Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : Village Voice
It may start with a big burst of energy, but this is a sad, somber film about a world that's slowly, knowingly losing touch with the real.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
It takes an actor with the finesse of Tom Hanks to turn a story of confusion, perplexity, frustration and panic into an agreeably uncomfortable comedy.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
This stranger-in-a-strange-land mood piece has an appealingly serene pace.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Tom Hanks exerts such a gravitational force in his movies, sometimes to his detriment, it's fascinating to watch him struggle for equilibrium in Tom Tykwer's A Hologram for the King.

Name : Ethan Sacks / Alias : New York Daily News
After a first act that seems to promise a biting comedy, the film gets lost in the desert - literally and figuratively.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
It's hard to imagine a more Tom Hanks-y setup than this.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
An earnest but aimless-feeling adaptation of Dave Eggers' novel.

Name : Michael Nordine / Alias : TheWrap
Even when A Hologram for a King rests on shaky narrative ground (which is often), Tykwer's confidently frenetic presentation and a host of surreal grace notes lend it a sense of urgency that keeps us on our toes, if not the edge of our seats.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
It looks expensive and comes off bland.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It's not entirely free of stereotypes or sentimental moments. What it is, though, is amazingly likable.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
If it sounds like Hologram is basically about a middle-aged white guy getting his groove back in the Middle East, well, yes, it is that. But if you squint hard enough, it's also a little bit more.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
To describe this as a movie about a mediocre businessman biding his time before an appointment probably makes it sound more exciting than it is.

Name : Kate Taylor / Alias : Globe and Mail
You have to wonder what this film would feel like if a darker figure, a Robert Downey Jr. or Edward Norton, for example, had been cast in the lead role.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
The movie conjures no shortage of potent images, but push a bit deeper and your fist closes on empty air.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Writer-director Tykwer skillfully presents a series of fantastical scenes in a way that has us thinking: Sure, that could happen. This is quite simply a beautiful film to behold.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
I guess I'll have to read the Dave Eggers novel to figure out what this thing is about.

Name : Eric Kohn / Alias : indieWIRE
It's Eggers minus Eggers - a whimsical tale that aspires to make its whimsy count for something deep.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
You always trust Hanks, and he makes this "Hologram" feel real.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Quiet existential irony, albeit diluted and distorted, still reverberates in this stranger-in-a-strange-land story.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
It's a sweet, deliberately meandering movie, and it took me a while to connect with it. But it won me over because ultimately it conveys so well that feeling of estrangement that is both terrifying and comic for any farflung traveler.

Name : Tony Hicks / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
"A Hologram for the King" is disappointing mostly in that it could have been been better. But that doesn't make it bad.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
The tone and rhythms are pushy, forced, strained, like the expression on Hanks' face. What should be casual punctuation, filmed in medium shot, ends up in bam-pow close-ups.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
A "Death of a Salesman" for the out-sourcing era, A Hologram for the King makes full use of Tom Hanks' default note, an everyman struggling painfully against the tide.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Here's a case of consistently miscalibrated tone, from the first clumsy stabs at humor to the hero's default expression, which is painfully pained.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
Director Tom Tykwer (Cloud Atlas), who also adapted the screenplay from Dave Eggers novel, displays a fine eye and a light touch with cultural detail, and isn't nearly as harsh on his hero as he might have (ought to have?) been.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It's a strange thing: A Hologram for the King is mostly about a series of nuisances, annoyances and stresses, and yet it's a pleasure from beginning to end.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
It's true that not much happens - except cinema at its finest.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
This film is surprisingly sweet.

Name : Nick Allen / Alias : RogerEbert.com
Here's a reasonably-sized star vehicle that finds exciting purpose in presenting an existential crisis.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Starring Tom Hanks and directed and written by Tom Tykwer ( Cloud Atlas, Run Lola Run), it veers from dark comedy to drama to buddy movie to romance without being particularly successful at any of them.

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : AV Club
A Hologram For The King is a 97-minute movie that feels like it was cut down from two-hours-plus, with whole subplots reduced or jettisoned in what was likely an arduous post-production period.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Not even the mighty Tom Hanks can save this scattershot adaptation of Dave Eggers' lost-soul novel

Name : Tom Russo / Alias : Boston Globe
It's like an international-relations microcosm imagined by the Coen brothers, down to an occasional sense that the absurdity isn't taking us anywhere.

Name : Sheri Linden / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The focus on the way individuals adapt to and defy custom is one of the smartest aspects of the film.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The problem is not that anything on screen is troubling, it's that nothing there, not even star Tom Hanks, is capable of holding our interest or attention for very long.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
It's that rare fish-out-of-water story in which the fish miraculously manages to stop needing water, and learns to crave air instead.

Name : Mara Reinstein / Alias : Us Weekly
The tension and anger in this neo-Western practically radiate off the screen.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
Scenic, well-paced and rich in dialogue and character, the film is Coen brothers for the squares, and maybe the best middle-of-the-seat drama of the summer.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
You might have to go back to 1967's Bonnie and Clyde to find a film about bank robbers that feels as of its time as David Mackenzie's Hell or High Water.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
You've seen it all before - but hell, it's worth seeing again.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
From a purely narrative perspective, there's nothing new here but like a new arrangement of a familiar tune, the slight changes make it fresh and enjoyable.

