Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Stiller's scenes with the gifted Adam Driver escalate into generational comic warfare of a high order. Baumbach touches a raw nerve.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
While We're Young starts off as an empathetic, funny look at middle age and winds up as profound and schematic as a Neil Simon play - or, for the younger set, an episode of The New Girl.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
This delicious satire about aging hipsters and their discontents is everything we've come to expect from the best of Noah Baumbach, as well as several things more.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
"While We're Young" is snarky, smart and surprising, right up until the final shot.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
Baumbach's own acutely observed this-is-life laffer features his most relatable characters yet.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Baumbach is never less than shrewd in the way he links his protagonists through insecurity.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Baumbach, whose films include the searingly funny, autobiographical The Squid and the Whale and the brilliantly uncomfortable Margot at the Wedding, writes wry, sharp, poignant stuff.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
For about an hour, "While We're Young" was one of the most exhilarating times I've had at the movies in many a month. It played like razor-sharp Woody Allen in his prime.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
If you've been wishing you could see a good Woody Allen comedy again, you should check out Noah Baumbach's While We're Young, which sees the 45-year-old director moving in on Allen's territory - the Manhattan comedy of manners.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
The verbal wit and comic set-ups are smart and sprung from the zeitgeist.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
When Baumbach is on, he's really on, and the brilliant "While We're Young" contains the same self-lacerating humor as his "Greenberg," "Margot at the Wedding" and "The Squid and the Whale."

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Only the motives of Baumbach's alter ego are pure. Meanwhile, the most entertaining questions - Can people transcend wide age gaps? Should they want to? - turn out to be beside the point.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
A sharp look at getting older, growing up and assuming responsibility.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Even at its most confected, this is a film that tells the truth.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
A sharply observed and witty dark comedy.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
Baumbach plays with universal themes about the uncertainty of aging, the elusive nature of "cool" and the acceptance that comes with settling down .

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
For a while much of this contemporary comedy is great fun - until the party ends and you're ready for these people to go home.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Another inconsequential Noah Baumbach parody of so-called "normal" people trying to function in a fractional society changing too rapidly to keep up with, While We're Young is a dreary bummer.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
A knotty exploration of the dialectic between sincerity and authenticity, or the shifting relationship between truth and fiction in an age where we're no longer sure what those words mean .

Name : Lisa Kennedy / Alias : Denver Post
The wonderful thing about While We're Young and the relationship that develops between Josh and Cornelia and Jamie and Darby is that it's less about resentment than it is a celebration of romantic love. At least initially.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
"While We're Young" is one step forward and two steps back for writer-director Noah Baumbach, whose movies are never less than intelligent but, at their worst, tend to settle for gestures instead of movements.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
While We're Young pairs two New York couples, one middle-aged and anxious and the other millennial and carefree. Both are in for a satirical skewering, but also - and here's a change for Baumbach - something close to a hug.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Baumbach belongs in a select group of invaluable American directors. He makes movies built, increasingly, like traditionally structured studio comedies of an earlier age.

Name : Mark Jenkins / Alias : NPR
Noah Baumbach's best movie since 2005's The Squid and the Whale, While We're Young navigates into more mainstream territory while losing none of the writer-director's rueful wit.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
The film has [Baumbach's] usual strengths: sharp urban insights, brainy comedy, moments of inspired high exasperation. It also shares a few of his faults.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
Baumbach's confidently charming latest, plays more like a Woody Allen-ish parody than any of his other movies, but the shift hasn't required a sacrifice in insight, heart or bite.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Baumbach may be the sharpest social satirist of his generation - in some ways, he's a Woody Allen with clearer vision and fewer nervous tics - but the message of this droll, enjoyable bourgeois vaudeville can be boiled down to Father Knows Best.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
We know from his previous work that Baumbach is capable of writing much more interesting and full-conceived female characters than these, so the gender imbalance here is disappointing.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Only an artist at the midpoint between the maypole and maturity could concoct a comedy as potent as "While We're Young."

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
It shows a director not so much mooning over the past, with regret for faded powers, as probing his own obsessions and the limits of his style.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
The storytelling is smooth and assured and the one-liners are generally enjoyable.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Putting one's finger on exactly what's wrong with "While We're Young" is a challenge. Best to use several fingers.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
I have some problems with this movie, not all of which can be ascribed to the usual narcissism of small differences. But first it's important to acknowledge the acuity of Mr. Baumbach's insight and his overall generosity of spirit.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It's a satire of endless youth, "The Kids Are All Right" colliding with "My Generation." Yet it's the best kind of grown-up absurdism.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
The most hilarious Woody Allen film in years is directed by Noah Baumbach, with Ben Stiller as basically an updated version of the idealistic documentary filmmaker the Woodman played in 'Crimes and Misdemeanors.'

