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

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 : 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 : 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 : 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 : 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 : 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 : 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.

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

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 : 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 : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
a riveting, resonant first feature from Marielle Heller, with a breakout star performance from Brit actress Bel Powley.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Heller and Powley present a journey that, stripped to its most basic emotional elements, is timeless and universal.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
Frank, poignant and daring, "The Diary of a Teenage Girl" invites you into the mind-set of a sexually adventurous 16-year-old girl - and suggests you leave your judgment at the door.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
What a ballsy film - and honest too.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A strikingly intimate look at a teenager's sexual life in an outstanding debut film.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
The first thing to know about The Diary of a Teenage Girl is that young British actress Powley is staggeringly good in it.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
The novel is life-specific, but what makes Minnie - on the page and now on the screen - greater than any one girl is how she tells her own story in her own soaringly alive voice.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Expect to feel uncomfortable watching Diary of a Teenage Girl, which is precisely the point of this finely etched debut feature by writer/director Marielle Heller.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Any woman who survived puberty knows that girlhood is all about obsession - just ask Justin Bieber, One Direction, New Kids on the Block, or the Beatles.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
Heller's empathy and, let's be honest, her denial of prurience appears to free Powley from embarrassment. She's seizing this part, not shrinking from it.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Heller approaches the film in just the right way: As an absolute outgrowth of arty Minnie's own pent-up creativity.

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
For a movie about such fraught topics, sometimes rendered with admirable and non-squeamish explicitness, Diary often eschews melodrama; when the plot turns, it does so abruptly, providing a credible simulation of real-life tumult.

Name : Dennis Harvey / Alias : Variety
A fine adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner's autobiographical novel about a sexually precocious 1970s adolescence.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
I made it two-thirds of the way through the routine sexual coming-of-age yarn "Diary of a Teenage Girl" when it occurred to me that anything else I could conceivably be doing would be more interesting.

Name : Nathalie Atkinson / Alias : Globe and Mail
Seldom has teenage sexual awakening been covered from a female perspective - with a fickle alternating confidence, self-doubt and voracious appetite - quite so frankly or delicately.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
The Diary of a Teenage Gir is the kind of movie that seems a lot more adventuresome than it is.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
Thank goodness the irreverent but earnest Diary of a Teenage Girl avoids the moralizing that would usually accompany a film about young people, sex and drugs.

Name : Kristin Tillotson / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
"The Diary of a Teenage Girl" is as rewarding as it is squirm-inducing for its honesty, audacity and artful portrayal of adolescence from a girl's point of view.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
The film is harsh but wonderful. It shouldn't be funny, too, but somehow it is, and somehow it's the right kind of funny.

Name : Elaine Teng / Alias : The New Republic
It's unlikely to make a box office splash, but it's a startlingly tough, authentic depiction of budding womanhood.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Films often fail to capture the turmoil of being a teenager - but not this one.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
An honest and personal and unblurred examination (even through that druggy blur) of a tricky voyage into womanhood.

Name : Lisa Schwarzbaum / Alias : TIME Magazine
A movie of (increasingly rare) truly indie sensibility, made by women who are confident about healthy feminine resilience.

Name : Rebecca Keegan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Big summer action movies can be thrilling, but if you really want to feel your heart pounding out of your chest, try being a 15-year-old girl for 101 minutes.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
It dares to show the heroine as something more complicated than a victim. As a result the movie lands somewhere outside the battle lines of contemporary gender politics, which may be why it feels true.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
"The Diary of a Teenage Girl" is a breakthrough moment in the culture in that it depicts youthful female sexuality . not just with the unapologetic frankness the boys usually get, but with an awareness of all the places a girl's urges will take her .

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Writer/director Marielle Heller, in her captivating debut film "The Diary of a Teenage Girl," hits exactly the right tone for a complicated balancing act, and for a film that could very easily have gone wrong.

Name : Jordan Hoffman / Alias : New York Daily News
The loose quality makes for a bit of a shaggy story with some rough edges, but the bursting, youthful heart throbs with that mix of longing and triumph that is first love.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It's work, but it's ultimately rewarding work. It tackles some truths that other movies wouldn't touch, not even with a stick and thick gloves.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Working from Phoebe Gloeckner's 2002 graphic novel/memoir, Heller gets the shabby glamour and bleached sunshine of '70s San Francisco just right, coloring several scenes with vivid blooms of animation.

Name : Barbara VanDenburgh / Alias : Arizona Republic
Heller's debut directorial effort is incisive and universal, despite its very specific and detailed setting.