
If you're in the right frame of mind for a lurid, blood-soaked B-movie with an A-list cast, Triple 9 is just the ticket.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : New York Daily News
It's got everything except a real script. Or director.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Most parties concerned maintain their grim countenances, their characters struggling to find the sweet spot between honor and greed, between doing the right thing and doing the absolute worst.

Name : Tony Hicks / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
There are a lot of great actors here and surprisingly good action scenes and a tense ending, all of which make "Triple 9" one of the more enjoyable urban crime dramas in recent memory.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Although "Triple 9" was most likely just a paycheck film for all involved, its go-for-the-gut efficiency can't be denied.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
"Triple 9" doesn't exactly transcend its genre, but it definitely exploits it for all it's worth.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Hillcoat brings stray moments of style and surprise to "Triple 9" but not nearly enough to save it; for every twist you don't see coming, there are five you probably will.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Without much investment, one just sits back with increasing detachment and bemused curiosity as to where and on whom the next shoe will drop.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
"Triple 9" feels more like a collection of good scenes than a novel, propulsive whole. Viewers are apt to be entertained by the film's visceral pulp pleasures, but left apathetic when it comes to its instantly forgettable genre cliches.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Triple 9" is a superbly crafted film, the sort of big-screen roller coaster I admire even if its plot falters.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
If there's a police code it merits, it's a "10-22": "Disregard."

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
"Triple 9" is as heartless as the people who infest it-the exception being a decent cop, Chris Allen, played by Casey Affleck-and mannered to the point of self-parody.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
A miserable, misguided police drama that almost seems to hate the police.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
One of those productions in which much of the creative energy has been funneled into gaudily inventive displays of violence.

Name : Mark Jenkins / Alias : NPR
Cops prowl darkened mazes, looking for perps they probably couldn't see even if they found them.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Given the movie's bloody stew of greed and sadism, its unbalanced frames and ear-scraping soundscape, its moral tidiness can bring a smile to your otherwise appalled face.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
Tight, taut and brilliantly structured.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : MTV
#AllLivesMatter? Not here. Hillcoat wants us to admit the truth behind the robbers' callous calculation: Some people are worth more than others.

Name : Barbara VanDenburgh / Alias : Arizona Republic
The action is bracing, the twists sprightly, but the sum of its parts sits heavy, like a meal that won't digest.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Triple 9 is like a David Ayer film on steroids, which is to say it's like Training Day if most of the characters were as morally compromised as Denzel Washington's.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
A modern-day heist thriller of unusually grim, coiled intensity .

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
Jon Stewart's filmmaking debut "Rosewater" has much in common with "The Daily Show" - it's blaringly obvious, it's naive, it plays to the cheap seats and it's enamored with cheap jokes.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Rosewater" is a reminder that America may have its critics, but at least there's little danger of the average citizen being arrested for appearing on a fake news show.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The film goes slightly beyond rigorous earnestness and settles into a kind of stubborn atonement.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Stewart acquits himself solidly, though not thrillingly, as a beginning director .

Name : John Anderson / Alias : Newsday
Earnest, well-acted, less than urgent, but more than a vanity project.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Stewart does a credible job of maintaining the story's immediacy, but I must say I felt relieved that the film wasn't a masterpiece. If it was, we'd have more reason to fear Stewart will leave The Daily Show.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
In outline, Rosewater sounds earnest, one-note, relentless - something you'd watch out of a sense of duty. But it turns out to be a sly, layered work, charged with dark wit along with horror.

