Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
If 5 Flights Up is worth seeing, it's primarily for the pleasure of Keaton and Freeman's company, plus maybe for some tips on buying and selling an apartment.

Name : Isabella Biedenharn / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Based on Jill Ciment's wry novel Heroic Measures, the film is at its best when it sticks with the everyday .

Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
5 Flights Up is a sweet film with a few nicely turned lines, some good jokes, and some very lovely dialogue. But it's not much more than fluff and air.

Name : John Hartl / Alias : Seattle Times
The movie ends just as you expected it to end, and there are almost no surprises along the way.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton have unexpectedly great chemistry in this warm and funny comedy about a couple who contemplate leaving a walk-up apartment in Brooklyn they've occupied for their entire 40-year marriage.

Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
What a pleasure to see a simple, finely tuned dramedy about real adults with real emotions in a real-life situation.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Sometimes you see a play and you can imagine it being a movie. Sometimes you see a small movie like this, and you can imagine it working better as an intimate stage play.

Name : Gerry O / Alias : Kid First
From the story line, it may seem that this film will be boring to kids. But, when I started watching this film I fell in love with it. Morgan Freeman's perfect timing of jokes and Diane Keeton's wonderful and priceless emotions make this film entertaining and heartfelt from the very start to the last second. It is a bit hard to say what the main genre is. Of course, there is a lot of romance between the two characters, Alex (Morgan Freeman) and Ruth (Diane Keeton), there is also that funny side that makes it all that more enjoyable. And, there is still a serious dramatic side which keeps you on the edge of your seat till the end. The story starts when an elderly couple, Ruth and Alex, live in a high up, massive apartment in New York City, Brooklyn actually. However, the five flight of stairs they need to take is getting more and more challenging so they decide to move to a location with an elevator. To add to the challenges, their dog is in the hospital undergoing treatment for spinal injury. The director, Richard Loncraine makes this movie feel authentic and rustic and also shows how current society stereotypes elderly people, how they truly feel about it and how wrong it is. The cast is wonderful and the acting is just superior with serious and comedy scenes mixed together and standing out all the time. I also like how they lightly touch upon problems of the past as well as problems of today. For example, Ruth and Alex got married in a time when bi- racial couples were not welcomed with open arms. Then it shows how today a gay couple is making an offer on a house. They submit it along with a note telling how they tried to adopt a child and finally were able to adopt one. It is something Ruth and Alex wanted to do when they were younger but were denied. My favorite scene is when they have an open house to sell their apartment and a huge crowd of people comes through, looking at everything and touching everything. Alex doesn't like it but Ruth tries to see the positive side but fails. I like that scene because it shows how the couple's life isn't perfect and also makes the film feel very real. Not only this moment does that but many others as well. This film has perhaps several moments of adult content but none that is too mature. I recommend it to kids ages 10 to18 and give it 5 out of 5 stars.

Name : John Anderson / Alias : Newsday
A couple of pros, playing attractive characters in an amiable yet topical story.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
"5 Flights Up" is far from perfect, but it's also undeniably touching.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
It's good to see first-rate artists devoted to a film that doesn't pander to an unsophisticated audience with a thirst for violence and smut.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : RogerEbert.com
What begins as a sweetly sentimental story ends up being cloyingly melodramatic.

Name : Graham Fuller / Alias : New York Daily News
Diane Keaton and Morgan Freeman are pleasantly entertaining in "5 Flights Up." But the movie's far too pleasant for far too long.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
The lead performances are so perfectly in sync that Alex and Ruth really feel like an old married couple who know each other's foibles and cherish every tic.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
The duo provide a bit of wit and warmth amid the contrived subplots and the self-satisfied moralism.

Name : Pete Vonder Haar / Alias : Village Voice
What starts as a somewhat charming - if prosaic - story of love in the time of gentrification inexplicably spends most of its third act mired in the finer points of apartment hunting, like a tastefully lit HGTV show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 : 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.