Name : Tasha Robinson / Alias : AV Club
A story about the difficult balance between protecting loved ones and controlling them is discarded so the cast can monomaniacally pursue a trite cliche summed up with a silly noise.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
This comedy starring and produced by Adam Sandler feels as slapped together one of the comedian's live-action buddy movies.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Hotel Transylvania may lack the emotional oomph of Pixar's best efforts, but it makes up for it with rapid-fire gags and an unflagging pace that makes this a rare all-ages treat.

Name : Lisa Schwarzbaum / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Tartakovsky's zippy, boing-boing touch shines through in the purely physical antics of the monster mob; words aren't necessary as the freaks bounce around the place with nutso energy.

Name : Laremy Legel / Alias : Film.com
The biggest issue facing "Hotel Transylvania" is that this story has been done before, over the past six decades, and in a far superior manner.

Name : Ian Buckwalter / Alias : NPR
At its core, this movie is little more than Twilight told from the other side of the tracks, only with far more fart jokes.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
No one does saccharine like Adam Sandler. The man can be sharp, angry and funny - but when he lays on the sweetness, it's like drowning in an avalanche of Tate & Lyle.

Name : Bruce Demara / Alias : Toronto Star
A fast, funny and wildly inventive animated tale with enough laughs and heart to appeal to audiences of all ages.

Name : Neil Genzlinger / Alias : New York Times
The movie loses its originality as it rolls toward its predictable conclusion, but it's still lovely to look at.

Name : David Fear / Alias : Time Out
Tweens might appreciate the sugar-rush ghoulishness; Famous Monsters of Filmland fans and discerning kids-flick viewers may find themselves reaching for torches.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Not since Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein have the great Universal monsters been subjected to such dismal treatment.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
"Hotel Transylvania" may offer a perfectly fine Halloween-themed getaway for young kids, but there aren't many amenities for Mom and Dad.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
A stale overprotective-dad story set within a location that could easily house a more inspired mix of characters and events.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
It won't drive you crazy to watch it, but it isn't "The Lion King" either.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Feels like a string of jokes without a story.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
It's all strictly one-note stuff. But it's a funny note, and the film has a grand old time giving us the same type of gag over and over again.

Name : Glenn Kenny / Alias : MSN Movies
The main reason I'm giving this a more favorable rating than my actual opinion of the movie would seem to call for is because the screening I attended also had a lot of kids in the audience, and most of them were relatively delighted.

Name : Mary F. Pols / Alias : TIME Magazine
A family movie that includes almost entirely lewd jokes for adults.

Name : Nick Pinkerton / Alias : Village Voice
Although it doesn't worry itself with dialectic complexities, Hotel Transylvania succeeds on the level of entertainment.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
There are a few laughs sprinkled throughout director Genndy Tartakovsky's film, but not nearly enough.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Even the animation is ugly.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"Hotel Transylvania" never becomes the great monster mash that seemed in the offing.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
There's enough silly slapstick here that it flies by harmlessly.

Name : Amy Biancolli / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
The film is good goofy fun, even as the plot uncorks a whole lotta nothing.

Name : Tom Russo / Alias : Boston Globe
Every generation of trick-or-treaters deserves its monster mash.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
While it's an energetic romp, there is more slapstick humor than wit at work here, and a good deal of borrowing from the far more clever Monsters, Inc.

Name : Tom Keogh / Alias : Seattle Times
There's much to enjoy here in a disposable way, particularly jokes about monsters having ordinary problems with kids and spouses.

Name : Michael Rechtshaffen / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A scarily unfunny animated monster movie that goes awry right off the bat.

Name : Nell Minow / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
The 3-D adds a vertiginous thrill to a chase on flying tables and a touch of claustrophobia to a maze of underground corridors.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
There's enough here to entertain - and gross out - the kiddie crowd, and parental units, too.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
[Tartakovsky's] wit and attention to detail enliven a collection of well-known ghosts and ghouls.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
"12 Years a Slave" isn't easy to watch, and it shouldn't be; it's one man's tragedy, but it's also the tragedy of countless thousands of souls beaten down, literally and metaphorically.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Every scene of 12 Years a Slave, and almost every shot, conveys some penetrating truth about America's original sin.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Believe the Oscar buzz. Britain's Steve McQueen (Hunger, Shame) nails the horror of America's slavery shame but also finds humanity in one man's determination to free himself and return to his family.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
"12 Years a Slave" works on so many levels - some topical, some timeless - that it's almost impossible to count them.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
It seems certain to transcend the movie realm and become a new reference point in contemporary culture-a defining vision of what slavery looked like, and felt like, in the U.S. before the Civil War.

