Name : Jeannette Catsoulis / Alias : New York Times
[The] screenplay . amounts to little more than a string of flashy stunts before fizzling to a contrived close. For all its hints at imminent catastrophe, "Nerve" feels surprisingly tame.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Joost and Schulman use nearly every trick imaginable to keep Nerve's energy at a consistently high level and to give it a visual uniqueness.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Bright, brisk, and enjoyably silly .

Name : Anna Smith / Alias : Time Out
Other films - including David Fincher's The Game (1997) - have done this better, but with its engaging story, energetic soundtrack and slick production values, Nerve is an easy watch for restless young minds.

Name : Justin Lowe / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
With its attractive young cast and a multiplatform media campaign, Nerve won't need to rely on going viral to find its audience, but it's unlikely to be trending for long once viewers digest its simplistically cautionary message.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Variety
"Nerve," let's be clear, isn't a movie to take seriously, yet its fast lunge at topicality - the way it uses the contest at its center as a lightning-rod metaphor for how young adults interact in the digital age - is part of what's fun about it.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
It gets off on the highwire fun of living on a digital dare and then pisses away its provocations by lecturing us with a metaphorical take on social media as an STD. What a buzz kill.

Name : David Ehrlich / Alias : indieWIRE
Blisteringly cool one moment and ridiculously silly the next, this punchy and propulsive late summer surprise is able to capture the way we live now because it displays such a vivid understanding of the reasons why we live that way.

Name : Alison Willmore / Alias : BuzzFeed News
Nerve is a dizzyingly of-the-moment good time, a dystopian meet-cute in present-day New York.

Name : Leah Pickett / Alias : Chicago Reader
The film has a fatal messaging problem: it lambasts online group-think and "hiding behind screen names" while also glamorizing the game.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
For about 45 minutes, the movie's engrossing fluff, a stylish cautionary cyber-tale aimed primarily at teenage girls.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
The sharpest, wildest and most unpredictable thriller I've seen this year .

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
An enjoyable teen flick about the glamour and danger of the internet.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
If it collapses in the end by going dark and also bonkers and bringing in hackers ex machina to clean up its mess, well, directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost can say they did it for the feels.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
Nerve looks fabulous and the pace is evenly adrenalized, which makes up for cliched characters, a concocted premise and commentary that is a bit on the nose .

Name : Kevin P. Sullivan / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The perils of social media may be ripe for the after-school-special treatment, but less expectedly, they make for a half-decent Hunger Games riff.

Name : Odie Henderson / Alias : RogerEbert.com
Part of me screamed for this film to get off my lawn, but an even bigger part of me succumbed to playing by its rules. Nerve is too much fun to stay mad at for long.

Name : Nick Patch / Alias : Toronto Star
Like one of its daredevils hanging one-handed from skyscraper scaffolding, Nerve mostly manages to maintain its precarious balance of pulpy suspense and social commentary.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
The city and the plot points wheel right by, the leads fetchingly entranced with each other. If one patch of dares disappoints, there's another coming right up, and the directors stage and shoot them with swooning neon kinecticism.

Name : Katie Walsh / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"Mr. Robot" meets "Battle Royale". a neon-saturated teenage dream, high on first kisses and digital hearts.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Franco grins diabolically throughout, and Roberts sounds a bit like a junior version of Sarah Jessica Parker's "Sex and the City" character . otherwise, they're awfully bland, and it's hard to get too invested in their fate.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : MTV
Nerve knows we're all playing the game.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Emma Roberts and Dave Franco are just fine, but there's no huge onscreen spark between them. Most of the supporting roles are thinly drawn and forgettable.

Name : Tirdad Derakhshani / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Nerve gives moviegoers everything they'd want from a teen romance. It's a little less successful as a critique of life in the age of Instagram.

Name : Allen Salkin / Alias : New York Daily News
Clever, exciting, sweet and full of quick twists that never devolve from serving a well-built story.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
Not only does it uncannily evoke the feelings of awkwardness, alienation and excitement that come with being a teenager, but it conjures the kind of suspense that will give your armrests a workout.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
While the film's vertiginous set pieces are appropriately heart-clenching, it's not nearly as successful at little details like plot and character.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
"Nerve" is sharp looking and delivers real jolts, even if the climax pushes things a bit far and wraps up too easily. Or maybe it's an accurate look at what'll happen when "Nerve" becomes real?

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
It comes off like a combination of "The Hunger Games," "Saw" and Pokemon Go. Maybe that sounds like a good thing. It's not.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
A successful and memorable thriller.