Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
There's a blue-chip cast running the gamut from A (Casey Affleck) to W (Kate Winslet) and terrific action sequences in Triple 9 - but in the end, this relentlessly nihilistic crime-caper thriller adds up to less than the sum of its impressive parts.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
It's hard to tell how much time has passed between scenes, or just why, as the twists come, the characters would suddenly turn so dumb.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Triple 9" is a superbly crafted film, the sort of big-screen roller coaster I admire even if its plot falters.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
If there's a police code it merits, it's a "10-22": "Disregard."

Name : Mark Jenkins / Alias : NPR
Cops prowl darkened mazes, looking for perps they probably couldn't see even if they found them.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
John Hillcoat packs a binge watch of characters and incidents into this corrupt-cop thriller.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Without much investment, one just sits back with increasing detachment and bemused curiosity as to where and on whom the next shoe will drop.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
[Hillcoat is] an expert in creating and sustaining gut-twisting tension. Good qualities all, but used here in the service of a story that is truly unappetizing.

Name : Tony Hicks / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
There are a lot of great actors here and surprisingly good action scenes and a tense ending, all of which make "Triple 9" one of the more enjoyable urban crime dramas in recent memory.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Triple 9 is like a David Ayer film on steroids, which is to say it's like Training Day if most of the characters were as morally compromised as Denzel Washington's.

Name : Liz Braun / Alias : Toronto Sun
Triple 9 races past in a blur of crime and action scenes, with plenty of violence and the odd spot of gallows humour to keep things interesting.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
A miserable, misguided police drama that almost seems to hate the police.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
The uneven thing [here] is John Hillcoat's direction: a tense, sustained journey through an apartment while lined up behind a bulletproof shield alternating with indulgent zooms and cuts depicting local color.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Most parties concerned maintain their grim countenances, their characters struggling to find the sweet spot between honor and greed, between doing the right thing and doing the absolute worst.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Triple 9 is no Reservoir Dogs, but it is a twisty, terrific ride. And Kate Winslet has a blast with the Russian accent, the wig, the attitude.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : MTV
#AllLivesMatter? Not here. Hillcoat wants us to admit the truth behind the robbers' callous calculation: Some people are worth more than others.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
"Triple 9" doesn't exactly transcend its genre, but it definitely exploits it for all it's worth.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
If you're in the right frame of mind for a lurid, blood-soaked B-movie with an A-list cast, Triple 9 is just the ticket.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
Though compelling in the acting and cinematography, Triple 9's plot is by the numbers and about nothing.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
The slam-bang opening bank robbery and chase channels the best of Michael Mann from his Heat days. But Triple 9 soon bleeds out and becomes a perfunctory hodgepodge of other crime movies.

Name : Barbara VanDenburgh / Alias : Arizona Republic
The action is bracing, the twists sprightly, but the sum of its parts sits heavy, like a meal that won't digest.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
One of those productions in which much of the creative energy has been funneled into gaudily inventive displays of violence.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Given the movie's bloody stew of greed and sadism, its unbalanced frames and ear-scraping soundscape, its moral tidiness can bring a smile to your otherwise appalled face.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
Tight, taut and brilliantly structured.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Matt Cook's maiden feature-length screenplay-something about dirty Atlanta cops being blackmailed by the Russian Jewish mafia-is so murky it leaves the whole cast looking tentative, if not defensive.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
"Triple 9" feels more like a collection of good scenes than a novel, propulsive whole. Viewers are apt to be entertained by the film's visceral pulp pleasures, but left apathetic when it comes to its instantly forgettable genre cliches.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Although "Triple 9" was most likely just a paycheck film for all involved, its go-for-the-gut efficiency can't be denied.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The most impressive thing about Triple 9 is that it somehow manages to be both predictable and incoherent at the same time. Well, that and the fact that it manages to make half a dozen good actors look really lost.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Hillcoat's approach is to craft a pulse-pounding experience that employs a mixture of conventional footage and hand-held work. There's an immediacy to the most gripping scenes.