Name : David Thomson / Alias : The New Republic
It is a film that necessity and education demand seeing.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
12 Years a Slave is a movie about a life that gets taken away, and that's why it lets us touch what life is.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
When a director who never ever blinks takes on a horrific subject, a nightmare in broad daylight is the inevitable result. Welcome, if that is the right word, to the world of 12 Years a Slave.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
A harrowing, unforgettable drama that doesn't look away from the reality of slavery and, in so doing, helps us all fully, truly confront it.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
The film is both brutal to watch and stunning to contemplate, powerfully challenging audiences - particularly white audiences - to examine their consciences.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
Brave performances throughout this magnificent film.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
McQueen and Ridley seem determined to obliterate any lingering Gone With the Wind-inspired notions that the antebellum South was a place of grace and charm, or that slavery was, in the euphemism of the day, merely a "peculiar institution."

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
The genius of 12 Years a Slave is its insistence on banal evil, and on terror, that seeped into souls, bound bodies and reaped an enduring, terrible price.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
One of the best and most courageous films of the year.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
In the epic form of 12 Years a Slave, his most approachable, emotional film, McQueen escalates the tension.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The power of McQueen's movie is in its declaratory style: This happened. That is all, and that is everything.

Name : William Goss / Alias : Film.com
Northup's story was a true, terrible thing, and by virtue of telling it, the burdens of all American slaves are unflinchingly realized by Ejiofor and McQueen alike.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
A film this good, and this quietly distinctive in its style, is always welcome.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Aside from a characteristically nuanced lead performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor. it's a picture that stays more than a few safe steps away from anything so dangerous as raw feeling.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
It is Ejiofor - bewildered, sorely tested, morally towering - whose staggered dignity anchors the film.

Name : Jocelyn Noveck / Alias : Associated Press
The film truly belongs to Ejiofor, whose big, soulful eyes seem to register so many things at once: Shock, pain, grit, determination, abject despair at times, cautious hope at others - and always, dignity.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
This is not medicine for America to swallow; it's filmmaking of the highest caliber.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
If the best films hold you in a captive vise, entertain you, keep you spellbound and teach you something at the same time, then 12 Years a Slave is outstanding-brave, courageous and unforgettable.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
"12 Years a Slave" lays out an institution so twisted and wrong that its honest portrayal has been avoided for centuries. Yes, it's dark and brutal. It needs to be.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
"12 Years a Slave" offers no false Hollywood catharsis along with its muted happy ending, because we're not free from the curse of slavery yet. Looking at it, as it really was, is a start.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, written by John Ridley and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a necessary corrective to the antics of Django Unchained, not to mention Mandingo and its ilk.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The film offers a formidable indictment of the cruelty of which human beings are capable.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
It's smashingly effective as melodrama. But McQueen's directorial voice-cold, stark, deterministic-keeps it from attaining the kind of grace that marks the voice of a true film artist.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
12 Years a Slave is likely the most painful, clear-eyed feature ever made about American slavery. In that light, it almost seems faint praise to add that it will also likely prove to be the best film of the year.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
12 Years a Slave is easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
So overpowering is this film's simple, horrible, and almost entirely true story that it's hard to get enough distance on 12 Years a Slave to poke at its inner workings.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It provokes recognition in us of the very heart of darkness. It makes the unimaginable imaginable.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
It's not too soon to call 12 Years a Slave a great film-ruined, tremulously sad, surreal in its evil.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
McQueen doesn't go in for a lot of flash edits or self-conscious visual flourishes to put viewers at ease; rather, he invites the audience to sit with him as he gazes, amazed, at man's inhumanity to man .

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Channeling the evils of human bondage through the experiences of one weary figure, McQueen has constructed another intensely physical character study about a man trapped in his own flesh.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
The cumulative emotional effect is devastating: the final scenes are as angry, as memorable, as overwhelming as anything modern cinema has to offer.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
This epic account of an unbreakable soul makes even Scarlett O'Hara's struggles seem petty by comparison.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Slavery is revealed for the unrelenting horror that it was. About time.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
But the much talked-about 12 Years a Slave is more than a beautifully shot art piece. It's history made violently real.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Slavery here is not only a great moral darkness but a sweeping canvas for depicting the emotional deformities of the people who enforced and exploited the practice.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
You won't be able to tuck this powder keg in the corner of your mind and forget it. What we have here is a blistering, brilliant, straight-up classic.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Other movies and books have gone here, but few so far and with such overwhelming clarity of purpose.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
12 Years a Slave is at times difficult to watch but always impossible to turn away from.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A strong, involving, at times overstated telling of an extraordinary life story.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Remarkable.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The harrowing 12 Years a Slave is a mesmerizing period drama for the ages.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
12 Years a Slave, British director Steve McQueen's antebellum Southern drama, sets a new standard in realistically depicting American slavery.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
A brutally powerful and emotionally devastating film that takes great pains to rip any lingering vestiges of romanticism from America's most shameful institution.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
It speaks to the courage and resilience of one man, the savagery of many, and the potential, for both good and for ill, in us all.

Name : Michael Sragow / Alias : Orange County Register
One of the finest historical movies ever made.