Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
It lurches between two decades and two actors, with no reliable center.

Name : John DeFore / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A deeply satisfying pop biopic whose subject's bifurcated creative life lends itself to an unconventional structure.

Name : Andrew Barker / Alias : Variety
A wonderfully innervating cure for the common musical biopic .

Name : Leslie Felperin / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Striking an elegantly sustained balance between intimacy and historical scope, director James Kent's WWI-set epic Testament of Youth encompasses nearly all of the virtues of classical British period drama and nearly none of the vices.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
A beautifully acted but disappointingly stiff period drama.

Name : Guy Lodge / Alias : Variety
Kent presents the female experience of war with crisp, tactile practicality . Unabashedly romantic the film may be, but little about Brittain's grief-ridden personal awakening is needlessly romanticized.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
The World War I-set "Testament of Youth" makes a passionate and sensible case for [pacifism] through devastating, melancholy, persevering drama.

Name : Michael Rechtshaffen / Alias : Los Angeles Times
When going for gritty realism, it doesn't hurt to have your lead actress essentially playing herself.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
Even if you don't know the place used to be called Needle Park, Josh and Benny Safdie's extraordinary indie will put you in mind of that 1971 NYC classic. It may even become one itself.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
I'm glad I saw this film; considered on its own merits, in terms of what I understand as its artistic goals, it's a wrenching and finely wrought piece of work.

Name : Danny King / Alias : Village Voice
Together, the images and the sounds turn Harley's reality into a pulverizing grind from which escape is barely even a distant thought.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Unpleasant moral ambiguity is served boiling hot in this drug-poisoned love story.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
Heaven Knows What [has] a backstory precisely as fraught as what happens on screen. And that's pretty fraught.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
All this desperation and squalor reeks of authenticity.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
By the end of Heaven Knows What, you see Ilya's fragile, unguarded soul through Harley's eyes, and the film's discordances sound like the music of the spheres.

Name : Melissa Anderson / Alias : Village Voice
It centers on electrifying newcomer Arielle Holmes as a homeless junkie named Harley, a character largely shaped by the performer's own extremely recent past.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
New York-based brothers Josh and Benny Safdie look past Manhattan's glossy surfaces to reveal an underworld of homeless young heroin addicts hidden in plain sight.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Heaven Knows What feels like an authentic, sometimes painfully accurate portrait of life in New York City as experienced by the homeless, ever-hustling teenagers.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It's just a portrait of emptiness, but it feels a lot like the real thing.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Holmes has a face that reveals everything and nothing. Besides being strikingly photogenic, she's a natural.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Fans of the cinematic street poet Larry Clark (Kids, Bully) might go for this, though the unexpected moments of dignity and compassion that deepen his characters are in short supply here.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
For much of the movie, [the Safdies] keep the camera discomfitingly close to the characters, blurring out the background and immersing us in their telescoped world.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
A striking portrait of addiction that doesn't say anything new - drugs are bad, kids - but it leaves a lasting and chilling impression.

Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
One junkie story tends to be much like another, so give brothers Josh and Benny Safdie credit for crafting one that's genuinely distinctive.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Heaven Knows What quickly obtains an oddly charming rhythm, a sense of eavesdropping on sometimes unlikable, but fully realized, social outsiders.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
There's never a false moment.

Name : David Rooney / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
It also helps that Holmes, Jones and Duress, as well as the mainly non-actors in secondary roles, all inhabit their characters with real conviction.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Obeys many conventions of the genre, trying its best to plunge viewers into a world that, while seemingly liberated of bourgeois proprieties, is actually a narrowly constricted prison of desperation and need.

Name : Barry Hertz / Alias : Globe and Mail
Although the film is raw, intense and even beautiful at times, the queasy knowledge of how it all came together constantly threatens to uproot any artistry.

Name : Nicolas Rapold / Alias : New York Times
At the very least, the directors, Josh and Benny Safdie, have created a small, beautiful classic of street theater by rendering these public disputes within a vibrant Manhattan setting through ingenious photography.