Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
It's not going to make anyone forget Jaws, but it delivers the kind of breathless tension that justifies its existence.

Name : Tom Russo / Alias : Boston Globe
Yes, there's shameless bikini ogling, but what could have been throwaway exploitation is instead a frequently gripping portrait of dire-straits resourcefulness.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
Is "The Shallows" a thriller for the ages? No, but it's decent popcorn fare.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
A fitfully entertaining mix of offscreen gore and Maxim-esque T&A.

Name : Andrea Gronvall / Alias : Chicago Reader
This is silly stuff but often genuinely scary, with excellent aerial and undersea photography and some persuasive special effects.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
The Shallows is a great-looking film, peppered with overhead long shots of the amazingly clear water, and some terrific underwater photography as well.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The Shallows is almost a good movie.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
For what it is, "The Shallows" works.

Name : Edward Douglas / Alias : New York Daily News
The Shallows isn't bad as much-needed escapist summer fun

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
Lively may have been cast primarily for her physique, but she proves a compelling heroine all the same.

Name : Glenn Kenny / Alias : New York Times
[Lively] acquits herself well here, especially in the vulnerable-to-shark-attack department.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
The Shallows pushes the buttons it's supposed to push for a summerthriller, even if the outcome is as deflating as it dumb.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
The girl kept talking and strategizing as heavy string music played on the soundtrack.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Lively can act, and she does a good job with a very difficult role here - holding our interest and sympathy for a feature-length movie with no one to talk to for most of it.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
The progression from personal drama to surf film to (wo)man vs. nature story to full-on creature feature is smooth, even expert, and always managed with handsome panache.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
You're gonna need a bigger Blake (and you're going to get one) in Lively's enjoyably trashy shark-survival movie, the definition of summer fun.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
It's all patently ridiculous. But Blake Lively, director Collet-Serra and a digital shark show no mercy in hooking us with the B-movie tension. And we bite.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
If the amount of surfing/suffering/staring-at-dark-skies footage rendered in slow motion were depicted at normal speed, "The Shallows" would run about a minute and a half.

Name : Chris Klimek / Alias : NPR
The Shallows is a thoroughly mediocre specimen of the externalized-grief survival flick, distinguished by a strong performance from Gossip Girl alumnus Lively.

Name : Peter Hartlaub / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
The most important parts, the ones involving the shark, don't feel genuine.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Clocking in at a svelte 87 minutes, the film knows its audience and the limits of that audience's patience with fare like this.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
A snack-size thriller that isn't quite enough to satisfy.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
School's out, schlock's in - no lessons here.

Name : Liz Braun / Alias : Toronto Sun
The Shallows is brisk and engaging, and a great vehicle for Lively. The film has the sort of breathtaking cinematography that will inspire you to visit the ocean. And a story that may stop you from ever going into the water again.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
We're gonna need a bigger boat?" "We're gonna need a smaller bikini," more like.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Los Angeles Times
If you're looking for a quick and satisfying summer thrill - a reminder that all you really need to make a movie is a girl and a flare gun - then the aptly titled Blake Lively-vs.-shark thriller "The Shallows" should serve you nicely.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
"Denial" is carried less by the normal theatrics of courtroom dramas than a staunch sense of duty to protect the truth. It's an argument for the patient, methodical dismantling of fools.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
You wonder if the material would have been more effective as a courtroom procedural adapted for the stage.

Name : Eric Kohn / Alias : indieWIRE
This isn't a debate, it's a sledgehammer; it's not inherently compelling drama, but it's immensely satisfying catharsis to watch as it flattens Irving's nonsense into nothingness.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
The jury remains out on this one.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Tom Wilkinson is brilliant as always as the barrister who takes on the case, complicated by England's labyrinthine libel laws. But there's too little actual tension in the climactic courtroom drama.

Name : Deborah Young / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A compelling, true courtroom drama touches on the lingering pain of the Holocaust.

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
As an actual procedural narrative, the film is only passably interesting, afflicted with the kind of stop-start rhythms endemic in movies that compress a legal battle spanning years into a two-hour movie.

Name : Farran Smith Nehme / Alias : New York Post
The movie sneers at the journalists covering the trial, but for those of us who followed it at the time, the newspaper accounts were a lot more engrossing than this film.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Because Hare's script grapples with serious themes and singular events whose ramifications are still being felt, it is effective when it counts.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
With chatty urgency, Jackson dramatizes the 2000 trial in which a flinty Brit Holocaust denier sued Penguin Books for libel.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Another illuminating performance by Rachel Weisz and a brilliant screenplay by the distinguished British playwright David Hare make Denial one of the most powerful and riveting courtroom dramas ever made.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : TheWrap
The film is talky and well-mannered, which are not usually the highest of compliments. But it works.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Variety
The crucial thing missing is what should be the essence of a courtroom drama: our immersion in how Lipstadt's lawyers stake out their strategy.

Name : Sophie Gilbert / Alias : The Atlantic
Its finest and most moving moments are when Lipstadt and Rampton go to Auschwitz on a research mission, where the camera lingers on the piles of rubble that cover a destroyed gas chamber.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : New York Daily News
There are people today who will claim that all opinions are equal; that facts are boring; that there is no such thing as objective truth. "Denial" reminds us of what the verdict should be.