Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Director Andre Techine's story is one of subtle emotional tones that require the most of an actor, and the cast is uniformly compelling.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Spanning a year beginning in the summer of 1984, The Witnesses offers the considerable satisfaction of a beautifully acted ensemble piece built on the foundation of a serious subject%u2014the dawn of the AIDS crisis%u2014handled just so.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Boston Globe
Witnesses takes us back to the turmoil in the Balkans. But the movie is not directly about the war. It's a cleverly told murder mystery.

Name : Lisa Schwarzbaum / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
What the characters in The Witnesses - and the audience - pay testimony to in Andre Techine's urgent, compassionate, and ultimately optimistic French drama are the toll the epidemic has rung, and the responsibility of the living to choose life.

Name : John Anderson / Alias : Washington Post
In The Witnesses, [director] Techine levels his gaze on the '80s, an era of seeming innocence, perhaps license, and one in which biological freedom has led to a loose, even sloppily knit fabric of humanity.

Name : Carina Chocano / Alias : Los Angeles Times
An ambling narrative, but an atmospheric one that feels authentic despite its unlikely character pairings.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Techine's graceful, forceful drama has the tact not to play narrative games with its subject.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Excitingly convoluted.

Name : Jan Stuart / Alias : Newsday
Andre Techine's The Witnesses is one of the finest fiction-film accounts of a free yet frightful moment in time, when the relaxing sexual liberties of the previous decade were being squeezed by the onset of an unforgiving new virus.

Name : V.A. Musetto / Alias : New York Post
Andre Techine's film features a strong ensemble cast. The film pulls no punches in its depiction of lives in crisis.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
The occasional voiceover from Beart and a slightly mournful score from Philippe Sarde offer some sense of lament, but mostly this unfolds in the moment and is urgent and engaging.

Name : David Wiegand / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Some may think the metaphoric possibilities of an incurable illness that can be transmitted through sexual contact have been all but exhausted. Director Andre Techine almost proves otherwise in The Witnesses, a kind of film opera without music.

Name : Marta Barber / Alias : Miami Herald
More than a thriller, the film is a portrait of the passions that drive ordinary people to kill and even worse, to accept the killing as something honorable.

Name : Andrew Sarris / Alias : New York Observer
Andre Techine's The Witnesses (Les Temoins) treats the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, first in the United States and then spreading to the rest of the world in 1984, as a devastating medical atrocity in a war that is still raging.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
The beautifully acted ensemble film The Witnesses sidesteps most of its opportunities for high drama, political sermonizing and the jerking of tears.

Name : Roger Ebert / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
The Witnesses doesn't pay off with a great operatic pinnacle, but it's better that way. Better to show people we care about facing facts they care desperately about, without the consolation of plot mechanics.

Name : Nathan Lee / Alias : Village Voice
Techine's triumph of compassion and craft shames the American cinema's indifference to gay history.

Name : Deborah Young / Alias : Variety
A fast-moving, engrossing multiple-character drama that brings the AIDS crisis of the 1980s into laser focus.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Scream 4 is a total hoot. Assuming you can find the humor in knife stabbings.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
The "Scream 4" (I refuse to write it the other way anymore) drinking game: Take a slug every time someone on-screen remarks how meta it all is.

Name : Mike Hale / Alias : New York Times
Like its predecessors, "Scream 4" replaces the values of storytelling and suspense with the value of being in on the joke. Unfortunately, in the 11 years since "Scream 3," the joke has gotten pretty old.

Name : Michael Nordine / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Stachura turns everything up to 11 almost from the outset, and all escalation from there feels overwrought.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The filmmakers' subtext - at least in the movie's first quarter - seems to acknowledge that you can't top the original. And they didn't.

Name : Lisa Kennedy / Alias : Denver Post
Compared with so many of the rebooted slasher flicks, Scream 4 remains a cut above. No, that is not an intended pun.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Between a diabolically funny start and a surprise climax, Scream 4 offers nothing more than a series of gory deaths that grow tiresome with repetition.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
This is quite effective as horror filmmaking and more pungent than anything [Craven's] done in a while.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
"Scream" always made fun of itself even as it was frightening us - and that hasn't changed a bit.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
The sardonic laughs are mostly gone in this wheezing cash cow and the cries don't resonate. The greatest shocks are the ones facing the now middle-aged main actors when they look into the mirror.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
You'll watch it to see a horror movie that has a sense of humor about itself. For "Scream" franchise fans, or for those who like their horror not too horrific, that's enough.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
It's almost really cool, without quite being really cool.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"Scream 4" finds a way to live up to its gory past while it carves out new terrors in new ways (new media helps).

