Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
This time around, the kids have been turned into wind-up figures whose only function - taking the title a tad too literally - is to RUN!

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
If it sounds like there isn't an original thought in The Scorch Trials' scripted head, you're right. But at least you won't be smacking yourself in the head trying to figure out what's going on.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
It's exhausting, yet emotionally unengaging.

Name : Katharine Pushkar / Alias : New York Daily News
Yes, these "Trials" go on too long. But they're never dull, and the kids are always good company.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
The material may be cardboard, but the actors do what they can.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
The young leads lack charisma, and the veteran supporting players seem to be phoning it in.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : RogerEbert.com
"Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials" crams in more lore, supporting characters, backstories and motivations to the extent that it becomes difficult to get a grasp on anything.

Name : Michael Sragow / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The first "Maze Runner" film was a wilderness saga refitted with robotic monsters. "The Scorch Trials" is a "Mad Max" film on foot.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
The teen dystopian franchise continues to play rough, and now even rougher, with satisfying results.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
To wait a movie and a half for a big reveal and have it turn out to be a zombie plague is like waiting until March for your Christmas present, and it turning out to be a three-pack of white Hanes T-shirts.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
With minimal plot development and far too much running around in dark corridors, The Scorch Trials has a poor story:filler ratio. And much of what happens is poorly thought-out.

Name : Tasha Robinson / Alias : AV Club
After an hour and a half of mechanical 10-minute action cycles that start with, "Maybe we're safe now, for the moment," and end with "Aaaah! Run!" the pattern gets as wearying as the level of emotional brutality.

Name : Justin Lowe / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Lacks a . sense of originality and urgency, undercut by overly familiar characterizations and dilatory pacing.

Name : Kevin P. Sullivan / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The Scorch Trials wanders between YA cliches - there's a Resistance, but it's unclear what they're resisting - and zombie movie tropes, with the obligatory a zombie bit our friend scene.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Director Wes Ball's film is a mad dash from one place to the next, with little time in between for rest, recuperation or plot development.

Name : John Williams / Alias : New York Times
The many chases and ludicrous narrow escapes offer respectable doses of adrenaline.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
Maze Runner's action, suspense and twists give movie fans of all ages a chance to embrace their inner on-the-run teenager.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
This story was better off back in the maze.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Essentially, The Scorch Trials makes up for the humdrum YApocalypse of its first half by going a little bonkers in its second.

Name : James Rocchi / Alias : TheWrap
There's no flare of strangeness or freshness here, just a pile of images and ideas stolen from smarter people's second-hand bin banged into each other for a numbingly dull 132 minutes.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Action overflows, some of it neatly staged but none of it telling us anything beyond "Go! Go! Go! Run! Run! Run!" Stay home, stay home.

Name : Andrew Barker / Alias : Variety
The latest 'Maze Runner' movie succeeds well enough as derivative survival-horror-action thrillers go, but makes for an unsatisfying, confusing sequel.

Name : Andrew Parker / Alias : Globe and Mail
The sequel is terrible and all my original criticisms for the first film still stand, but at least it's a more entertaining kind of awful.

Name : Tom Russo / Alias : Boston Globe
The movie may feel tonally consistent with the first, but it's also overlong and thoroughly routine.

Name : Keith Phipps / Alias : AV Club
Gone: the liquid reality of dreams and a sense that anything can happen. In its place: another story of quests, destinies, and chosen ones.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It looks like a CGI head trip gone postapocalyptic. In the film's rather humdrum 3-D, the place doesn't dazzle - it droops.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
It's just hard to know why Mr. Burton, who doesn't seem much interested in Alice, bothered.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
A visually imaginative fairy tale that suffers slightly from its predictable course but still manages to wow at all the crucial moments.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Variety
Alice in Wonderland has its moments of delight, humor and bedazzlement. But it also becomes more ordinary as it goes along, building to a generic battle climax similar to any number of others in CGI-heavy movies of the past few years.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Burton, one of the great visual artists in Hollywood history, is incapable of making an uninteresting movie. Still, I'm not looking forward to the sequel promised in the last scene.

Name : Claire Martin / Alias : Denver Post
Burton and Disney have found a glorious way to interpret fairy tales and fantasies.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
[Depp's] wide eyes and high whimsy feel a bit derivative of his Willy Wonka (another collaboration with Burton), but he invests so much of his ample energy and instinct in these roles that it's hard to complain.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Here's a riddle: What's Alice in Wonderland without wonder? It's a beloved character landing in the rubble of wrong-headed revisionism.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
IBurton and Woolverton pursue a message of self-fulfilment, not as vigorously as they might chase a rabbit but to the same delightful end.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
You leave the theater with a pleasant grin on your face, but by no means is it as wide as the Cheshire Cat's, and that's a shame.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
When it comes to 3-D visual splendors, give me Wonderland over Pandora any day.

