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.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
This movie really moves. But a fleet of tanks couldn't help the brothers Dowdle push past the plot holes in the screwiest mix of suspense and stereotypes since Michael Bay was a pup

Name : Stephen Dalton / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Dowdle delivers enough adrenalized tension to maintain his track record of profitable, populist pulp.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
Writer-director John Eric Dowdle makes the street action propulsive, bewildering and terrifyingly real, and things are just getting warmed up.

Name : Kevin P. Sullivan / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Even ignoring the racism-which is pretty much impossible-No Escape is a cliche-ridden, artless relic.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
A taut thriller about an American family touching down in an unnamed country just as a violent coup erupts, No Escape goes about its gut-churning business by playing (and preying) on our worst xenophobic tendencies.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
There's no fleeing the clunkiness in "No Escape."

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
If you've really been wanting to see endless shots of Owen Wilson running, sometimes while carrying a medium-sized child, the thriller "No Escape" might be just for you.

Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Supersize your popcorn, check your logic at the door and settle in for a pretty good ride.

Name : Julia Cooper / Alias : Globe and Mail
Whatever seeds of social justice and emotional nuance No Escape may be attempting to sow are undercut by the film's melodramatic valorization of family values.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
I won't make a case for No Escape being a good film; the first half is pretty good and the second half ranges from pretty bad to truly awful.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
In terms of pure popcorn escapism, No Escape delivers from the get-go, cutting to the chase without belabouring the character details.

Name : Michael Granberry / Alias : Dallas Morning News
A nearly two-hour thrill ride that, tired cliche that it is, really does keep you on the edge of your seat.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
Dowdle sticks closely to the family's perspective, for better and for worse; though fairly effective at conveying their terror, he fails to establish any sort of social or political context for the story.

Name : Daniel M. Gold / Alias : New York Times
Among the most terrifying scenes is an early shot of Mr. Brosnan in the hotel bar, shouting lyrics to a Huey Lewis tune. Oh, the horror.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
No Escape is a tense but utterly predictable exercise in Western xenophobic paranoia and guilt.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Between the script and the superior editing by Elliot Greenberg, there's an enormous amount of tension and thrills to be found here; unfortunately, they're all in the service of a movie that's reprehensible to the core.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
A thoroughly ugly film for an audience that doesn't care who's shooting whom.

Name : Walter V. Addiego / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Strict plausibility isn't necessary in these movies, but you can't just throw it out the window, and "No Escape" shows why.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
No Escape is an outlandish, sometimes brutally violent, exploitative, fast-paced white-knuckler featuring your classic American everyman who suddenly develops action-hero skills when his family is placed in danger.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
No Escape is pretty trashy, but it held my attention, which is more than I can say for most of the summer fodder.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Bang, boom, bam. That's about the size of things in No Escape, a movie banking on its admittedly first-rate action drowning out its political tone-deafness.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
This isn't lightweight, fanciful entertainment; it's tense, white-knuckle material.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
Taut, well-made and entirely dubious.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
Despite its illegible chase scenes, awkward slow-motion shots, and fumbling attempts at political commentary, No Escape manages to be intermittently interesting, thanks to an off-beat supporting turn from Pierce Brosnan.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
A technically accomplished, morally rank slab of cultural exploitation .

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
Every Asian character is either a ruthless murderer or anonymous collateral damage. A lot of locals have to die, the film suggests, in order for one white family to survive.