Name : Tomas Hachard / Alias : NPR
The result neither portrays the suffering of Bahari's incarceration adequately nor lampoons the absurdities of the situation.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
For a first effort, Stewart hasn't done a bad job. There's just the nagging feeling with "Rosewater" that a better movie was possible.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Though at times Rosewater is clearly the work of a first-timer still finding his voice, Stewart is indisputably a real filmmaker.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Mr. Stewart's interest in the material is obviously personal, but his movie transcends mere self-interest.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
A solid, powerfully acted political drama about human endurance in the face of ideological oppression.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Rosewater certainly has merit as an act of atonement on Stewart's part and a tribute to people like Bahari. In the end, however, the movie needs to stand on its own, apart from its noble intentions and the popularity of its writer-director.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Stewart does a solid job of handling the facts of the time; it feels true to the moment, like a filmed Newsweek story. Creative acting, dramatizedthemes, gifted cinematic styling? Not so much.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Rosewater is an earnest picture, but it's also got some juice - there's vitality and feeling in it, the secret ingredients so often missing from even the most well-intentioned first features.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
What makes "Rosewater" different from similar entries in what might be called the Triumph of the Imprisoned Spirit genre is that the hero is hardly an ideologue, despite having sympathy for the Iranian reformers and the Green party.

Name : James Rocchi / Alias : Film.com
"Rosewater" marks the debut of a director whose brains and guts are the equal or the better of his eye and heart .

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
This is Jon Stewart's directorial debut; the talk show comedian has a handle on the material and conveys it clearly.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Stewart's enthusiasm for his story and passion about injustice ring clear, but throughout what could have been a dreadfully somber film, he remembers to breathe.

Name : Jocelyn Noveck / Alias : Associated Press
A clear-headed, sensitive and thoroughly impressive directorial debut for the Comedy Central host.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
The virtue of this movie is its commitment to political ambiguity and emotional truth.

Name : Esther Breger / Alias : The New Republic
The main question Rosewater grapples with is whether Stewart can hack it as a filmmaker. The answer: sort of?

Name : Mary Houlihan / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
With Rosewater, Stewart proves he can pull back from the satirical comedy and become a thoughtful, incisive and questioning filmmaker.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
The hard-focus clarity of the images (Bobby Bukowski did the cinematography) leads to an intimacy with anguish that passes into expressionism.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
While the film keeps telling us that Bahari survived his ordeal by freeing his mind from imprisonment and eventually outsmarting his rosewater-scented interrogator, we are told that he's doing so more than we're seeing it.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Stewart has created an informative, dark and witty story imbued with black humor surrounding Bahari's confinement.

Name : Joe McGovern / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Rosewater, starring the geeky-charismatic Gael Garcia Bernal as Bahari, is a gripping drama, smartly calibrated for Western audiences who still need an education in the bright, progressive, fight-back impulses in Iranian culture.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
The film settles into the kind of sobriety you've seen too often .

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
That the movie is as tense and chilling as it is owes much to first-time director Jon Stewart's keen eye for the way humor surfaces even in the dark places.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
Rosewater . has an urgency that's all about the storytelling smarts of its first-time writer-director.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
A strong, striking political drama.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Stewart lets the truth roll out, the best he can, believing in the sanitizing effect of sunlight and the inevitable fate that awaits all despots.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
A finely wrought, powerful drama that tells the true story of an Iranian-born journalist's imprisonment and torture by the Islamic regime in Iran.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
Centrist mush-basic, boilerplate human-interest stuff that's too shapeless to completely work as drama, and too depoliticized to be taken seriously as anything else.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
"Rosewater" doesn't hector, nor does it giggle about the issue of press freedom. It's an impressive and important piece of storytelling.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Stewart proves to be an able filmmaker in "Rosewater." But he also shows hints of being something more.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
A persuasive production despite its limited budget .

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Stewart's wryly observant qualities as a TV star serve him well in his feature film debut.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Stewart and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski cover it all in a straightforward, watchable way, the performances are all sincere and solid and the situation is easy to respond to emotionally.

Name : Geoff Pevere / Alias : Globe and Mail
It's a movie made for people who prefer to take their politics while sitting on the couch.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
While it may seem like another triumph-over-adversity tale, the movie is really about what sustains us during impossible moments.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Stewart can never quite answer the question: Why this man's story, of all the ones that should be told? And why now, five years later?