Name : Neil Genzlinger / Alias : New York Times
The new "Poltergeist" might well be the scariest movie 13-or-unders have yet seen, just as the original was for their parents back in 1982.

Name : Randy Cordova / Alias : Arizona Republic
The original film was promoted with the tagline "It knows what scares you." If there was a truth-in-advertising law regarding films, this movie's ad copy would read: "Poltergeist: Meh."

Name : Eddie Goldberger / Alias : New York Daily News
It doesn't reinvent the wheel, but Poltergeist is a solid, surprisingly effective chiller that's respectful towards its 1982 predecessor while acquitting itself as a proficient update.

Name : Justin Lowe / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Leaving behind the youth-skewing perspectives of Monster House and City of Ember, director Gil Kenan not only delivers on the promise of Hooper's Poltergeist, but significantly raises the stakes for similar PG-13 fare.

Name : Clark Collis / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Poltergeist does benefit from briskness-it's actually 20 minutes shorter than Hooper's film-and there is a nice, Evil Dead 2-esque sequence involving a power drill.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
This new Poltergeist isn't anything special . But it's not a travesty, and that feels like cause for brief celebration.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
There's little doubt that nostalgia played a part in Fox's decision to remake Poltergeist, but that's a poor reason for any film's existence and no excuse for how uninspired Gil Kenan's re-imagining of this one turned out.

Name : Drew Hunt / Alias : Chicago Reader
Director Gil Kenan ruins the pacing with too many half-baked, awkwardly staged horror set pieces, but the cast acquit themselves well enough.

Name : Andrew Barker / Alias : Variety
[A] professionally executed yet bloodless film . an act of homage that hews reverently to its source material while missing the essential spirit and vitality that once powered it.

Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
It's not exactly a scary film, but it does provide an enjoyable ride. It's good fun. But it left me befuddled. A little sad. And a little angry.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
This new spooky-house chiller never escapes the shadow of its predecessor, but it also pales next to the scores of subsequent movies - "The Conjuring," "Insidious," and "Paranormal Activity" - that already stripped the original "Poltergeist" for parts.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
This has more in common with slick, audience-goosing modern spookers like 'Insidious' than with Hooper & Spielberg's imaginative original.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
There are some jumps but few legitimate scares, unlike director Tobe Hooper's original, which, although similarly bloodless, still stands as one of the scariest movies ever made.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
Poltergeist 2015 is to Poltergeist '82 what today's shipped-frozen-to-the-store Pizza Hut dough is to the kneaded-on-site pies the chain's stoned cooks tossed in the Reagan era.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
Just as the original was one of the scariest PG movies ever, the reboot has about as much gruesomeness as you can possibly stuff into a PG-13.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
This remake is over 20 minutes shorter than the original "Poltergeist," and it saved most of that time by sacrificing the beginning and end.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
This harrowing and intimate character study offers fairly blunt insights into the physical and psychological toll exacted on the front lines, yet strikes even its familiar notes with a sobering clarity .

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Bradley Cooper, as Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, and director Eastwood salute Kyle's patriotism best by not denying its toll. Their targets are clearly in sight, and their aim is true.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Cautiously, Eastwood has chosen to omit Kyle's self-mythologizing altogether, which is itself a distortion of his character. We're not watching a biopic.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
It's clearly Cooper's show. Substantially bulked up and affecting a believable Texas drawl, Cooper embodies Kyle's confidence, intensity and vulnerability.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A taut, vivid and sad account of the brief life of the most accomplished marksman in American military annals, American Sniper feels very much like a companion piece-in subject, theme and quality-to The Hurt Locker.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
There's no freshness in either the domestic scenes or the combat sequences.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Though it never uses the term "PTSD," American Sniper, at its best, is a devastating portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The film's just a repetition of context-free combat missions and one-dimensional targets.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
"The result is not unlike watching a suspenseful but highly repetitive video game, especially since nearly every Iraqi is seen through Kyle's highly perched rifle scope."

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
American Sniper lifts director Clint Eastwood out of the doldrums that have plagued his last few films.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Mr. Eastwood's film lets this good and anguished man speak for himself, and discover himself, at his own pace.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
It's a gritty, confident portrait of a man whose life may have been somewhat messier than this Hollywood version.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
This movie is drowning in duty - to say nothing of hoary storytelling devices and one embarrassing scene after the next for Sienna Miller as Mrs. Kyle.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
The best movies are ever-shifting, intelligent and open-hearted enough to expand alongside an audience. "American Sniper," Clint Eastwood's harrowing meditation on war, is built on this foundation of uncommon compassion.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
American Sniper is imperfect and at times a little corny, but also ambivalent and complicated in ways that are uniquely Eastwoodian.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Clint Eastwood has directed war movies before, but never one that focused on a single warrior. And he has an amazing one here .

Name : Preston Jones / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
But the adrenaline can't replace perception, and despite Eastwood's deft staging of the Iraqi scenes, they don't bring viewers any closer to understanding why Kyle insists on repeatedly returning to the war zones.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Cooper nails the role of an American killing machine in Clint Eastwood's clear-eyed look at the Iraq War.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
Just as only Nixon could go to China, only Clint Eastwood could make a movie about an Iraq War veteran and infuse it with doubts, mission anxiety and ruination.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
After 40 years of Hollywood counterpropaganda telling us war is necessarily corrupting and malign, its ablest practitioners thugs, loons or victims, "American Sniper" nobly presents the case for the other side.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
As a piece of direction, it's as taut as anything [Eastwood's] ever done.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Less a war movie than a western - the story of a lone gunslinger facing down his nemesis in a dusty, lawless place - it is blunt and effective, though also troubling.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
Both a devastating war movie and a devastating antiwar movie, a subdued celebration of a warrior's skill and a sorrowful lament over his alienation and misery.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Eastwood's impeccably crafted action sequences so catch us up in the chaos of combat we are almost not aware that we're watching a film at all.