Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Dope's biggest strength lies in its affectionate and honest portrait of a different kind of young urban blackness than we're used to seeing on movie screens.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
The acting is uniformly good. This is Moore's first big role, and he delivers a performance both entertaining and believable.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
This vibrant film is a bit of a mess, but it's a beautiful one.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
It's a remorselessly entertaining, Frankenstein's monster of pop-culture borrowings and appropriations. So much so that it becomes very much its own thing.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
"Dope" may be the perfect movie for the summer of 2015.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
"Dope" is the bomb.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
The film's ability to confound expectations while delivering some big laughs may be its most crowd-pleasing characteristic but the anti-stereotype message rings clear as a bell throughout.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It's downright dainty as far as plot, but a mostly tasty layer cake of drugs, jokes, sex, jokes, cool young cast members, jokes, 1992 hip-hop, cartoony characters, a heist and a lot more jokes.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
A freewheeling comedy about sex, drugs and identity politics.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Mr. Famuyiwa . shoves disparate genre elements together as if pulling jigsaw puzzle pieces from a half-dozen different boxes, and if the finished work isn't quite convincing, it's still fun to look at.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
A narrative as freewheeling as this one might ordinarily daze and confuse. But Malcolm makes for such a forceful character, it's easy to go along with whatever direction he's headed in.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Moore, who's done some TV work and is also a singer and dancer, emerges as a genuine movie star in "Dope." He's very good looking and has charisma to burn, and he controls the screen in every scene he's in. Which is practically every scene.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
While Famuyiwa deserves the lion's share of acclaim for making "Dope" such an inventive, hyperactive and electrifying comedy, it is Moore who gives "Dope" its big heart.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
The tone of "Dope" is very interesting - funny, but rarely stupid-funny. The film does not wear its serious observations, about aspirations and realities and hypocrisies of all kinds (not just racial), in a heavy fashion.

Name : Boyd van Hoeij / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A funny and often intelligent crowd-pleaser about three geeks who get smart about drug-dealing.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Be sure to stay for the end credits. No other summer-movie credit crawl is going to get audiences dusting off their old Running Man and Cabbage Patch dance moves like this one. Take that, Jurassic World.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
Dope digs into racial culture in a real way with Malcolm struggling with the fact that he doesn't fit being a geek or a menace to society, and it's a hoot to root him on as he finds his place somewhere in between.

Name : Dennis Harvey / Alias : Variety
The cast, drawn from comedy, rap, TV, modeling and other spheres, is sharply on form throughout, as is Famuyiwa's direction; the pic's esprit is amplified by every editorial trick in the book, from split-screen to freeze-frames.

Name : Kevin C. Johnson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Dope" is funny, slick and sharp.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Here is the rare movie overstuffed with memorable moments that would have been better if there had been fewer of them.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
If "Dope" were as earnest as Malcolm seems to be, you might expect it to be a bit of a bore. No worries on that count, though.

Name : Patrick Dunn / Alias : Detroit News
When so many black movie characters are simple stereotypes, it's a pleasure to see a film with real wit about the benefits and pitfalls of playing to and against those expectations.

Name : Mark Feeney / Alias : Boston Globe
"Dope" is too smart and lively to be dismissed. It's even original in its mixing of ingredients, however unoriginal those ingredients may be. But it's also unfeeling and, beneath its in-the-hood surface, as much a bit of artifice as a Wes Anderson movie.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
Again and again, Dope puts us in Malcolm's Air Jordans, letting us sweat or fear or hope right with him.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
Writer-director Rick Famuyiwa . doubles down on an applying-to-Harvard satire that both upends demographic expectations while insisting (at times a bit strenuously) that we all aim a little higher.

Name : Robert Abele / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"Dope" is, in the end, just another unfunny grab bag of stereotypes. Don't believe the hype.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Shameik Moore is a forceful, sympathetic locus, with an appealing gentleness of spirit that in no way seems entirely innocent. There's a drive there. As for Zoe Kravitz, she is having one terrific year.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
A fantastical, slight, and occasionally fun, hip hop-scored romp.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
As a comedy, the film isn't especially funny, and as a screwball drug caper a la "Go," it's raggedly plotted, with ridiculous coincidences popping up everywhere.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
In an era full of indifferent, cookie-cutter indies, an excess of ideas and personality is hardly a bad thing.

Name : Jordan Hoffman / Alias : New York Daily News
The tone is fast and funny, with a modern "Risky Business" or "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" vibe, but there's an additional layer that stems from the violence of the neighborhood.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Shameik Moore gives a smashing breakout performance in a comedy of social expectation that plays like an exhilarating gift.

