Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
"Everest" is nothing but a long, slow climb. Without any peaks.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
With its rigorous attention to the technical details of mountain climbing and its sensitive handling of the characters' relationships, it has a you-are-there immediacy unmatched by previous Everest movies.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
It never seems to get anywhere, taking up space and time without managing to be especially memorable or imposing.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
"Everest" is a sprawling mess of a movie, one you feel like could have been great but instead roams all over the place and winds up being just pretty good.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
A man vs. nature epic more realistic than most.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
As it turns out, Imax 3-D works better for yaks than it does for people.

Name : Jacob Hall / Alias : New York Daily News
Like the mountain for which it's named, "Everest" is rock solid. It's big, it's beautiful, it's terrifying, and it's merciless to both its characters and the audience.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
A white-knuckle survival film with an outstanding cast.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Filled with stunning visuals and featuring more than a half-dozen of our best actors delivering solid performances. even though at times it's difficult to distinguish one climber from the next.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
The toggling between the base and various points along the way to the summit becomes stressful, then heartbreaking.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
The climbing sequences, which take up the bulk of the movie, pack a visceral punch.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
With a harrowing story to tell, and this many characters, it's a given that character development will be sketchy. The good news is that this cast is capable of turning a little into a lot.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Unlike many mountain-disaster stories, this is the kind that makes you never want to look at a mountain again.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
For all the natural spectacle, the characters are what hold one's attention.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
No one pays IMAX ticket prices for nuanced human drama, and the film's dizzying climbing scenes and vertiginous don't-look-down moments are what give it its heart-quickening power.

Name : Katie Rife / Alias : AV Club
The best argument in favor of what otherwise would be a pointlessly cruel loss of human life are the sweeping, heart-stoppingly beautiful mountain vistas. (See this one in IMAX if you can.)

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
So imposing is the mountain, and so realistically rendered by Salvatore Totino's camera (plus CGI imaging), it threatens to dwarf any attempt to bring a human element to the tale.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
If this oft-told tale of courage and folly is seen as a summit to be achieved, the script not only never makes it to base camp but seldom rises above sea level.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
Fictionalized accounts of real tragedy are not impenetrable. James Cameron made us feel for a ship full of characters we'd never met. "Everest" can't break that seal, and it's a handicap.

Name : Patrick Dunn / Alias : Detroit News
"Everest" is a truly spectacular experience that deserves to be seen on the grandest scale possible.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
Although hardly a peak achievement, Baltasar Kormakur's Himalayan epic is a properly grueling, strikingly unsentimental chronicle of the 1996 Mount Everest tragedy.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
In 3D IMAX, a dizzying visual adventure that will knock the wind out of you. As personal drama, not so much.

Name : Kate Taylor / Alias : Globe and Mail
There is no tragic hero here; there is no overarching explanation, but a movie that offered either of those would seem pretty pat.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
With its perilous central premise and gallery of individuals some of whom are destined not to make it, you could say Everest is a disaster movie in the old Hollywood sense of the term, but it doesn't feel like one. And that's a good thing.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Everest is visually splendid, though it loses a few points for its murkiness in rendering its main characters as distinct individuals.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
Its screenwriters . have Gladiator and 127 Hours to their names, and Everest combines the muscular, sometimes sentimental force of the former with the sense of physical endurance that made the latter so successful.

Name : Tom Russo / Alias : Boston Globe
An all-star disaster movie lineup makes a surprising showing in the mountaineering thriller "Everest," combining to deliver the sort of restrained drama you might expect from a much smaller film.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
"Everest" gets several things right, but it fails to find a way to make the average viewer relate to the people on the mountain.

Name : Peter Hartlaub / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Kormakur never quite latches on to the dramatic momentum. The pacing problems are compounded by some confusion in terms of mistakes that were made, and a difficulty identifying actors through the blizzard.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Everest takes an inordinate amount of time to get the pieces in place. However, once the group departs base camp and begins the ascent, the film sloughs off its slow pace and transforms into a gripping tale of survival, life, and death.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Even before the air gets fatally thin, the thinness of the characterizations presents a liability.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
"Everest," in short, suffers from the same problem as Everest: overcrowding.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Tries and fails to spin too many plates. Each of those real-life climbers no doubt had an interesting story to tell, but when shoved together like this they're all reduced to types rather than people.