Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
Though Tillman doesn't quite elevate the maudlin material into serious drama, the result is uncommonly sensitive.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
It tries to bridge the gap between pop culture and cultural elitism, between high art and the common commodity that everyone else buys tickets to see. A worthy goal, but it results in a movie that has none of the virtues of either.

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
Qualifies as one of the best Sparks films by virtue of not including any love-ghosts or destructive misinformation about how Alzheimer's works.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
The young Eastwood is better than you might expect, though it's Chaplin who shines in this Nicholas Sparks romance.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Appealing performances by a trio of second- and third-generation Hollywood kids keep this three-hankie twaddle more bearable than it deserves, but "Ride" will surely go the longest with audiences for whom this is not their first Sparks rodeo.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Just as the basic plot points are hard to swallow, even the most rudimentary aspects of the characters' interactions feel forced, artificial and unspontaneous.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Look, it's easy to laugh at this stuff - that's part of the game, in fact. To buy into these movies, you have to buy into the silliness. But The Longest Ride, for all its ridiculousness, comes by its emotions honestly.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Fairly tedious, despite the charm and sincerity of the actors.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The Longest Ride has as much bull as the 10 previous Sparks adaptations. This is one of the few you can ride for longer than eight seconds.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The Longest Ride is sentimental, forced and silly, but it's sure to hit the bull's-eye with its intended audience.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : ChristyLemire.com
The Longest Ride is pretty darn tolerable - and sometimes even enjoyable - not just for fans but also for regular people who are, you know, cynical.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
It's easy to tease a Nicholas Sparks movie. It's harder to admit that he's good at his niche - and has a string of 10 films, nearly all profitable, to prove it

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
As a romance, a drama, or even a sports movie, The Longest Ride never reaches a satisfying destination.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
If this is your particular poison, it won't kill you. But anyone averse to Sparks' sappy touch may get sick from all the bull.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Conforms to a timeworn, and shopworn, Sparks formula of troubled protagonists receiving wisdom, or inspiration, or both, from unexpected sources.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
"The Longest Ride" treats us to a twist that's so ridiculous I think we're almost supposed to laugh. It's not quite on the "Are you KIDDING ME!?" level of awfulness as the big reveal in "Safe Haven," but it's close. It's close.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
The real love story is between Eastwood and David Tattersall's camera, which spends so much time leering over the actor's cheekbones, abs and other attributes that you begin to wonder if someone's going to call Human Resources.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
This is spoon-fed entertainment, but it tastes pretty good.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
People don't go to Sparks movies for subtlety; they go to warm their hearts by bearing witness to true love. Of course, that requires a story that rings true. In "The Longest Ride," authenticity is in short supply.

Name : Connie Ogle / Alias : Miami Herald
Merely adding an older generation of lovers to a love story does not make your romance one for the ages.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
Eventful, polished, and knuckle-bitingly dull, the 10th film adapted from a novel by Nicholas Sparks, combines fate, bull riding and some powerful Hollywood bloodlines among its young cast.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Everything in the movie is suffused by a vision of life that is resoundingly and evidently false, but as this vision is not repulsive, but is intended to reassure, the lies don't produce anger or frustration. No, they bring on the laughs.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Carolina settings, star-crossed lovers, elements of tragedy: Sparks' formula works. Get out your handkerchiefs, and rest assured that there will be uplift at the end.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Can the ailing Ira help the young lovers work things out in his limited time left on earth - or even afterward? Let's just say Sparks works up to an ending that's as shamelessly preposterous as it is predictable.

Name : Barbara VanDenburgh / Alias : Arizona Republic
It's exactly what you'd expect, except executed with more-than-typical competence with the help of a few excellent actors and some gorgeously photographed rodeo scenes that capture the drama and thrill of bull riding.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
The movie has nowhere to go and spends more than two hours getting there.

