Name : Jon Bream / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
A must-see for liner-note readers.

Name : Joe Leydon / Alias : Variety
The unsung heroes who played on stacks of wax during the '60s pop era are celebrated in a hugely entertaining documentary.

Name : Jim Farber / Alias : New York Daily News
These unsung heroes are the subject of an illuminating, witty and comprehensive documentary by Denny Tedesco, son of the Crew's inventive guitarist, the late Tommy Tedesco.

Name : Jon Caramanica / Alias : New York Times
Mostly, it's hagiography, with stars like Cher and Brian Wilson used as character witnesses to the players' greatness.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
"The Wrecking Crew" succeeds as important cultural history. But it's also deeply personal for Tedesco .

Name : John Anderson / Alias : Newsday
Good-natured look at the virtuoso workhorses of classic rock and pop.

Name : Jim Harrington / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
It can be uncomfortable to pull back the curtain on some of the most beloved rock songs of all time. Yet, it's worth it in order to meet The Wrecking Crew.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
With a son's love and duty, Tedesco . breezily celebrates the team that laid down a thousand riffs back just before pop became too serious for anonymous craftsmanship.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Long on nostalgia, the film does shed further light on the genius of Brian Wilson and the unfair uproar over the Monkees' need for musical backup. Turns out even the Beach Boys required the Wrecking Crew to rock.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
With its release held up for seven years because of rights issues, Denny Tedesco's illuminating documentary about the unsung L.A. session musicians who provided the backbeat for some of the greatest songs from the '50s through the '80s can now be seen.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Fascinating .

Name : Mark Feeney / Alias : Boston Globe
Denny Tedesco's lively and loving documentary takes its title from the name collectively applied to the group of two to three dozen Los Angeles studio musicians who dominated rock and pop recordings there during the 1960s and early '70s.

Name : Ella Taylor / Alias : NPR
The studio musicians rarely got credit on or off the albums. In The Wrecking Crew, Denny Tedesco, whose father was a Wrecking Crew guitarist, rights that wrong.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
The enchanting Kaye - "I was making more money than the President" - probably deserves her own film.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Though their story has taken decades to reach the screen, it has been worth the wait.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : RogerEbert.com
It'll make you listen to "Good Vibrations," a song you've heard a million times, with fresh ears.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
The actors don't just look uncomfortable in their period duds, they also look uneasy in their own skins, which is a feat for two such natural, physically confident screen performers.

Name : Serena Donadoni / Alias : Village Voice
By making Serena ornamental, Bier diminishes her power, and Lawrence plays her as a petulant Lady Macbeth wannabe. Worse is Bradley Cooper, whose Pemberton comes off like an entitled scion, not a clear-cut timber king.

Name : Charlie Lyne / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
This is a film full of unremarkable compromises - the kind that result in a bland film rather than a bad one.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Filmed in 2012 and finally limping into theaters like a glamorous zombie, the movie has star wattage but zero emotional voltage.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
It's painful to watch all that talent get wasted.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
It's reassuring, really, to be reminded that top-tier Hollywood stars can make lousy choices just like the rest of us.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
Lawrence is the hottest actress in Hollywood and she and Cooper share six Oscar nominations, and one win, between them. But "Serena" uses muscles the costars of "Silver Linings Playbook" and "American Hustle" stars don't often get to flex.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Beating a dead horse barely begins to describe the task of writing about "Serena"; it's more like playing coroner.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
What were Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence thinking? Seriously?

Name : Geoff Pevere / Alias : Globe and Mail
One of those movies that proves that the mere presence of all the right ingredients does not a happy meal make. It's all in the mixing.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Ah, well. All the best actors eventually get their Ishtar, right?

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
Both actors, gracefully dressed and lightly anguished, draw deep on their professional aplomb in a bid to keep a straight face; the credible, bulked-up pain that Cooper brought to "American Sniper" seems a world away.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
In other words, a lot of people realized they had an epic clunker on their hands.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Given these unpromising circumstances, I was expecting something truly awful, and perhaps that might have been more fun to watch than this lugubrious period piece. The production values and the costumes are the true stars.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Funny how there are fans of Jennifer Lawrence who will never see her in "Serena." It's not her best film, but it contains one of her best performances, in a role that challenges her more than any other.

Name : Inkoo Kang / Alias : TheWrap
Densely packed and gorgeously expressionist, the old-fashioned tragedy is very nearly a satisfying experience despite its various shortcomings.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Into each life some rain eventually falls, and in a bomb called Serena, golden couple Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, united for the third time onscreen, arrive soaking wet.

Name : Cath Clarke / Alias : Time Out
We don't invest anything in either character, and with barely any tension, 'Serena' grabs neither head nor heart.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
Absolutely nothing works. No one seems to understand the place or the people. And the only thing gleaned from the lumber industry is that you can build an entire movie from performances made of wood.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Left for dead since 2012, Serena would better serve its stars by burial, not resurrection.

Name : Guy Lodge / Alias : Variety
Bier's Danish-language work, usually structurally and emotionally cohesive to a fault, has rarely been this compellingly untidy.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
The film is haunted by a sense that something was overlooked in translation from the book.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
The choppily edited and thoroughly wooden "Serena'' fails to catch fire, even when everything literally goes up in flames. Basically, it's "Cold Mountain" without Renee Zellweger.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Although the film got stuck in editing limbo for two years, no amount of cutting could rid the project of a diseased premise. Nor is it erotic or violent enough to be an effective critique of human nature.

Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The performers are as beautiful to look at here as they are intriguing to watch.

Name : Vadim Rizov / Alias : AV Club
There's simply not that much to see in the performances.

Name : Stephen Dalton / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Serena only has one key flaw: it is difficult to believe a single word of it, still less to care about these relentlessly selfish and short-sighted characters.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
A Depression-era potboiler starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence that never manages to get past the feeling of a calculated Hollywood reunion.