Name : Katie Walsh / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Hillcoat directs with a sense of immediacy and grimy realism, bringing the audience into the shootouts and bloodshed on the streets. Atlanta becomes another war zone for the men who have seen war, battling an enemy of a different race and culture.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
A modern-day heist thriller of unusually grim, coiled intensity .

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
Triple 9 imagines itself a sprawling, nihilistic epic, and it floats along for a while on the shoulders of its prestige filmmaking and cast, but ultimately the storytelling just isn't up to the task.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : New York Daily News
It's got everything except a real script. Or director.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Hillcoat brings stray moments of style and surprise to "Triple 9" but not nearly enough to save it; for every twist you don't see coming, there are five you probably will.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
"Triple 9" is as heartless as the people who infest it-the exception being a decent cop, Chris Allen, played by Casey Affleck-and mannered to the point of self-parody.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Fifty Shades of Grey" doesn't entertainingly cross the line of good taste so much as trip and fall on it.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Fifty Shades of Grey delivers, however ponderously, on its promise of pop transgressiveness.

Name : David Ehrlich / Alias : Time Out
Fifty Shades of Grey is a sex-positive but hopelessly soft-core erotic drama that fails to be even a fraction as titillating as the E.L. James books that inspired it. And yet, that's exactly why it works.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Basically, they made a lousy, mid-2000s-era Katherine Heigl romance with a handful of explicit sex scenes spliced throughout the familiar cliches.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
The only thing Dakota Johnson can't pull off is her character's over-dramatic name - she introduces herself as Anastasia Steele like an apology.

Name : Meredith Goldstein / Alias : Boston Globe
The director of the much-anticipated adaptation, Sam Taylor-Johnson, made what could have been a trashy TV movie into well-conceived cinema.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : ChristyLemire.com
It realizes this story is ridiculous in ways the book itself never could. It has an actual sense of humor.

Name : Courtney Shea / Alias : Globe and Mail
Nobody sweats or pants or experiences onscreen ecstasy, which is presumably how a movie about violent sex manages to avoid an NC-17 rating, but the result feels like 50 shades of beige.

Name : Lisa Schwarzbaum / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The movie Fifty Shades of Grey is considerably better written than the book. It is also sort of classy-looking, in a generic, TV-ad-for-bath-oil way.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Johnson is rather sweet, though, and if she played a role that required her to look more than alternately smitten and poleaxed, she could score big. But now that Fifty Shades is poised to be a franchise, will she have that chance?

Name : Joy Tipping / Alias : Dallas Morning News
I'll go see the next movie quite happily.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
"Fifty Shades of Grey" the movie, for the record, is not quite as bad as "Fifty Shades of Grey" the book. But that's not saying much.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
The dashes of momentum are just a tease. It's hard to remember the last time this much sex was this tedious.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The likably coy Johnson has no chemistry with the dreary, self-serious Dornan. He's a casting disaster .

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
Gone are the truly dreadful aspects of the book, and the biggest surprise may be that Ana and Christian have developed senses of humor.

Name : Meghan Daum / Alias : Slate
A generic romance cynically engineered to appeal to the lowest common denominator of female fantasy.

Name : Katie Rife / Alias : AV Club
Leads Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, both of whom spend the majority of the film supposedly desperately longing for each other, have so little chemistry that it gives the sexy goings-on a rather clinical feel.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
"Fifty Shades of Grey" might not be a good movie - O.K., it's a terrible movie - but it might nonetheless be a movie that feels good to see, whether you squirm or giggle or roll your eyes or just sit still and take your punishment.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Yet the film's biggest problem is its two stars. Despite all the ripped abs and exposed breasts, blindfolds and cuffs, there are few sparks between them. Without that, Fifty Shades of Grey feels as cold and sterile as Grey's sleek penthouse.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
For a movie where people are naked for a large chunk of time and play at bondage and dominance (without ever really seeming all that committed to it), it sure is boring.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
My God, this thing goes on. By the time the two get busy in Christian's "playroom," the oomph has gone out of the whole erotic setup .

