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

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

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

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

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

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

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 : 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 : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Carolina settings, star-crossed lovers, elements of tragedy: Sparks' formula works. Get out your handkerchiefs, and rest assured that there will be uplift at the end.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Everything in the movie is suffused by a vision of life that is resoundingly and evidently false, but as this vision is not repulsive, but is intended to reassure, the lies don't produce anger or frustration. No, they bring on the laughs.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
The real love story is between Eastwood and David Tattersall's camera, which spends so much time leering over the actor's cheekbones, abs and other attributes that you begin to wonder if someone's going to call Human Resources.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
Eventful, polished, and knuckle-bitingly dull, the 10th film adapted from a novel by Nicholas Sparks, combines fate, bull riding and some powerful Hollywood bloodlines among its young cast.

Name : Connie Ogle / Alias : Miami Herald
Merely adding an older generation of lovers to a love story does not make your romance one for the ages.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
As a romance, a drama, or even a sports movie, The Longest Ride never reaches a satisfying destination.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
"The Longest Ride" treats us to a twist that's so ridiculous I think we're almost supposed to laugh. It's not quite on the "Are you KIDDING ME!?" level of awfulness as the big reveal in "Safe Haven," but it's close. It's close.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The Longest Ride is sentimental, forced and silly, but it's sure to hit the bull's-eye with its intended audience.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The two-plus hours is mostly marked by an emptiness born of scene after scene designed to blatantly manipulate emotions rather than trigger them.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
The young Eastwood is better than you might expect, though it's Chaplin who shines in this Nicholas Sparks romance.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
This is spoon-fed entertainment, but it tastes pretty good.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
It tries to bridge the gap between pop culture and cultural elitism, between high art and the common commodity that everyone else buys tickets to see. A worthy goal, but it results in a movie that has none of the virtues of either.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Conforms to a timeworn, and shopworn, Sparks formula of troubled protagonists receiving wisdom, or inspiration, or both, from unexpected sources.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The Longest Ride has as much bull as the 10 previous Sparks adaptations. This is one of the few you can ride for longer than eight seconds.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
People don't go to Sparks movies for subtlety; they go to warm their hearts by bearing witness to true love. Of course, that requires a story that rings true. In "The Longest Ride," authenticity is in short supply.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Fairly tedious, despite the charm and sincerity of the actors.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Appealing performances by a trio of second- and third-generation Hollywood kids keep this three-hankie twaddle more bearable than it deserves, but "Ride" will surely go the longest with audiences for whom this is not their first Sparks rodeo.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
It runs a long 128 minutes. You have to wade through not just puddles of tears, but also piles of BS.

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
Qualifies as one of the best Sparks films by virtue of not including any love-ghosts or destructive misinformation about how Alzheimer's works.

Name : Barbara VanDenburgh / Alias : Arizona Republic
It's exactly what you'd expect, except executed with more-than-typical competence with the help of a few excellent actors and some gorgeously photographed rodeo scenes that capture the drama and thrill of bull riding.

Name : Sandy Cohen / Alias : Associated Press
The film is likely to satisfy Sparks fans. And it brings something new to the romance genre: bull riding.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Look, it's easy to laugh at this stuff - that's part of the game, in fact. To buy into these movies, you have to buy into the silliness. But The Longest Ride, for all its ridiculousness, comes by its emotions honestly.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
The movie has nowhere to go and spends more than two hours getting there.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Just as the basic plot points are hard to swallow, even the most rudimentary aspects of the characters' interactions feel forced, artificial and unspontaneous.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
It's easy to tease a Nicholas Sparks movie. It's harder to admit that he's good at his niche - and has a string of 10 films, nearly all profitable, to prove it

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Can the ailing Ira help the young lovers work things out in his limited time left on earth - or even afterward? Let's just say Sparks works up to an ending that's as shamelessly preposterous as it is predictable.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
Though Tillman doesn't quite elevate the maudlin material into serious drama, the result is uncommonly sensitive.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
If this is your particular poison, it won't kill you. But anyone averse to Sparks' sappy touch may get sick from all the bull.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : ChristyLemire.com
The Longest Ride is pretty darn tolerable - and sometimes even enjoyable - not just for fans but also for regular people who are, you know, cynical.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Even when Eastwood and Robertson, pleasant enough company, threaten to float off the screen, "The Longest Ride" glides along and delivers its reheated comfort food by the ton.