Name : Kevin C. Johnson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
It's funny and scary at the same time, and fans will "Scream" with approval.

Name : Glenn Kenny / Alias : MSN Movies
It's not a disgrace - indeed, it's not bad if you like that sort of thing - while not particularly good, and yet it's one of the better horror films I've seen in a long time.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
"Scream 4" is a strange concoction, clever and self-knowing in the extreme and yet operating in primal ways that bypass wit. Something about it feels very modern.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
The problem is, the movie doesn't really care if we are laughing with it or at it.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
Bloody entertaining.

Name : Lisa Schwarzbaum / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It's a giddy reminder of everything that made Scream such a fresh scream in the first place.

Name : Gary Dowell / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Though director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson don't quite generate the lightning-in-a-bottle energy that made their first Scream movie a hit, they manage to awaken a 15-year-old slasher franchise that has been dormant for a decade.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Scream's brand of horror, which lampooned the slasher genre while simultaneously embracing it, was fun and breezy in 1996. In 2011, it's about as fresh as the whiff of something stale and rank from a crypt.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
On its own terms, Scre4m is pretty good.

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : Time Out
It's a professionally polished package - cinematographer Peter Deming frames the carnage beautifully in widescreen - but don't go in expecting scares so much as laughs.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Craven guides us expertly down a series of blind, bloody alleys, a journey that's more pleasurable than frustrating. On account of his steady hand, the last act is as good as could be expected: skillfully conceived and entertaining in its preposterousness.

Name : David Germain / Alias : Associated Press
Honestly, it's not an unwelcome thing to watch the return of Neve Campbell as the slasher victim who wouldn't die, Courtney Cox as the tabloid hack in bloodlust for a story and David Arquette as the bumbling Barney Fife of fright-flick cops.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The film very quickly, and tediously, becomes more of the same old and Craven thing - self-referential film buff gags accompanied by a clockwork killing spree that seriously reduces the population of a small town.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
For genre geeks, this can be fun - although nothing in Scream 4 is quite as clever as the filmmakers seem to think it is.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
There is some fun here, but ultimately it's more self-satisfied than anything else.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Retaining all the elements introduced in the 1996 original - gut-clenching tension, sharp whodunit plotting, self-aware humor and a sympathetic core cast - it advances the story to a new-media era.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Boston Globe
Craven no longer appears to be directing a cast of characters. Collectively, they're a knife block.

Name : Laremy Legel / Alias : Film.com
A perfectly acceptable Friday night, Scream 4 delivers plenty of scares without consequences, murder without depth, and a flood of legacy laughs.

Name : Rick Groen / Alias : Globe and Mail
Not even the smug irony endures - it's hard to congratulate yourself for being in on a stale joke.

Name : Roger Ebert / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
The actors do what they can in a film that doesn't care about human insights. The characters are almost preternatural in their detachment; if you were embedded in events like these, wouldn't you be paralyzed with panic?

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Against all odds, Scream 4 proves that sometimes you can go home again.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
Relying on obvious cliches doesn't seem ironic anymore, just easy. And though there are several genuine jolts, poor pacing leaves too much time between the silliness and scares.

Name : Nathan Rabin / Alias : AV Club
Fifteen years in, the series now looks more than ever like a Mobius strip that reflects on itself in a perpetual loop. But meta-arbitrary is still arbitrary.

Name : Dennis Harvey / Alias : Variety
Overblown, overlong and overstuffed with genre self-referentialism, yet undercooked in terms of credibility, worthwhile new characters and memorable scares, it's not the razor-sharp reboot fans were hoping for.

Name : Nick Pinkerton / Alias : Village Voice
The unengaged and overlong fourth Scream plops its self-awareness on a new generation, who must endure a late-'90s flashback that's aged as well as the Nu-metal songbook.