Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
There are no surprises or hitherto untapped resources mined here.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : MTV
A girl-power comedy with a bold twist: The timid heroine blossoms in Afghanistan, one of the most female-unfriendly countries on earth.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
By the time Fey is able to say the words, "This is not about you," the comedy owns the feminism it always had. The war scenes are only so-so, but it wins a bigger battle.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Tina Fey is the biggest asset but even she's not sufficient to make it worth more than a marginal recommendation and a suggestion to wait until it shows up on home video.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
If this role isn't remembered as THE signature moment when we came to think of Tina Fey as an award-level dramatic actor as well as an iconic comic force, it's a substantial step in that direction.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : TIME Magazine
Should a movie about reporting from such a deeply troubled country really be this entertaining?

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
The filmmaking fails to draw this material together in a cohesive way, and the resulting fragmentation feels more like a side effect than a skillful style choice.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
There aren't enough movies in which Tina Fey fires an AK-47 while grinning maniacally.

Name : Scott Tobias / Alias : NPR
The laughs are scattered, the emotions are muted, and the politics are largely toothless. Yet it still doesn't take much squinting to see the M*A*S*H that might have been.

Name : Nicolas Rapold / Alias : New York Times
The film . rests in a tidiness that's at odds with the messiness of the milieu. And even when we are exposed to glimpses of wartime violence and menace, it's undercut by fuzzy platitudes near the end of the film.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
I found it flawed but fascinating, and a no-fail showcase for Tina Fey's real talents as a serious actress. Best of all, this movie is never boring for a single minute.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
It wobbles in terms of an authentic feel, yet there's no doubt Fey succeeds in her most serious big-screen outing yet.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
That Tina Fey is funny is a given. That she gets inside the tangled mind of a complex woman on a perpetual hot seat is something new.

Name : Molly Eichel / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot isn't a great movie, but it is something rare and important: a woman's story of self-discovery - having nothing to do with her finding a husband - that has gotten room on the big screen.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
An efficient wartime dramedy about middle-aged restlessness and the bubbles we build to distract ourselves from real life.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" is a likable construction that points its star in a new direction without ever quite making a point.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Tina Fey, the film's producer and star, keeps getting better and better in each of those positions. Here she hits a new high mark in both.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
The film itself feels uncertain, compromised and tentative. Those are very different qualities than brash, or bracing, or provocative.

Name : Simon Houpt / Alias : Globe and Mail
A war-set comedy-drama as messy and ineffective as an Afghan suicide donkey.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
The filmmakers keep to the surface of the bluntly rowdy story while conveying apolitical layers of regret and exasperation, in wanly comic and affectingly melodramatic action alike.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
Writer and actress tilt between insecurity and bravado, employing dry, observational humour tinged with occasional sentimental flashes only outwardly out of character.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Fey has her moments, and so does "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot." But for a performer who still deserves some big-screen respect, her war-movie comedy still feels a little small-screen, a little timid, a little safe.

Name : Connie Ogle / Alias : Miami Herald
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is entertaining sometimes, but if you're looking for any real insight, you're looking in the wrong place.

Name : Preston Jones / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Fey and the cast try to anchor Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which was shot in New Mexico, a not-entirely convincing double for Afghanistan. Despite everyone's best efforts, the end result is a war in which everyone - and especially the audience - loses.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot doesn't serve [Fey] fully, but this is her best work yet on the feature screen. It's a pleasure to see her come into her own as a movie star while playing a woman who must travel far afield to discover her strength and courage.

Name : Mara Reinstein / Alias : Us Weekly
In her most impressive role to date, Tina Fey plays a journalist in the throes of an identity crisis. Alas, her movie has one too.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
True to its title, as well as its flawed but sympathetic protagonist, "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" is more confused than cynical or opportunistic. Its bewilderment is contagious, and ultimately endearing.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
A scattered comedy-drama with few laughs and even fewer insights.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Strange movie. And despite the presence of Tina Fey playing its lead character, a cable-TV reporter named Kim Baker, it's not a funny one.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
"Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" is by far Tina Fey's best movie. It makes use of her comic sense, but also of her watchful wariness and underlying wistfulness.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
It's wiser than the confusion its title suggests, and it pushes Fey toward a film career that's as uncompromising, unpredictable and intelligent as her TV work.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Thanks to Fey, as well as the other actors, it has grit. But it doesn't have teeth.

Name : Melissa Anderson / Alias : Village Voice
WTF is essentially Eat Pray Love for embeds, filled with jokes and sight gags that are repeated to ever stonier spectator silence.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa move things along fast enough to keep [the problem aspects] from sinking in too deeply, and star Tina Fey holds the spotlight with aplomb.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
There's a sharp comedy to be made about America's misadventures in Afghanistan. This isn't it.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
The movie plays like a global-political farce made by people who've never left the Upper West Side.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
I was rooting for it so hard that I told myself I liked it even as it missed one mark after another. But in the end it's just shapeless and apolitical.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
The movie never quite shakes off a glib, incurious outsider's perspective that can tilt into outright cluelessness, particularly where some of its more egregious casting choices are concerned.

Name : Leah Pickett / Alias : Chicago Reader
The questions posed about journalistic ethics, personal integrity, and the problematic high of wartime reporting are all worth considering.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
What work better in the movie are mostly smaller moments: the jokes that land, the rapport between the reporters, and all the weirdly ordinary ways people manage to find a new normal, even in the most WTF circumstances.

Name : Will Leitch / Alias : The New Republic
Tina Fey grounds the movie in something real, something urgent and human, and she nearly single-handedly saves the movie from itself. The movie itself isn't particularly serious, but she sure as hell is.

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.