Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Mildly enjoyable despite its basic mediocrity .

Name : James Rocchi / Alias : TheWrap
The Lazarus Effect doesn't exactly break new ground, but it nonetheless finds plenty to relish in the mouldering bits it stitches together as it gives classic themes about death, life and the soul a literal and figurative shot in the arm.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
No resurrection for this dog please.

Name : Simon Abrams / Alias : Village Voice
Death may not be the end in The Lazarus Effect, but it should be.

Name : Geoff Berkshire / Alias : Variety
Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde struggle to breathe life into a recycled thriller about the horrors of reanimation.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
It staggers, zombielike, from one jump-scare to another before petering out, a scant 83 minutes after rising from the slab.

Name : Frank Scheck / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The film squanders whatever potential it had, not to mention the talents of such performers as Duplass and Wilde who clearly deserve better.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
It's thematically thin but competently made and good for a few scares.

Name : Ben Kenigsberg / Alias : New York Times
[A] risible mix of pseudoscientific hokum and supernatural freakouts.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
You've seen it all before. The only question is: Why haven't they?

Name : Bruce Demara / Alias : Toronto Star
While The Lazarus Effect isn't the worst scary movie film you'll see this year, it is probably one of the most predictable and lazily plotted.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Absorbing, well-crafted and appropriately tense, with a smart cast that raises it a notch above average.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
This is an 83-minute movie that feels a half hour longer and, if it weren't for the loud crescendos, it would put people to sleep.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
There are lessons to be learned from this minimalist thriller. The first is that scaring people requires more than just tossing furniture around, turning the lights off and on, and basically sneaking up from behind and shouting "Boo!"

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The Lazarus Effect begins with an intriguing premise then proceeds to squander all the early goodwill through a slow, inexorable descent into cheap horror gimmicks.

Name : Kevin C. Johnson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"The Lazarus Effect" boasts nothing special. It's not going to provide much relief for horror-starved audiences.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Another cheapie from the producers of "Paranormal Activity." Aims low, but hits its target.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
"The Lazarus Effect" is nothing but a cheap horror film cloaked in scientific mumbo-jumbo.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Looks like it was directed by a blind and deaf person over a weekend on a leftover laboratory set from a TV show and edited with a roulette wheel.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
A grimy, dopey, confused thriller that wastes a very likable cast.

Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
A tense, efficient medical thriller best enjoyed sans microscope.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Like too many horror films, this one seems targeted at a hypothetical audience using only 10 percent of its brainpower.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
The film intends to explore the nature and mystery of death, but devolves into a combination of trivial science fiction and banal "Pet Sematary" havoc.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
Doesn't go far enough, isn't scary enough and has mad scientists who just aren't mad enough.

Name : Keith Staskiewicz / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
I would have loved to see more from the filmmakers, daring to fail while staking out some new terror incognita instead of just going through the motions of an experiment for which we already have the results.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
This first-ever movie take on Peru's furriest export is a cuddly triumph.

Name : Guy Lodge / Alias : Variety
Affectionately honoring the everyday quirks of Bond's stories, while subtly updating their middle-class London milieu, King's film may divide loyal Paddingtophiles with its high-stakes caper plot, but their enraptured kids won't care a whit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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