Critic consensus:Memories of Murder blends the familiar crime genre with social satire and comedy, capturing the all-too human desperation of its key characters.

Numbered reviews:1. For a film about women getting brutally attacked and dispatched, the movie has no sense of urgency or underlying dread.
2. Achieves an unlikely but ultimately successful blend of blunt-force comedy and desperate investigation.
3. The script is as sloppy as Song (Kang-ho)'s unkempt cop, sprinkled with intriguing ideas and imaginative details that, like the investigation, simply get lost in blind alleys.
4. What's most remarkable about it is the way Bong builds real suspense and plays the chilling moments straight while leaving himself room for nonsense and horseplay.
5. These are no gritty 'Dirty Harry' cops, nor are they kooky Keystone Kops. You know what they are? They're Columbo - if Columbo were the schlemiel he always pretends to be.
6. Horribly, gorily fascinating and slightly unfulfilling
7. Manages to transcend the popular and cliched genre by focusing on the emotional toll dealing with such crimes has on the detectives.
8. A refreshingly mature thriller that succeeds in its ambitious attempt to blend quips and killings.
9. Uneven movie has tonal problems.
10. Fledgling director Bong Joon-ho received the best new director award at the San Sebastian Film Festival and he shows a deft, talented hand at the helm.


Critic consensus:Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is more melodramatic than emotionally truthful, and uneven in its mixture of time periods, actresses, laughter and tears.

Numbered reviews:1. What have we done to deserve this treacly, badly-acted nonsense? Whose children have we run over in a previous life?
2. For all the quirky behaviour on display, there is still no personality, merely 'issues', their resolutions and a lot of frickin' ya-yas.
3. Cross-generational mother-daughter drama is a little familiar, but it'll still warm your heart.
4. It is the actresses' irreproachable ability to tap into the feminine psyche, to capture the beauty of female friendships and to demonstrate the complex love and loathe relationship often found between mothers and daughters that elevates this movie.
5. With an assist from screenwriter Mark Andrus, and judicious borrowing from the follow-up novel Little Altars Everywhere, Ms. Khouri has tamed Rebecca Wells' sprawling narrative without sacrificing its emotional riches.
6. Well-made, but frequently boring and predictable drama -- a couple of decent performances but the climax doesn't work and it's all been done better elsewhere.
7. ...it becomes clear that these two hours would be better spent reflecting on our own treasured memories than getting confused by this group's sordid past.
8. A tal irmandade Ya-Ya é de uma bobagem extremada, e o roteiro tem buracos incríveis, deixando de lado vários pontos sobre os irmăos de Burstyn e Bullock, que săo mencionados, mas nunca vistos.
9. Since, at least as relates to its central plot, Ya-Ya cheerleads for the pure life-living gusto of its gaudy heroines, some spirited overacting and slathery screenwriting is less a liability than a guilty pleasure the movie is wholly in on.
10. ...Mostly a load of pretentious crap, but it has its moments.


Critic consensus:Preachy and repetitive in parts, Baby Boy still manages to exude authenticity, thanks to its competent cast.

Numbered reviews:
1. Singleton just may be challenging us to laugh at the film or with it and then feel extremely uneasy for doing so. If so, that's admirable; if not, he's made a very strange soap opera.
2. A meandering, flawed, but electrifying film.
3. The subject is certainly worthy, but Singleton's script is too repetitive, pedantic, and protracted to do it justice.
4. Baby Boy earns credibility for its insights by moving beyond image and rhetoric and quickly establishing Jody, his friends, lovers and family members as complex, striving, fallible human beings.
5. Singleton hammers home his thesis ... with a monotonous single-mindedness that dulls the usual acuity of his perceptions.
6. A bold criticism of young black men who carelessly father babies, live off their mothers and don't even think of looking for work.
7. Baby Boy is more insistent in its didacticism than Boyz N the Hood, the passion and conviction are no less heartfelt.
8. 'Baby Mama Drama' in da Hood.
9. Tells it like it is with just a glimmer of how it ought to be.
10. What holds the movie together ... is Gibson's broodingly responsive performance.