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Actors Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan make an appealing couple and battle mightily against the flat, linear plotting, though when the story ended inconclusively I wasn't eager to follow them through the inevitable sequels.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Maybe in future installments there will even be something that resembles a plot. For now, the entire movie is about as sexy as a root canal.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
It's been said that the movie contains 20 minutes of sex; if this is the case, it must contain at least 40 minutes of Ana biting her lip or putting a pencil in her mouth.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
I'm shocked - shocked, do you hear me?!? - that the film version of E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey is such a dull, decorous affair, about as erotic as an ad for Pottery Barn. Strictly intended for gluttons for punishment-by boredom.

Name : Connie Ogle / Alias : Miami Herald
Despite what you might fear, the movie is not torture. And even if it doesn't inspire lust, you will breathe a warm sigh of relief, thinking: This could have been so much worse.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
Think of it as the "Downton Abbey" of bondage, designed neither to menace nor to offend but purely to cosset the fatigued imagination.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"Fifty Shades of Grey" turns out to be an intriguing tussle - not in the sack, or in the Red Room of Pain, but in its internal war between the dubious erotica of James' novel (the first of three) and the far craftier trash offered by the movie.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
In the end, there's nothing here we haven't seen before. But there's also nothing as agonizingly awkward as James's prose.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
Glossy, well cast, and a consistent hoot until it becomes a serious drag.

Name : Karen D'Souza / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
About an hour in, it finally dawned on me that perhaps the movie was giving me insights into masochism after all. As the minutes slowly, painfully ticked by I came to accept my punishment.

Name : Sheri Linden / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Aiming to please, the filmmakers submit without hesitation to the bold yet hokey source material, with leads Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson breathing a crucial third dimension into cutout characters.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
"The stylish and mostly satisfying film will be [a blockbuster], and deservedly so. Starring a vivacious Dakota Johnson and a game Jamie Dornan, Taylor-Johnson's erotic romance is a skillful distillation of James' first book."

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Sitting through the turgid and tedious S&M melodrama that is Fifty Shades of Grey may feel like its own form of torture.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
An unashamed and genially preposterous fairy tale, a kind of "Cinderella" with restraints, "50 Shades" is about as believable as "Jack and the Beanstalk," albeit considerably more kinky in intent.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The film doesn't culminate in anything. It's a bunch of scenes that end before any kind of satisfying conclusion.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
I wouldn't say that Taylor-Johnson has made a good movie from "Fifty Shades of Grey," precisely. That's asking too much.

Name : Bruce Kirkland / Alias : Toronto Sun
Fifty Shades of Grey only has one shade: tedious self-pity. The other 49 shades promised in the title are missing from the movie version of the infamous novel.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Despite the endless sex, a highly unsatisfying encounter. Cold as a fish and almost as dumb.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Creating a genteel R-rated film from a very X-rated book is like making a Mamma Mia! movie without the songs.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Who would have imagined that a movie about sex could be so boring?

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
I'm not going to pretend I didn't like this movie, just as I can't pretend there's nothing wrong with it. But try thinking of it this way: It's an event movie that's also a relationship drama, and that's rare.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
Johnson is a true find: She's so committed, she makes Ana's every discovery - in or out of the bedroom - convincing.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Isn't the stuff of bondage and discipline, sexual role play, silky blindfolds, and whips and floggers supposed to be, well, exciting?

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Vainly seeking to reach the widest possible audience, the makers of this exercise in banality stripped it of almost anything that could cause offence.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
The whole thing's about as transgressive as ordering a Cabernet Sauvignon with your fish.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
We may have all been curious going in, but by the time the credits roll, there's another question that springs to mind: Is that all there is?