Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
An acclaimed film director, a legendary comic actor, lots of fun rock and pop songs, and a noble story at its core can't save "Rock the Kasbah" from being one hugely misguided dud.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
A white-savior showbiz fable of a particularly dubious and retrograde variety.

Name : Natalie Daher / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It fumbles a bit by prioritizing the goofy antics of its white cast over what turns out to be a smart depiction of non-Western life.

Name : Tasha Robinson / Alias : AV Club
A comedy that's openly afraid to seem too sincere or too mawkish, and doesn't fully commit either to its comedy or its uplift. Like Murray, it's wry and presented largely in air quotes, with an accompanying eye-roll.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
Not Murray's best and not Levinson's either.

Name : David Lewis / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Murray does his best to hold up the movie, but there's only so much he can do. Ultimately, his latest fish out of water never makes it back upstream.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Rock the Kasbah, does not rock at all - not even a little bit.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
"Rock the Kasbah" is the mausoleum where comedy was buried.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Murray, idiosyncratic as always, dominates, but his performance can't save this misconceived mess.

Name : Mark Jenkins / Alias : NPR
Rock the Kasbah's timing is so slack, and its screenplay so shapeless, that the movie doesn't even rise to the level of an Afghan-war Stripes. It's almost as laugh-free as the latest news from Kunduz.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Your enjoyment of all this will probably depend heavily on your willingness to let the words romp and Taliban coexist for approximately two hours.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
Levinson never seems to know what to point his camera at, or when to cut, and Glazer never seems to know when to leave a joke alone and let the cast work.

Name : Randy Cordova / Alias : Arizona Republic
There might be a decent movie in here somewhere, if the focus had been on the right character.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Quite possibly [Murray's] worst movie ever.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
This movie is all over the place.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Rock the Kasbah morphs into a pretty implausible feel-good movie that's nearly as maudlin as it is unconvincing.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
As one-liner after one-liner misses its mark, you begin to feel sorry for Murray, who's really too old to be playing a guy who has a little daughter . and likes to get kinky with Kate Hudson as a raucous, Dolly Parton-style hooker-businesswoman.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
A lot of the actor's usual mercurial charm isn't used to full effect and is actually tempered when it doesn't feel like it should be.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
For every moment of desert beauty, or insight into the twilight economies that flourish in a war zone, there's a key scene that appears truncated or even missing.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
An ongoing war is no setting for a musical comedy, especially one this glib and inane.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
This dismal comedy, scripted by Murray's old pal Mitch Glazer (Scrooged), evinces only enough interest in Afghanis to keep the story rolling.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
It's a movie that's half-over before it tells us what it's really about.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Cliched, enervating, insulting - it's tough to settle on a single pejorative for "Rock the Kasbah," though abysmal might do.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : TIME Magazine
Its music-industry gags sit awkwardly next to war-zone jokes and cultural quips, landing all involved on a peace train to nowhere.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
If it were any worse, they'd be screening it as evidence at The Hague.

Name : Andrew Barker / Alias : Variety
Bill Murray heads to Afghanistan in director Barry Levinson's dreadfully misguided farce.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Rock the Kasbah goes fierce to quietly touching and back to funny again.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Bill Murray is Bill Murray is Bill Murray in a comedy that's little more than a schtick delivery system with some third-act personal growth thrown in for good measure.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
The movie wants to be both glib and emotionally resonant, but it can't seem to figure out what the stakes are - even as people are getting shot.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
It needs a smarter script. It needs at least two or three perfectly engineered, joke-after-joke sequences. It needs a smart director - did you really do "Wag the Dog," Levinson? - whose idea of political satire goes beyond freshman-year sarcasm.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Some projects are just too misguided for the star to mug and shrug his way out of. Consider Rock the Kasbah at the top, or the bottom, of that list.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
"The Overnighters" is commendable for many reasons, not the least of which is the way it allows complex issues to remain complex. There is a clear conflict between the pastor and the town, but there's no good vs. evil.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
It develops into a study of obsession, hypocrisy, righteousness and self-doubt, questioning motive and then gob-smacking the audience with the wholly unexpected.

Name : David Lewis / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Moss was basically a one-man production crew, which explains how he was able to film such intimate, painful conversations. His work is haunting - one of the best documentaries of the year.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
So much of "The Overnighters" tells all sorts of truths, and Moss earned the trust of his subjects, whatever they might think of the result.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
[A] tough-minded, admirably unresolved film .

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Filmmaker Jesse Moss frames his shots beautifully; the landscapes look like Andrew Wyeth paintings.

Name : Trevor Johnston / Alias : Time Out
An urgent portrait of compassion under fire.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
A sobering must-see, The Overnighters speaks to the eternal dilemma of doing the right thing in a community beset by suspicion and fear.

Name : Lisa Kennedy / Alias : Denver Post
Moss uses images of drill towers or blistering flame as visual metaphors for other things transpiring on screen: the fracturing of a family, the heated fury that comes with a sense of betrayal.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
The Overnighters sounds like the sort of dry news blurb you'd skim over in the Sunday paper, but it unfolds into an epic tragedy.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
If John Steinbeck were writing in the second decade of the 21st century, "The Overnighters" is precisely the story he'd want to tell.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Moss uncovers something greater than a vision of a divided community; he's made a drama as prickly and surprising as any fictional character study.

Name : Jeannette Catsoulis / Alias : New York Times
Composed of multiple layers - more than one of which might bring tears to your eyes - this shape-shifting documentary begins as one thing and ends as quite another.

Name : David Rooney / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A scenario with present-day echoes of "The Grapes of Wrath" yields perceptive insights into the way we view outsiders.

Name : Sheri Linden / Alias : Los Angeles Times
It's the rare documentary in which truly unpredictable events unfold and no assumption is safe.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
The movie might seem like just another liberal do-gooder profile, yet a shocker ending throws new and disturbing light on the situation, amplifying the Christian themes at the heart of the story.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
Through patience, skill, discretion, and trust, Jesse Moss has taken a seemingly small town story and turned it into both a microcosm of today's most urgent issues and a portrait of a single suffering soul.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
A classic example of a documentary that discovers its subject in the process of its making.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
The film features stunning third-act revelations that compel viewers to rethink its characters' actions and motivations.