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

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

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

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

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

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 : 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 : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
The sort of movie that adjectives like 'frothy' and 'bubbly' were invented for.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
The story soon gives way to characters kvetching about romance and the working world, their sentiments recycled from the director's other movies.

Name : Andy Webster / Alias : New York Times
This candy-coated confection is so irresistible that you're captivated by its sentiment even as you acknowledge its manipulations.

Name : Serena Donadoni / Alias : Village Voice
Fox infuses Cupcakes with Ofer's can-do optimism, where the power of song can overcome any personal or professional strife.

Name : Jordan Hoffman / Alias : New York Daily News
If this Semitic "Strictly Ballroom" and its campy, colorful characters (including a hummus baron!) don't win you over, you may want to check your pulse.

Name : Sheri Linden / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Though the comic confection's clunky moments keep it from achieving souffle delicacy, its bright zingers and seamless fantasy sequences amp the playfulness, and the mostly unforced performances complement the production's cartoonish exuberance.

Name : Ronnie Scheib / Alias : Variety
Israeli helmer Eytan Fox's candy-colored musical is an endearingly goofy celebration of the right to be yourself.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
Somebody needs to give Andrew Bujalski a TV series. If "Results," his unlikely but delightful new film set in and around an Austin fitness studio run by hard-bodied Guy Pearce, were a TV pilot, I would be hooked on the show already.

Name : John DeFore / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A perfectly chosen cast sells this unhurried comedy, which flows unconventionally but is still, by a long stretch, the most mainstream-friendly picture Bujalski has made.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
A movie like this feels like a dream challenge for an actor. It lives and dies not sheerly by the writing and the direction of the script, but by the cast's organic adherence to both.

Name : Michael Rechtshaffen / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The rom-com isn't such a lost cause, after all. It was just waiting for someone like indie filmmaker Andrew Bujalski to resuscitate it.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Only toward the end do you realize that the characters have been arranged into a pleasing and familiar romantic-comedy triangle and that you've been watching a beautifully played game of underhand slow-pitch screwball.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
Writer-director Andrew Bujalski appreciates a grimy basement as much as he does a wide-open highway, and he aims for a slice-of-life tapestry. But he should have simply let Corrigan slouch into nirvana.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
Like Bujalski's early mumblecore work, this is sensitive and meandering - and just a little bit patience-testing.

Name : Linda Barnard / Alias : Toronto Star
Bujalski crafts a quirky romance with fitness-industry comedy Results, shaping flawed characters into people you might just admire.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
There's an absurdist edge, but with nothing of the smart aleck about it. Rather than use wit as a way of bypassing thought and emotion, Bujalski's concerns are serious and his attitude toward his characters is warm without being indulgent.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
One of the strangest and strongest of recent romantic triangles forms in the course of this lyrical, fanatically realistic comedy, written and directed by Andrew Bujalski.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
What happens when a rigorously non-mainstream filmmaker tries to reverse-engineer a mainstream romantic comedy? The result, in all its charming perversity, is "Results."

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
A week in the outback without a cellphone would be better than Results.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
This droll, intelligent farce is most poignant as a portrait of modern alienation that explores how money, service work and self-improvement leave individuals stranded and alone.

Name : Abby Garnett / Alias : Village Voice
Bujalski knows how to reveal the immaturities and hangups people hide behind money, ambition, and the pursuit of a better body.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
"Results" is a smooth transition for Bujalski from the fringes to more commercial work. It's heartening that he didn't give up his calling-card observational humor to do it.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Sharply funny slacker comedy.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
With Bujalski, this is business as usual, but by the standards of the contemporary indie rom-com, it's refreshingly unpredictable and thoughtful.

Name : Ella Taylor / Alias : NPR
You'd expect Bujalski, who made Beeswax and Computer Chess and a couple of other extreme indies, to poke fun at gym culture, the ultimate soft target. And he does, but sweetly and without disparagement .

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Not a whole lot happens, but you get to know an interesting trio, and leave them feeling satisfied that it was time well spent.