Name : Roger Ebert / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Alice plays better as an adult hallucination, which is how Burton rather brilliantly interprets it until a pointless third act flies off the rails.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Carroll purists and freshman English majors may be aghast at the change in story, but for those who watched Avatar and marveled at the images but were left wanting by the wooden acting and tired story, Alice is a treat.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Indecision haunts every frame. The result is a clattering, hectic spectacle that by the end has run out of inspiration. It's a home for abandoned ideas.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
No knockouts here. No tkos, either.

Name : Laremy Legel / Alias : Film.com
Alice in Wonderland is, strangely, about the movie you'd expect based on the talent involved.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
"Frabjous" may be a word Carroll invented, but Burton knows just what it means, at least in his own mind. He's clearly excited to invite us inside, and as long as you're open to so much muchness, you'll be very glad he did.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
Much of Carroll's magical nonsense remains, even if Burton's film wobbles at the gates of anarchy and ends up being a more average affair than many might expect.

Name : Amy Biancolli / Alias : Houston Chronicle
Its single biggest failing - an affront to Lewis Carroll and the charms of nonsense literature - is the fact that it makes sense.

Name : Thomas Rogers / Alias : Salon.com
I found myself trying so hard to like Alice in Wonderland that the process of watching it exhausted me.

Name : J. Hoberman / Alias : Village Voice
The new Alice is casually absurd, off-handed in its violence, and doggedly on message. The movie is not just three-dimensional but blatantly programmatic.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small, and the pills Tim Burton gives you don't do very much at all.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Alice in Wonderland isn't quite the natural fit of director and material that it seemed to be on paper, but most of Burton's recent movies have been far more disappointing.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
The sweetly surreal feeling of those original books has been lost. What always felt like an English garden party gone slightly off has been replaced by the grotesque and the Gothic and the overdone.

Name : Rick Groen / Alias : Globe and Mail
The true three-dimensionality here is the old-fashioned kind - Wasikowska's fully rounded performance. Throughout the technical razzle-dazzle, we keep returning to the pallor of that face, the gravity in those eyes.

Name : Christopher Rosen / Alias : New York Observer
It might be time for Johnny Depp and Tim Burton to start thinking about seeing other people.

Name : Roger Moore / Alias : Orlando Sentinel
Purists will squeal, but it's a workable and watchable liberty to take with an oft-filmed yet impossible to film novel.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : I.E. Weekly
"Curiouser and curiouser," says Alice in Tim Burton's latest, and for the first time I don't believe her.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Though it has a few moments where you can see Burton's imagination giving way to Disney convention, along with a bit of trademark Burton darkness, the pleasures of Alice are virtually always unexpected.

Name : James Rocchi / Alias : MSN Movies
Combines the heavy-handed clamminess of unneeded brand remarketing with the hateful hollowness of overdone and empty computer-generated imagery. . With Burton's uninspired, underdone and underwritten version, you only feel like you're watching money.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
So how's the movie? Mostly frabjous. The visual palette is more artfully riotous than that of other Alice films, the performances more zestful.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Burton, bless him, knows you can't CG a soul.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : At the Movies
A really interesting movie.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
It's a workmanlike effort that will enchant all but the youngest children while holding the interest of parents. That, by definition, makes for a worthwhile family outing.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Its best and strangest interludes assert Burton's skills as a fantasist, as well as Depp's as a squirrely, inventive character actor.

Name : Carrie Rickey / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Carroll purists are likely to dismiss this Alice as spuriouser and spuriouser. But who expects a faithful adaptation of a literary classic from Timothy Beetlejuice?

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
A film adaptation should, of course, treat its source material as inspiration rather than dogma. But did Burton have to get the books so entirely wrong?

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
Though Burton's film boasts some excellent performances, as the caterpillar says to our heroine, it's merely "almost Alice."

Name : Michael Rechtshaffen / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A fantastical romp that proves every bit as transporting as that movie about the blue people of Pandora, his Alice is more than just a gorgeous 3D sight to behold.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
In its big-budget extraordinariness, Alice is awfully.ordinary.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Even Disney and a PG rating can't bury Burton's subversive wit. Like Carroll, he's a master at dressing up psychic wounds in fantasy.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
A succession of chases and fanciful combats, more akin to Dungeons & Dragons than to Carroll, leads to a peculiarly truncated climax. The 3-D effects are enjoyable, but the added depth can't make up for deficits in the concept or the plot.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Even considering the liberties Burton has taken with the original text, it's tempting to think that Carroll himself would consider him an altogether frabjous match.