Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Johnny Depp does career-best work as notorious Boston gangster James 'Whitey' Bulger in Scott Cooper's taut, elegantly understated crime drama.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Black Mass, a down and dirty crime drama based on the exploits of Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger, is thrilling for a number of reasons.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
The movie's good enough that you should see it if you want to. But you don't have to, and, in these parts, that matters.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Black Mass struggles to find something new to say about organized crime and the loyalty between men. But the only thing the film manages to do is remind us we've seen all this stuff done before, and done better.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
It's as if the spirit of a psychopath like Bulger resists the camera. Or maybe the movie isn't imaginative enough to penetrate his shell.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Black Mass is a tightly wound piece of work, and Cooper keeps its many small parts moving with ease.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
The acting in "Black Mass" is tremendous.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
In scene after scene, some fine actors go to town and dive into the material gratefully.

Name : Tony Hicks / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
"Black Mass" is a riveting character study and might land Depp an Oscar nomination, even if the film itself is not very ambitious.

Name : Bruce Kirkland / Alias : Toronto Sun
Propelled by a raw and primal performance by Johnny Depp, Scott Cooper's Black Mass will have you barricading your doors and hiding under the bed after seeing this corrosive gangster film.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
The role is Depp's best in many years, and a welcome respite from the parade of prancing pseudo-villains-Mortdecai, the Wolf, Barnabas Collins, Jack Sparrow, Willy Wonka-to which he has devoted far too much of his career.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
What "Black Mass" gains in moral honesty, it loses in dramatic momentum. Even filmmakers and actors as fine as these haven't managed to solve one of cinema's most enduring challenges - making criminals interesting without exalting them.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
Black Mass isn't The Departed, and it's a bit too black and white. But movie mobster fans can relax, cause the movie doesn't need to have a hit taken out on it.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
This is the sort of movie Sidney Lumet might have made in his prime - intelligently written, handsomely mounted, and loaded with top actors.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
For Black Mass, Johnny Depp has dusted off his A-game, which has lain dormant for far too long.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
With all the talent on board here, expectations go beyond creepiness; unfortunately creepiness is about as far as the movie ultimately goes.

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
Black Mass more or less limits itself to procedural status. Within those aims, it's a pretty good one, absorbing and well-made.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
This is a good, solid, well-executed crime story. Nothing more, nothing less.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
If there's a problem with Black Mass, it's that the general arc of the story is well known.its details reflect the plot points of many other gangster films. But it's the getting there that's the thrill.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
This is Depp bringing his skills to the table as a man with a propensity for being both terrifying and charming, often switching between the two on a dime.

Name : Peter Hartlaub / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
"Black Mass" is a solid piece of filmmaking, from subtle beginning to the excessive end.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It's a very good film about a very bad man. But as well-crafted and well-acted as it is, it never rises to greatness because we've been watching this story in one way or another going back to the time of Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
[Depp] holds the screen as pure malevolence.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
I'm as susceptible as any other deskbound, conflict-averse fantasist to the visceral appeal of a good gangster movie. But "Black Mass" isn't one.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
A crime drama that creeps and drips blood like a horror movie, and in many respects it is.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Black Mass" is the sort of gangland film you would call run of the mill, if only it dashed faster.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Depp's performance as Bulger is as strong, and as energized, as anything he's done on screen for years.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
While there's nothing totally new here, Black Mass works the tropes extremely well and sets the scene early in the mean streets of 1970s South Boston.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
Johnny Depp is more engaging than he's been in years, even if his performance can feel a little restricted and one-note.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
There are moments of icy violence, and some great lived-in faces among the characters. But this is no "Goodfellas." It's just another punk, talking tough.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The acting here is much stronger and more soulful than I would have expected, and not only from Depp.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
How much longer must we subscribe, as moviegoers, to the sentimental brotherhood of violence?

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
"Black Mass" isn't pretty, but it certainly is strong.

Name : Jocelyn Noveck / Alias : Associated Press
It's absolutely chilling to watch Depp. With bad teeth and a head of dramatically receding hair, the actor somewhat resembles Jack Nicholson in The Departed but deftly avoids caricature as he grows more sinister with every murder.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Depp's brutal antihero is the highlight of this compelling if somewhat familiar gangster movie.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
A bleak, claustrophobic based-on-fact film that draws us completely into a dark world of crime and complicity.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
You forgive the zigs, zags, evasions and subplots for the hardcore power of Depp's performance and the film's portrait of moral rot on both sides of the law.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Welcome back to the real world, Mr. Depp.

