Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
As silly and sometimes nonsensical as it is, the movie is surprisingly sweet and well-intentioned.

Name : Patrick Dunn / Alias : Detroit News
Hardcore fans won't find much of the Jem they loved under the movie's achingly hip millennial trappings, while young newcomers will be left wondering what a robot has to do with a rock band.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
Jem has lost her outrageousness and gained a robotic sidekick in an overlong, low-budget big-screen reboot of the 1980s toy-selling cartoon series.

Name : Neil Genzlinger / Alias : New York Times
It seems to be merely tossing ideas into the pot that it thinks might appeal to 9-year-olds.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Even though I wish the songs themselves were stronger, there's an energy and a vibrancy to the movie that its young target audience will appreciate.

Name : Geoff Berkshire / Alias : Variety
The film seems inexplicably embarrassed by its roots, instead serving up half-baked and self-consciously contemporary drama that no one in the sure-to-be minimal theatrical audience will remember quite so fondly some 30 years on.

Name : Scott Tobias / Alias : NPR
Jem and the Holograms is Mac and Me to Josie and the Pussycats' E.T.

Name : Frank Scheck / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Not being part of the generation that watched the show, I can't vouch for its merits. But it's safe to say that it must be miles ahead of this wan, bloated screen version which forgoes the original's sci-fi and thriller aspects.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
Jon M. Chu, who directed the concert doc Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, maintains a lively pace, and there's some cute business involving a robot that communicates through music.

Name : Rebecca Keegan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
In revisiting the pop rock quest of a multiracial group of adopted sisters in suburban California, Chu has made a stylish and self-aware musical fantasy for the YouTube generation.

Name : Julia Cooper / Alias : Globe and Mail
There's hardly tension, barely any drama and the sugar high you might expect from an eighties redux is replaced by a dull aspartame buzz.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
The movie's poky and confused, never clearly setting up its conflicts and blowing far too much of its running time on a National Treasure clue-hunt for messages Jem's father programmed into a sassy dancing robot.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
After a few crackling, resonant digital-age scenes in the opening act, the filmmakers settle in and make Jem into a mediocre Disney Channel movie - with, for no good reason, a pet robot.

Name : Molly Lambert / Alias : Grantland
What it lacks in humor it makes up for in sheer weirdness - it's a master class in How Did This Get Made? It feels focus-grouped to within an inch of its life, but it's so strange that it's impossible to imagine what process led us here.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
Its one saving grace is that Chu's direction is so wildly inconsistent that it manages to produce a handful of genuinely gorgeous images alongside all of the cruddy ones.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
Director Jon Chu stretches "Jem" to a ridiculous 2 hours, via endless amateur-musician YouTube clips. Anyone can be a star, they attest - and always be yourself! (Except when you're Jem. I guess.)

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
The truest testament to the film's strength is the degree to which it all but achieves greatness.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
In a well-made, but one-note film.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
"Unbroken" is a rousing old-fashioned yarn with numerous exciting set-pieces and an uncomplicated hero you root for all the way through. It's entertaining throughout and made with a high level of technical skill.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
This great, tough-skinned movie can stand with the muscular action dramas that are a crucial part of American movie canon.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
A straightforward and entirely commendable story about the triumph of the human spirit, etc.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
What the movie ends up in desperate need of is a sense of life made real and palpable through dreadful, transporting details, not a life embalmed in hagiographic awe.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Jolie gets the dirty/ennobling job done.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
Given its subject, it should have been great, but it turns out to be simply good.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
A tale of endurance, "Unbroken" takes endurance to sit through.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It's moving, admirable, and occasionally exhilarating. What it's missing is the one thing that could always be counted on with Jolie as a star: the spark of danger.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
The film boasts both sheen and efficiency without always delivering an equivalent emotional impact. It's easier to be awed or impressed by it than moved.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
Handsome, alert and intensely focused, little-known English actor Jack O'Connell is a fine choice as Louis. And Japanese pop star Takamasa "Miyavi" Ishihara shines as "The Bird,' Louis' sadistic captor and war criminal in training.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
If you can take it, "Unbroken" will lift you like the classics of adventure cinema.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
An interminable, redundant, unnecessary epic devoted to suffering, suffering, suffering.

Name : Connie Ogle / Alias : Miami Herald
The bigger problem is that neither Jolie nor the script bothers to flesh Louis out as a fully formed person with faults and fears and regrets, which keeps the film from ever capturing you emotionally.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
It is a harrowing journey, and an inspirational one. But, as director, Jolie takes far too long to tell it, particularly in such a conventional manner.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
As a castaway story, a historical drama and a portrait of an Olympian turned soldier, "Unbroken" is a touching and important work.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"Unbroken" makes for a grueling experience, which is not quite the same as a memorable one.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
More a series of similar events than a story, and lacks an underlying message except that torture hurts.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Zamperini's life story is genuinely inspirational, but the movie seems fashioned as a standard-issue profile in courage.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
For Jolie, it's all about the suffering, without much meaning.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
"Unbroken" stirs a moviegoer by default; it's an astounding story of human endurance that has been brought a little too safely to the screen.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
If nothing else, it's certainly better than the last time a good-looking Hollywood star decided to direct a movie about WWII. But the less said about George Clooney's The Monuments Men, the better .

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : AV Club
Though Jolie is shooting for Christ-like passion and redemption, she only ends up slathering one man's very real, very morbid struggles in the usual reductive "greatest generation" sentiment.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
All the movie's tension comes down to whether Zamperini can withstand Watanabe's abuse, which is probably when it's helpful to forget the title.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Jolie is more fixated on gore than grace. In making us feel every crushing blow - the better to burnish her reputation as a serious director - we're shortchanged on the beauty of Zamperini's story

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
A bit embalmed in its own nobility, it's an extraordinary story told in dutiful, unexceptional terms, the passionate commitment of all involved rarely achieving gut-level impact.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Well-crafted and compelling, but director Angelina Jolie's best contribution was casting the unknown Miyavi in a pivotal role.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Despite its many impressive elements, "Unbroken" plays incomplete and unbalanced.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
This passion project for Angelina Jolie shines with her abiding love for Louis Zamperini and his courage under fire. In honoring Louis' endurance, she does herself proud.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
Though O'Connell's vulnerable lead performance is terrific, Unbroken's unrestrained hero worship undermines the story.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
Jolie hasn't done a disservice to Zamperini's life, but it's hard to know what she was trying to tell. It's Zamperini's story in fact and circumstance, but somehow, he feels like an enigma.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
You find yourself happy that this film exists, but wishing it were better.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Jolie has made a grand, solid movie of the Zamperini story, but O'Connell is the part of Unbroken that was truly worth the wait.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
Angelina Jolie's film as a director is a gorgeously shot and hardhitting old-school war drama - but still somehow fails to get under its subject's skin.

Name : David Hiltbrand / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Unbroken is a fitting title for this excruciating cinematic treatment of the flyboy's ordeal. It plays like an endless, unrelieved gauntlet of suffering, an onslaught untempered by grace or redemption.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
This will be a tough film for some to take. But it also has strong appeal as an extraordinary survival story, and Laura Hillenbrand's first-rate book that inspired it has not been on the best-seller lists for four years for nothing.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
There's a lot to like about the movie. Its presentation is straightforward, chronicling Zamperini's amazing tale without flinching.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
One of the finest achievements of the 2014 film year.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
A beautifully shot, well-acted, and worthy-to-a-fault Second World War survivor story that only intermittently achieves the kind of emotional impact for which it aims.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
A good 45 minutes of the movie consists of showing Louis getting beaten up, then healing; getting beaten up, then healing, over and over.