Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
"The Interview" struggles to really illuminate anything about the stranger-than-fiction Orwellian nightmare that is North Korea, but its attempt is admirable. It deserves to be seen.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
It's certainly smutty-and infantile. Maybe half the jokes miss. But it is a truly savage work.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
The remarkably dismal quality is emblematic of the mind-set that brought the movie, and its attendant crises, into being.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Offers a few moments of casual brilliance but otherwise trips itself up in the threads of its contrived absurdity.

Name : Joe McGovern / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
A dangerous comedy about a dangerous regime shouldn't be safe for suburban dads.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : ChristyLemire.com
This is what all the fuss was about?

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
In their third film together, Franco and Rogen have a terrific banter and an underlay of affection. This kind of rapport is rare.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Te best satire provokes and even outrages, and Rogen, Franco and Goldberg certainly succeed on that score.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Characterizing it as satire elevates the creative execution of the film's very silly faux assassination of North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un far beyond what it merits.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Everyone here is in way over his or her head.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
It's stupid. It's in bad taste. It impossible. I know all that. But Rogen's instinct to try anything for giggles and sticking it to dictatorial assholes is worth fighting for. Screw Kim if he can't take a joke.

Name : G. Allen Johnson / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Imagine "Harold and Kumar Go to North Korea," or "Bill and Ted's Excellent North Korean Adventure" or even "The Road to Pyongyang" starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. You get the idea.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Bluntly funny and ever-so-slightly sweet.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
Hate to say it, but this film ain't half the satire it could have been.

Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
The film is not a dangerous weapon, or a tool for anti-Korean propaganda. It does kill, but with comedy.

Name : David Ehrlich / Alias : Time Out New York
The Interview confirms Rogen as the most ambitious mainstream comedian in Hollywood.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Its lesson is that American pop culture is inescapable, our great achievement and most popular export, the weapon we wield abroad and the glue trap we struggle with at home.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
About as funny as a communist food shortage, and just as protracted.

Name : Ben Kenigsberg / Alias : AV Club
Much of the film is devoted to the hit-and-miss (but strangely moving) riffing between the leading men.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
While The Interview never slacks in its mission to tell jokes, it's such a messy and meandering movie that it never quite lands as a satire of politics or the media or anything else.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
What's wrong with The Interview is that it doesn't know how to be the singeing comedy it wants.

Name : Aisha Harris / Alias : Slate
If you like your dictator mockery served on a sharper, smarter dish, you should probably just do what everyone else seems to be doing, and rewatch Team America: World Police.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Maybe you will love The Interview - if you can ever see the movie - as much as some people hate or fear it. But if you're hoping for any cogent political satire here, then the joke's on you.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Like their affable, ignorant characters, Rogen and Franco seem in way over their heads with "The Interview."

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The Interview fails to live up to the hype, floundering as a rowdy comedy as it grows duller by the minute.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The Interview has the comic batting average of a mediocre-to-average Saturday Night Live sketch .

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
That something so carefully slapdash and happily juvenile actually resulted in cyber-sabotage and threats of violence is, in itself, an enormous kind of joke. Too bad it's the biggest one here.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
There's a whip-smart, pointed comedy in "The Interview." Unfortunately it's buried in there. Really deep.