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.

Name : Rick Groen / Alias : Globe and Mail
A sustained if wildly unco-ordinated assault on our senses (our emotions are clearly not on his battle map), complementing those feverish jump cuts with a cliche of equally stunning proportions.

Name : David Hiltbrand / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Despite Andrew Douglas' tightly focused direction, this is a cheap, calculated scare.

Name : Roger Ebert / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
The problem with The Amityville Horror is that, in a very real sense, there's nothing there.

Name : Gene Seymour / Alias : Newsday
The movie is a procession of unregenerate B-level goosing. But there's definitely a smirk beneath the muck.

Name : Robert Denerstein / Alias : Denver Rocky Mountain News
The filmmakers have managed to take a mediocre movie and make it worse.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Salon.com
I wasn't shocked by The Amityville Horror, or outraged by it: I felt nothing but disdain.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
This house springs so many FX shocks it plays like a theme-park ride. Result? It's not scary, just busy.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
A few lines get laughs, but the horror is standard fare, without a shred of innovation.

Name : Ruthe Stein / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It retains the cheesy look of the 1979 original, pure schlock not gussied up to appear to be anything else.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
A gory lark, a cheap-thrill-packed love poem to the history of the contemporary horror film.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
In a ghost story, the narrative doesn't have to be a model of originality or coherence, but it needs to support the scares. In The Amityville Horror, the writing is so bad that it detracts from the 'boo!' moments and creepy interludes.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Shoddily made, boring and, most shockingly, without a single decent scare.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
In theory, this should all be scary, but it just isn't. You giggle at the B-movie cheesiness of it.

Name : Kirk Honeycutt / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Shorter and punchier but nearly as hokey as the original.

Name : Kevin Thomas / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The film is a terrific scare show, fast and furious, made with a lot of style and energy, packing plenty of jolts yet never lingering morbidly over horrific images.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Boston Globe
Not content to remake an old, mediocre horror movie, this Amityville takes its cues from current mediocre horror movies, too. This one is frightening only if you can't remember the last throwaway movie that leaned on all the same tricks.

Name : Bob Longino / Alias : Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There's nothing this Amityville won't beg, borrow, steal from or fabricate in trying to make your neck hairs sit up and quiver.

Name : John Monaghan / Alias : Detroit Free Press
The latest in a long line of cheap horror film remakes that combine familiar names and stories with slash-cut editing and computer-generated effects.

Name : Philip Wuntch / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Watching The Amityville Horror is about as enjoyable as attending a Halloween party hosted by people you can barely tolerate.

Name : Jack Mathews / Alias : New York Daily News
A cut-to-order MTV hack attack. Audiences will be stunned not because they have been frightened but by how obvious and safe the whole thing is.

Name : Connie Ogle / Alias : Miami Herald
Moviegoers are more cynical now than they were in 1979, and most will laugh off the moments meant to be tense. You can't really blame them.

Name : Roger Moore / Alias : Orlando Sentinel
The original is still creepy, but this Horror will have fans jumping in their seats and talking back to the screen.

Name : Lisa Rose / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
The startling thing about the remake is that it's one of the better horror films to hit screens in recent months, thanks to its refusal to take itself too seriously.

Name : Chuck Wilson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Never buy a house with a basement, and while you're at it, avoid old Dutch Colonials in which the previous occupants were murdered by an eldest son possessed by demons.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Completely cheesy and mildly enjoyable.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Low-key creepy rather than outright scary, the new Amityville marks a modest improvement over the original.

Name : David Ng / Alias : Village Voice
The Amityville Horror is a Xerox so tattered and faded that it's impossible to determine who's to blame for the overproduced mediocrity before our eyes.

Name : Lisa Kennedy / Alias : Denver Post
Since Scream poured irony into the mix, it has become mighty hard to write a line of dialogue that doesn't elicit winks and nods. We all know where the mayhem's leading.

Name : Sean Daly / Alias : Washington Post
You'll want to get out of Amityville long before the Lutzes do.

Name : Bruce Westbrook / Alias : Houston Chronicle
Like good drive-in fare from the '70s, this is all about sensation.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Begins slavishly faithful to its low-key 1970s predecessor then sledgehammers auds with a numbing succession of shock edits and over-the-top horror effects.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
If they scare up enough business to perpetuate this sort of retread, that will be the real horror.

Name : Bill Muller / Alias : Arizona Republic
If star Ryan Reynolds wants to scare us, why not just lock us in a room and make us watch Van Wilder over and over? Or have girlfriend Alanis Morissette talk about her past relationships?

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
In this Amityville, the performances are bad, the special effects ho-hum, and it's not even particularly scary.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Brevity is the single best thing about it.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Nothing gets in the way of the rote staging, the ham-handed predictability, the feeling that you've been to this house, and yawned at these ghosts, once too often.