Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
This harrowing and intimate character study offers fairly blunt insights into the physical and psychological toll exacted on the front lines, yet strikes even its familiar notes with a sobering clarity .

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A taut, vivid and sad account of the brief life of the most accomplished marksman in American military annals, American Sniper feels very much like a companion piece-in subject, theme and quality-to The Hurt Locker.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
After 40 years of Hollywood counterpropaganda telling us war is necessarily corrupting and malign, its ablest practitioners thugs, loons or victims, "American Sniper" nobly presents the case for the other side.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The film's just a repetition of context-free combat missions and one-dimensional targets.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
American Sniper lifts director Clint Eastwood out of the doldrums that have plagued his last few films.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Mr. Eastwood's film lets this good and anguished man speak for himself, and discover himself, at his own pace.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
"The result is not unlike watching a suspenseful but highly repetitive video game, especially since nearly every Iraqi is seen through Kyle's highly perched rifle scope."

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
The best movies are ever-shifting, intelligent and open-hearted enough to expand alongside an audience. "American Sniper," Clint Eastwood's harrowing meditation on war, is built on this foundation of uncommon compassion.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Clint Eastwood has directed war movies before, but never one that focused on a single warrior. And he has an amazing one here .

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Though it never uses the term "PTSD," American Sniper, at its best, is a devastating portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Name : Preston Jones / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
But the adrenaline can't replace perception, and despite Eastwood's deft staging of the Iraqi scenes, they don't bring viewers any closer to understanding why Kyle insists on repeatedly returning to the war zones.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Eastwood's impeccably crafted action sequences so catch us up in the chaos of combat we are almost not aware that we're watching a film at all.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out New York
Just as only Nixon could go to China, only Clint Eastwood could make a movie about an Iraq War veteran and infuse it with doubts, mission anxiety and ruination.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
It's clearly Cooper's show. Substantially bulked up and affecting a believable Texas drawl, Cooper embodies Kyle's confidence, intensity and vulnerability.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
Both a devastating war movie and a devastating antiwar movie, a subdued celebration of a warrior's skill and a sorrowful lament over his alienation and misery.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Less a war movie than a western - the story of a lone gunslinger facing down his nemesis in a dusty, lawless place - it is blunt and effective, though also troubling.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Cautiously, Eastwood has chosen to omit Kyle's self-mythologizing altogether, which is itself a distortion of his character. We're not watching a biopic.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
This movie is drowning in duty - to say nothing of hoary storytelling devices and one embarrassing scene after the next for Sienna Miller as Mrs. Kyle.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
It's a gritty, confident portrait of a man whose life may have been somewhat messier than this Hollywood version.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
There's no freshness in either the domestic scenes or the combat sequences.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Bradley Cooper, as Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, and director Eastwood salute Kyle's patriotism best by not denying its toll. Their targets are clearly in sight, and their aim is true.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
As a piece of direction, it's as taut as anything [Eastwood's] ever done.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Cooper nails the role of an American killing machine in Clint Eastwood's clear-eyed look at the Iraq War.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
American Sniper is imperfect and at times a little corny, but also ambivalent and complicated in ways that are uniquely Eastwoodian.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
At 162 minutes, "American Honey" may test some viewers' patience, but for this one, it paid off with an unflinching portrait of middle America, a love letter to the open road and a dynamic newcomer in Sasha Lane.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : TIME Magazine
Over and over, American Honey calls attention to how observant it is, rather than just being observant.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The camera races and races to keep this fast and furious young woman locked in its sights, turning her into an object of both pursuit and contemplation.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Just when you think you know what's going to happen, the film serves up one more surprise.

Name : Guy Lodge / Alias : Variety
It's constantly, engrossingly active, spinning and sparking and exploding in cycles like a Fourth of July catherine wheel.

Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
It works best as a rowdy ensemble piece-sort of a co-ed, mobile, present-day version of Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some, examining the frayed bonds created among newly formed adults with few responsibilities.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
It probes the murk and terror beneath the surface of contemporary life, and illuminates the vital role of ignorance, poor judgment and wishful thinking in our national character.

Name : Danny King / Alias : Village Voice
Most of American Honey sees Arnold either mounting vague attempts at naturalistic detail or satisfying more facile, disingenuous instincts.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
For the most part it succeeds, gorgeously - though it will probably make anyone over 30 feel either mildly outraged or wildly irrelevant.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Lane is everything Arnold must have hoped she'd be. The longing is in her eyes, but her mouth, with its thick upper lip, suggests skepticism and a healthy self-possession.

Name : David Sims / Alias : The Atlantic
Thanks to Lane's natural magnetism and the director Andrea Arnold's remarkable empathy for her subjects, it's required viewing.

Name : Jesse Hassenger / Alias : AV Club
Plenty of recent films can claim Terrence Malick as an influence, but Arnold is one of the few filmmakers who takes that intuitive style in a fresh direction-who builds on it, rather than repeating its contemplative whispers.

Name : Allen Salkin / Alias : New York Daily News
This shimmering, raw, hip-hop hymnal of a film by Andrea Arnold is an American tale that is both gorgeously original and rooted in some of the greatest stories this country has ever produced.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
A bold film, full of energy and spunk, but a patchy, half-formed, rambling one too.

Name : David Rooney / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A road movie without a map that nonetheless arrives at a worthwhile destination.