Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Writer-director Rodrigo Sepulveda suggests a personal explanation for her quest late in the game, but too late and too half-heartedly to rescue this morose Chilean drama from its own sanctimony.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Green demonstrates no control over his star, who dodders through the movie in a sleepy daze.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
The low-key, dialed-down acting that Green has elicited from the frequently hammy Pacino - on the heels of Nicolas Cage's sensitive turn in Green's Joe - establishes the filmmaker as the go-to sponsor for members of Overactors Anonymous.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Vera Brittain's celebrated memoir of the British home front in World War I gets a polished Masterpiece Theatre treatment that fails to diminish the story's wrenching emotional content.

Name : Leslie Felperin / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Striking an elegantly sustained balance between intimacy and historical scope, director James Kent's WWI-set epic Testament of Youth encompasses nearly all of the virtues of classical British period drama and nearly none of the vices.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
The World War I-set "Testament of Youth" makes a passionate and sensible case for [pacifism] through devastating, melancholy, persevering drama.

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : AV Club
There's a good movie in Brittain's story, but you wouldn't know it from this lethargic, BBC-produced bore.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Mournful, very fine .

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Vikander and Harington provide the spark this World War I epic needs to get us through the tribulations and tragedies that pile on with numbing regularity.

Name : Marsha McCreadie / Alias : Village Voice
Without the epic sweep of a Doctor Zhivago, it's an intellectual and emotional landscape Vera traverses: grief to survival and, finally, pacifism.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Tough-minded and sometimes harrowing.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
This is World War I from a woman's point of view, a different perspective than we usually see. It's the story of someone who doesn't fight . but for whom the horrors of war are just as vivid and devastating.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
In World War I, a generation learned that war was not the answer. In World War II, another generation learned that pacifism was not the answer. It would seem that there just isn't an answer.

Name : Elaine Teng / Alias : The New Republic
Just once, it would be refreshing to see Britain look like something other than a country-living catalogue.

Name : Nathalie Atkinson / Alias : Globe and Mail
In what is a well-acted but fairly typical prestige period drama, it's Vikander's nuanced performance as the resolute but still-vulnerable Vera who gives the film its depth.

Name : Jordan Hoffman / Alias : New York Daily News
[D]elivers one rich and emotional scene after another

Name : Ella Taylor / Alias : NPR
Vikander crisply holds the screen as a naive rebel transformed by unspeakable suffering into a mature, independent young woman who remains open to the possibility of a new love and a rebuilt England.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
As Vera, the rebellious, moneyed young woman whose dream of graduating from Oxford is deferred when the war breaks out, Alicia Vikander is such a ferociously intuitive performer that you can't take your eyes off her.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
From first to last, "Testament of Youth" sweeps you away.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
Evokes the march of history with a balance and restraint exhibited by few movies with such grand ambitions.

Name : Guy Lodge / Alias : Variety
Kent presents the female experience of war with crisp, tactile practicality . Unabashedly romantic the film may be, but little about Brittain's grief-ridden personal awakening is needlessly romanticized.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
This is Vikander's film and she is very good here.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
We don't need movies to tell us war is hell. But at their best, they humanize its unfathomable losses in a way that history books never quite can.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
The book is still is in print to this day, selling like crumpets at high tea. The movie is a proud collation of its reflected glory. Don't miss it.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
The film is elegantly done, mainly because it wisely expends most of its energy on Alicia Vikander's face.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
[Vikander's] performance is a subtle tour de force of feeling and restraint, made all the more remarkable by the whiplash highs and lows of this true but melodramatic tale.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
A beautifully acted but disappointingly stiff period drama.