Name : Barry Hertz / Alias : Globe and Mail
Whenever Depp is on screen, nothing else matters.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Depp shines in a solid gangster biopic.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
It's one of those movies that you don't exactly enjoy (so many guns, so many deaths), but you appreciate for its craft and tension, and for its cast's willingness to lose themselves in the darkness.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Timothy Spall gives an admirably warty and unpleasant performance as Turner, an arrogant and uncompromising man who's annoyed by his celebrity in Britain but shocked when the public turns against his work.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The sprawling, loosely structured 2 1/2 hour drama has some of the year's most stunning visuals, many of which appear as artfully composed scenes in Turner's work.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Epic in breadth and length (2 1/2 hours), and gorgeously photographed (digitally) by Bill Pope, Mr. Turner is intimate in incident.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
A portrait of the artist as visionary oddball, for whom life was an endless source of both beauty and the irritating distractions blocking his view of said beauty.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
"Mr. Turner" is a harsh, strange, but stirring movie, no more a conventional artist's bio-pic than Robert Altman's wonderful, little-seen film about van Gogh and his brother, "Vincent and Theo."

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
With his incomparable Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh continues to make other directors look simpleminded.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Without a speck of pomposity Leigh's film - one of the year's best - honors its subject in all his tetchy ambiguity.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
It's not a pretty portrait of the artist. But it is a real one.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Mike Leigh takes on the topsy-turvy life of J.M.W. Turner in an exquisitely detailed, brilliantly acted biopic.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Timothy Spall - best known to mainstream audiences as Wormtail in the Harry Potter series - delivers an Oscar-caliber tour de force reminiscent of Charles Laughton

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
J.M.W. Turner, arguably the greatest of British painters, was an uncommonly difficult man, and "Mr. Turner," the exceptional film Mike Leigh has made about him, does not do things the easy way either.

Name : Katie Kilkenny / Alias : The Atlantic
A gorgeous, important film.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Despite his own failings and faults, Leigh and Spall's Turner is a man consumed by the search for truth and beauty, even in the midst of the less than pretty truths of his times.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Leigh shows us the world as Turner sees it-harsh and ravishing. His beauty of a movie touches the heart not by sentimental gush but by the amplitude of its art.​

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
The gap between the celestial art of the great English romantic painter Joseph Mallord William Turner and the brutish details of his life is vividly explored in Mike Leigh's tragicomic movie Mr. Turner.

Name : Keith Staskiewicz / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
To use a word often associated with Turner and his art, it's sublime.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
This is less your standard-issue biopic than a foray into the mystery of human feeling.

Name : Leslie Felperin / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Mr. Turner manages to illuminate that nexus between biography and art with elegant understatement.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
It's a painfully uneven movie, but its best moments are ravishingly good.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
Timothy Spall - a veteran of Mike Leigh's films - plays this eccentric, determined London bohemian like a bronchial, cantankerous, randy old toad with backache.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
Spall may make a grotesque of Turner - piggish, rutting, whoring - but he finds such incandescence in the world around him. And director Mike Leigh lets you see that incandescence as Turner saw it: Everywhere.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
A vacuous endurance test about an abstract loser.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Any expectations of reverential biography are quickly dispelled by Mr. Leigh's sharp, scintillating script and Mr. Spall's uncanny daring.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Keen observer Mike Leigh brings his hawk's eye to a vibrant rendering of J.M.W. Turner, the celebrated British "painter of light."

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
Leigh and lead Timothy Spall make full use of their canvas, creating a sprawling portrayal of a wonderfully messy personality.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Writing about Mr. Turner a few weeks after seeing it, I feel a craving to be again immersed in its world, which is rich with colors, textures, and, it sometimes almost seems, smells .

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
"Mr. Turner" is a rich, ruthless and profoundly compassionate study of life and love and art, for those who find themselves on its wavelength, but it also presents itself as a challenge.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Failure isn't only the province of the lazy and uninspired. No, even the gifted and conscientious must occasionally take a stroll through that blasted landscape, and with Mr. Turner Leigh does it, for 2 1/2 hours. Don't go with him.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Mr. Turner" is a rich portrait of England at a particularly scabrous period.

Name : Sasha Stone / Alias : TheWrap
As is usual with any Mike Leigh film - a style unique and trademarked by now - his ensemble is a collection of remarkably adept actors who know their characters so well they could stay in character for weeks, continually improvising, as they often do.

Name : Bill Zwecker / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
I can't say enough about the power of Spall's performance.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
"Mr. Turner" is a mighty work of critical imagination, a loving, unsentimental portrait of a rare creative soul.