Name : Julian Carrington / Alias : Globe and Mail
Even as Famuyiwa acknowledges the preconceptions that Malcolm's blackness engenders, he invites audiences to identify with the character on the basis of his relatable interests, aspirations and vulnerabilities.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
The film is too busy, and in some ways too gross, to sustain an effective atmosphere of dread. It tumbles into pastiche just when it should be swooning and sighing with earnest emotion.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
Lurid and ghastly and immensely enjoyable and frequently spectacular and also thinner and less substantial than it wants to be, like a meal eaten in a dream.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
All the carefully orchestrated color schemes and all the dark corridors and secret chambers and all the flowing red metaphors in the world can't accelerate the slow patches, or make us care about lead characters.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
A faithful homage to a foolish genre. The risk is that audiences who don't share that love won't appreciate the work, like the world's best cover band nailing obscure nu-metal hits

Name : Jason Gorber / Alias : Globe and Mail
Guillermo del Toro's latest dive into the darkness is a sumptuous, beautifully constructed tale that feels both archaic and inviting.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
The real wonder is the sumptuous production design by Thomas E. Sanders, whose darkly colorful sets were inspired by Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
This often entertaining film feels like a mish-mash of overfamiliar elements, falling way short in the wild, weird, what-the-f--was-that department.

Name : David Sims / Alias : The Atlantic
Though Crimson Peak's tone is arch enough that it won't be for everyone, there's definitely a gory, beating heart at its core.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
The setting is spectacular, but its ghosts underwhelm. Kudos to del Toro for bucking the minimalist trend in spooky movies, but his Grand Guignol spirits are so visible they begin to resemble fun-house monsters.

Name : Scott Tobias / Alias : NPR
For genre mavens, the experience is like witnessing the revival of a lost art form.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
At its worst, and best, "Crimson Peak" exists in a weird parallel world where very separate rules of logic apply. It's a true waking nightmare.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
This often entertaining film feels like a mish-mash of overfamiliar elements, falling way short in the wild, weird, what-the-fuck-was-that department.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
"Crimson Peak" is more creepy than scary (despite a couple of gruesomely violent deaths), but del Toro's imagination blooms in every frame.

Name : Katie Rife / Alias : AV Club
Unsurprisingly for a Del Toro film, the production design is the real star of Crimson Peak.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Crimson Peak is a fascinating conundrum of a movie. I was close to hating it as I walked out of the theater, but images and moments from it have stayed with me.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
Aflame with color and awash in symbolism, this undeniably ravishing yet ultimately disappointing haunted-house meller is all surface and no substance, sinking under the weight of its own self-importance into the sanguine muck below.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
You don't go to a del Toro movie for the story (he co-wrote this one with Matthew Robins) or even the characters. You go for his all-encompassing imagery .

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Del Toro's creativity, the joy he finds in splicing together pieces of the movies and books and characters he loves, is hard to resist. This is a film that believes deeply in ghosts, and half of them are in its director's head.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Guillermo del Toro doesn't merely direct movies. He paints them, dreams them, shapes them into private fantasies. Too much? Of course. But that's part of the fun.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"Crimson Peak" is frustrating from nearly every angle. It lets the audience race ahead of the reveals, while struggling to put all that tantalizingly rich atmosphere to effective narrative use.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
The old-fashioned good intentions of "Crimson Peak," like the house at the center of the film, quickly get swallowed up by puddles of bright red goo.

Name : Steve Tilley / Alias : Toronto Sun
It's not particularly creepy, nor all that emotional, nor even (deliberately) silly.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
As even [Del Toro's] last film, the kaiju monster movie Pacific Rim, proved, there may be no better conjurer of color in movies right now. His dreams, and nightmares, are in technicolor.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
Del Toro builds a tight plot but never develops it; his frames are overdecorated with macabre clutter and smothered in shadow, but the atmosphere of dread never reaches ecstatic excesses.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
[It's] certainly unequaled in its field for the beauty of its camerawork, sets, costumes and effects. But it's also conventionally plotted and not surprising or scary at all.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
An extravagantly entertaining ghost story. Hiddleston could be our next Vincent Price.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Del Toro just goes for effect, and the effect he seems to be going for here is something like, "Ew, Guillermo, that's really gross."

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Director Guillermo del Toro's unique visual style is on display but the story is predictable, the characters are flat, and the supernatural elements are red herrings.

Name : Karen D'Souza / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
This haunted house flick has all the discipline and restraint of a Spirit Halloween store. Once the suspense is gone, all that's left is the blood spatter.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
A loving throwback to Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe movies and Hammer's gothic chillers from the '60s, Crimson Peak is a cobwebs-and-candelabras chamber piece that's so preoccupied with being visually stunning it forgets to be scary.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
The insanely lush Gothic romance and ghost story plays like a hitherto unrecorded collaboration between Edgar Allen Poe, Edith Wharton, the designers of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion and whoever directed all those Bonnie Tyler music videos in the 1980s.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
For the two hours it lasted I wasn't asking any questions, only giggling, squirming, screaming, and swooning.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Is it too much? Oh, yeah. But if you like this kind of thing, too much is never enough.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
This gothic horror opus is melodrama most foul, and I mean that in terms of concept and execution, as well.