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It's not Stiller's character who's the curmudgeon, it's Baumbach.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
A sometimes poignant paean to struggling to age gracefully while time drags you kicking and screaming to the inevitable end, While We're Young effectively balances wry comedy and bittersweet drama.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Baumbach's eighth feature isn't just sharp, it's serrated - its jokes, and there are lots of them, come at you with rows and rows of tiny teeth.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
While We're Young may provide the fusion of two disparate narrative packages but the glass is only half-full.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : RogerEbert.com
The observant and mocking humor that makes the film's first two-thirds so breezy and enjoyable gives way to shattering realizations, but Baumbach ultimately tempers that instinct somewhat by exhibiting genuine sympathy for Stiller's character.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
Leigh and lead Timothy Spall make full use of their canvas, creating a sprawling portrayal of a wonderfully messy personality.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Writing about Mr. Turner a few weeks after seeing it, I feel a craving to be again immersed in its world, which is rich with colors, textures, and, it sometimes almost seems, smells .

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Keen observer Mike Leigh brings his hawk's eye to a vibrant rendering of J.M.W. Turner, the celebrated British "painter of light."

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Leigh shows us the world as Turner sees it-harsh and ravishing. His beauty of a movie touches the heart not by sentimental gush but by the amplitude of its art.​

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Mike Leigh takes on the topsy-turvy life of J.M.W. Turner in an exquisitely detailed, brilliantly acted biopic.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
A portrait of the artist as visionary oddball, for whom life was an endless source of both beauty and the irritating distractions blocking his view of said beauty.

Name : Bill Zwecker / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
I can't say enough about the power of Spall's performance.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
Timothy Spall - a veteran of Mike Leigh's films - plays this eccentric, determined London bohemian like a bronchial, cantankerous, randy old toad with backache.

Name : Sasha Stone / Alias : TheWrap
As is usual with any Mike Leigh film - a style unique and trademarked by now - his ensemble is a collection of remarkably adept actors who know their characters so well they could stay in character for weeks, continually improvising, as they often do.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
"Mr. Turner" is a harsh, strange, but stirring movie, no more a conventional artist's bio-pic than Robert Altman's wonderful, little-seen film about van Gogh and his brother, "Vincent and Theo."

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
A vacuous endurance test about an abstract loser.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Without a speck of pomposity Leigh's film - one of the year's best - honors its subject in all his tetchy ambiguity.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The sprawling, loosely structured 2 1/2 hour drama has some of the year's most stunning visuals, many of which appear as artfully composed scenes in Turner's work.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Failure isn't only the province of the lazy and uninspired. No, even the gifted and conscientious must occasionally take a stroll through that blasted landscape, and with Mr. Turner Leigh does it, for 2 1/2 hours. Don't go with him.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
"Mr. Turner" is a rich, ruthless and profoundly compassionate study of life and love and art, for those who find themselves on its wavelength, but it also presents itself as a challenge.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Any expectations of reverential biography are quickly dispelled by Mr. Leigh's sharp, scintillating script and Mr. Spall's uncanny daring.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Timothy Spall gives an admirably warty and unpleasant performance as Turner, an arrogant and uncompromising man who's annoyed by his celebrity in Britain but shocked when the public turns against his work.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
The gap between the celestial art of the great English romantic painter Joseph Mallord William Turner and the brutish details of his life is vividly explored in Mike Leigh's tragicomic movie Mr. Turner.

Name : Leslie Felperin / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Mr. Turner manages to illuminate that nexus between biography and art with elegant understatement.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Despite his own failings and faults, Leigh and Spall's Turner is a man consumed by the search for truth and beauty, even in the midst of the less than pretty truths of his times.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
With his incomparable Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh continues to make other directors look simpleminded.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
Spall may make a grotesque of Turner - piggish, rutting, whoring - but he finds such incandescence in the world around him. And director Mike Leigh lets you see that incandescence as Turner saw it: Everywhere.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Mr. Turner" is a rich portrait of England at a particularly scabrous period.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Timothy Spall - best known to mainstream audiences as Wormtail in the Harry Potter series - delivers an Oscar-caliber tour de force reminiscent of Charles Laughton

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
It's a painfully uneven movie, but its best moments are ravishingly good.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
J.M.W. Turner, arguably the greatest of British painters, was an uncommonly difficult man, and "Mr. Turner," the exceptional film Mike Leigh has made about him, does not do things the easy way either.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Epic in breadth and length (2 1/2 hours), and gorgeously photographed (digitally) by Bill Pope, Mr. Turner is intimate in incident.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
"Mr. Turner" is a mighty work of critical imagination, a loving, unsentimental portrait of a rare creative soul.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
It's not a pretty portrait of the artist. But it is a real one.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
This is less your standard-issue biopic than a foray into the mystery of human feeling.

Name : Keith Staskiewicz / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
To use a word often associated with Turner and his art, it's sublime.

Name : Katie Kilkenny / Alias : The Atlantic
A gorgeous, important film.