Name : Sandy Cohen / Alias : Associated Press
The film is likely to satisfy Sparks fans. And it brings something new to the romance genre: bull riding.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Even when Eastwood and Robertson, pleasant enough company, threaten to float off the screen, "The Longest Ride" glides along and delivers its reheated comfort food by the ton.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The two-plus hours is mostly marked by an emptiness born of scene after scene designed to blatantly manipulate emotions rather than trigger them.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
It runs a long 128 minutes. You have to wade through not just puddles of tears, but also piles of BS.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
Its screenwriters . have Gladiator and 127 Hours to their names, and Everest combines the muscular, sometimes sentimental force of the former with the sense of physical endurance that made the latter so successful.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
With its rigorous attention to the technical details of mountain climbing and its sensitive handling of the characters' relationships, it has a you-are-there immediacy unmatched by previous Everest movies.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
No one pays IMAX ticket prices for nuanced human drama, and the film's dizzying climbing scenes and vertiginous don't-look-down moments are what give it its heart-quickening power.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
So imposing is the mountain, and so realistically rendered by Salvatore Totino's camera (plus CGI imaging), it threatens to dwarf any attempt to bring a human element to the tale.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
"Everest" is nothing but a long, slow climb. Without any peaks.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
In 3D IMAX, a dizzying visual adventure that will knock the wind out of you. As personal drama, not so much.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
Fictionalized accounts of real tragedy are not impenetrable. James Cameron made us feel for a ship full of characters we'd never met. "Everest" can't break that seal, and it's a handicap.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Filled with stunning visuals and featuring more than a half-dozen of our best actors delivering solid performances. even though at times it's difficult to distinguish one climber from the next.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
If this oft-told tale of courage and folly is seen as a summit to be achieved, the script not only never makes it to base camp but seldom rises above sea level.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
Although hardly a peak achievement, Baltasar Kormakur's Himalayan epic is a properly grueling, strikingly unsentimental chronicle of the 1996 Mount Everest tragedy.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Tries and fails to spin too many plates. Each of those real-life climbers no doubt had an interesting story to tell, but when shoved together like this they're all reduced to types rather than people.

Name : Patrick Dunn / Alias : Detroit News
"Everest" is a truly spectacular experience that deserves to be seen on the grandest scale possible.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Even before the air gets fatally thin, the thinness of the characterizations presents a liability.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Everest takes an inordinate amount of time to get the pieces in place. However, once the group departs base camp and begins the ascent, the film sloughs off its slow pace and transforms into a gripping tale of survival, life, and death.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
With its perilous central premise and gallery of individuals some of whom are destined not to make it, you could say Everest is a disaster movie in the old Hollywood sense of the term, but it doesn't feel like one. And that's a good thing.

Name : Peter Hartlaub / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Kormakur never quite latches on to the dramatic momentum. The pacing problems are compounded by some confusion in terms of mistakes that were made, and a difficulty identifying actors through the blizzard.

Name : Tom Russo / Alias : Boston Globe
An all-star disaster movie lineup makes a surprising showing in the mountaineering thriller "Everest," combining to deliver the sort of restrained drama you might expect from a much smaller film.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
"Everest" is a sprawling mess of a movie, one you feel like could have been great but instead roams all over the place and winds up being just pretty good.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
A man vs. nature epic more realistic than most.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
"Everest," in short, suffers from the same problem as Everest: overcrowding.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
It never seems to get anywhere, taking up space and time without managing to be especially memorable or imposing.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
"Everest" gets several things right, but it fails to find a way to make the average viewer relate to the people on the mountain.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
For all the natural spectacle, the characters are what hold one's attention.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
The climbing sequences, which take up the bulk of the movie, pack a visceral punch.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
As it turns out, Imax 3-D works better for yaks than it does for people.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
With a harrowing story to tell, and this many characters, it's a given that character development will be sketchy. The good news is that this cast is capable of turning a little into a lot.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
A white-knuckle survival film with an outstanding cast.

Name : Kate Taylor / Alias : Globe and Mail
There is no tragic hero here; there is no overarching explanation, but a movie that offered either of those would seem pretty pat.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The toggling between the base and various points along the way to the summit becomes stressful, then heartbreaking.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Unlike many mountain-disaster stories, this is the kind that makes you never want to look at a mountain again.

Name : Jacob Hall / Alias : New York Daily News
Like the mountain for which it's named, "Everest" is rock solid. It's big, it's beautiful, it's terrifying, and it's merciless to both its characters and the audience.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Everest is visually splendid, though it loses a few points for its murkiness in rendering its main characters as distinct individuals.

Name : Katie Rife / Alias : AV Club
The best argument in favor of what otherwise would be a pointlessly cruel loss of human life are the sweeping, heart-stoppingly beautiful mountain vistas. (See this one in IMAX if you can.)