Les Misérables (2012)

"This version of Les Miserables is better than anyone dared to dream."

"Like being trapped in Disney jail with the kids from Fame. For five consecutive life sentences."

"While Anne Hathaway avoided food in preparing for this film, she compensated for her dietary restriction by chewing the scenery with uncontrolled gusto."

"No one expects gutsy filmmaking in a musical. But that's just what... Tom Hooper delivers in Les Misérables."

"A productive experiment, an epic-scaled weepie, an exercise in sincere kitsch, and, perhaps too easily dismissed, a rare modern movie about the wretched poor..."

"The squalor and upheaval of early 19th-century France are conveyed with a vividness that would have made Victor Hugo proud, heightened by the raw, hungry intensity of the actors' live oncamera vocals."

"Will send the devoted home happy and likely demonstrate to the few uninitiated what all the fuss is about."

"By the grand finale, when tout le monde is waving the French tricolor in victory, you may instead be raising the white flag in exhausted defeat."

"By the end, you feel like a piñata on the dancefloor: empty, in bits, the victim of prolonged assault by killer pipes."

"You can walk into the theater as an agnostic, but you may just leave singing with the choir."

"There are large, emotionally susceptible segments of the population ready to swallow this sort of thing, but that doesn't mean it's good."

"Occasionally, like its characters, ragged around the edges, this nevertheless rings with all the emotion and power of the source and provides a new model for the movie musical."

"Jackman is performing in a drama, Crowe on his concert stage, and Hathaway alone in her room. It's a collection of performances rather than a story."