Name : Chris Klimek / Alias : NPR
The 101 minutes that follow essentially comprise a feature-length Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen song, their brilliance lying in the details.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
A film with the sort of sweeping grandeur that today's filmmakers rarely aspire to, let alone fulfill.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
In a word, "Hell or High Water" is terrific.

Name : Liz Braun / Alias : Toronto Sun
Hell or High Water is set up like a cops and robbers drama, but it plays out like a complicated western - no black-hats-and-white-hats simplicity here. It's all moral shades of grey.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
You could freeze nearly any frame of Hell or High Water and you'd be looking at a work of art. It's stark and breathtaking and gorgeous to behold.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Hell or High Water isn't just a great time at the movies, it's one of the year's best pictures.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
The cast is uniformly magnificent, but it's Pine who steals the movie.

Name : Glenn Whipp / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"Hell or High Water" is a gripping heist drama keenly attuned to the outsider politics of our times.

Name : Jeannette Catsoulis / Alias : New York Times
If there's such a thing as an easygoing thriller, then "Hell or High Water" is it. The stakes may be steep, but the characters can seem more nonchalant than nervous.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Hell or High Water is a rare humanist Western: Finality is the true villain.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Hot damn, this one's a goodie - a mesmerizing, modern-day western that moves with the coiled intensity of a rattlesnake ready to spring.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Hell or High Water is at once a tale of desperation in hard times, and a keenly observed character study - or studies.

Name : Robert Abele / Alias : TheWrap
Feels old-fashioned in its action-thriller gratification and in-the-moment about everything else.

Name : Katie Walsh / Alias : Tribune News Service
A dusty, blood-soaked myth of crime and punishment far from fantasy, a finger planted on the pulse - and the trigger.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
"Hell or High Water" overcomes its vapid political leanings with loads of West Texas atmosphere, smart dialogue and acutely observed relationships.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It's not every day that we see a movie that's fresh, exciting and dangerous, slapping you from explosive laughter to stunned attention. Mood and atmosphere and interesting character acting are rarely handled as well as this.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : TIME Magazine
The plot is clever, and its intricacies are beautifully worked out.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Let's make it easy: If you like sitting in a dark room looking at pictures that move, you should see "Hell or High Water." It's terrific.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
Hell or High Water is a genre film that transcends genre, an iconic American tale that is nonetheless firmly grounded in both place and time. One of the best movies of the year.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"Hell or High Water" has one foot in pulp conventions, and the other in some stimulating, morally tricky contemporary answers to those conventions. What the movie has, above all, is a dramatic line, clean and straight.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Much more than a genre piece, "Hell or High Water" takes you places that you thought the big screen had forgotten.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
They don't make them like this anymore - but they still can, and here's the proof.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Audiences have been down this dusty backroad before. The thrill of High Of High Water is in its skillful, offbeat execution.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : New York Daily News
It's got a dry dusty power, and a dark sense of humor. And when it finally saddles up and really rides, pardner, you'd best get out of its way.

Name : Peter Sobczynski / Alias : RogerEbert.com
It's frustrating that Hell or High Water contains so many good things that just don't coalesce into a fully satisfying moviegoing experience.

Name : Walter V. Addiego / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Despite the weighty issues at play, there's much about the movie to simply enjoy - the camaraderie of the brothers and the lawmen, and the not infrequent elements of humor.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
Director David Mackenzie tells a sad story about desperate characters that is somehow as thrilling as it is heartbreaking.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Texas is as much a riveting character in [this] fascinating crime drama as the brothers turned bank robbers at its heart or the laconic lawman who coolly follows them across the sun-hardened landscape like a hunter on the trail of his next kill.

Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
Hell Or High Water plays out in unexpected ways, culminating in a tense final showdown that's somehow simultaneously an epilogue, the story having already concluded. (Neat trick, that.)

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : MTV
We don't live in an era of white hats and black hats. Maybe we never did. Today, everyone is gray - or, in Mackenzie's color scheme, faded blue and sad beige

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
All of the performers in this film, right down to the bit players, are quite good, but Bridges demonstrates yet again that he is one of the finest actors in America.

Name : Danny King / Alias : Village Voice
Hell or High Water's deliberate pacing gives it the feel of a heist story with its feet stuck in mud - and that's a good thing.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : Village Voice
Sheridan's script - filled with quotable zingers, telling character details, and topical anger - comes to vivid, exciting life with that cast, in particular Bridges, who seems to have finally found another gruff, down-home type worthy of his talents.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
The action is as schematic and artificial as a chess game, and the characters have as much identity as its pieces.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Variety
"Hell or High Water" is a thrillingly good movie - a crackerjack drama of crime, fear, and brotherly love set in a sun-roasted, deceptively sleepy West Texas that feels completely exotic for being so authentic.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
"Hell or High Water" is a story about men, but the movie is really about a mindset, a way of life, the strength and resolution required to make a living in a world that doesn't care about you.

Name : David Rooney / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A soulful outlaw tale with a socioeconomic perspective and a rich sense of place.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
In this bleak West Texas landscape where everyone seems to be struggling, you find yourself rooting, inexplicably, for all of them against a clear villain: the faceless, predatory bank.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
When the final showdown arrives, the men are redefined by their deeds and what began as a sharp genre piece deepens into a subtle character study.