Mamma Mia!

This winner takes it all -- an absolutely hilarious, rousing and joyous celebration that ought to have you dancing in the aisles.

The movie takes the ABBA jukebox musical that ate London, and is still eating Broadway, and turns it into a surprisingly sensuous experience.

The film, vividly directed by newcomer Phyllida Lloyd and cannily written by Catherine Johnson, begins and ends quietly.

Mamma Mia! earns its exclamation point. The adaptation of the long-running stage hit is a crowd-pleasing gusher of escapism, not the least of which is respite from summertime teen action fare.

While Meryl Streep may as well write her Golden Globes acceptance speech now for best actress (comedy or musical), Pierce Brosnan might find himself with a Razzie for his embarrassingly bad vocal performance.

The comedy and romance should appeal even to non-ABBA fans. Only those with the hardest of hearts will be able to resist Mamma Mia!

The purest entertainment on movie screens this summer. Mamma Mia! isn't classic musical theater, but it's classy -- and loads of fun.

It's a pretty enjoyable, big-screen songfest that should appeal to both the show's fans as well as aficionados of the Swedish pop group that supplied its tunes.

As colorful as a peacock feather and just about as insubstantial, Mamma Mia! bounces along on the music of ABBA and a cast of pros who sell like there’s no tomorrow.

I'd argue that Mamma Mia! is basically an idiot-proof property once those ABBA tunes burrow their way into your skull. As Noel Coward so brilliantly put it, "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is."

The entire all-star cast enthusiastically sings, dances and emotes through the romantic musical comedy, clearly aware of the campiness of it all.

The accomplished Streep steals the show here, proving that she can belt out the music better than anyone could have expected.

Meryl Streep again proves her greatness in Mamma Mia!, because she enlivens this creakily constructed musical.

Mamma Mia! is fun, the music's terrific and the cast is appealing.

Between songs, the film's dopey sight gags and bawdy winks exert an irresistible anti-gravitational pull on the corners of the mouth.

There are plenty of reasons to be dubious about Mamma Mia! -- including awkward direction and a lead actor who sings as well as I do (that's not a compliment) -- but there is no way to listen to an ABBA song without bopping along.

Like the stage version that it follows with such devotion, Mamma Mia! the movie is broad, brassy, often overdramatic and about as subtle as an elephant in harem pants.

Is there anything Meryl Streep can't do? Mamma Mia! is worth the ticket price just to see her belt it out, jump up and down on a bed, dance in platform shoes and slide down a banister.

Almost everyone in the cast gets his or her solo, and if the material is too flimsy to require much in the way of acting and the dancing isn’t going to evoke visions of Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, both are fun to watch.

A fabulous piece of froth with nothing bigger on its mind than giddy entertainment, Mamma Mia! is a bubbly blast that's sure to win the hearts of those who love musicals.

It's a defiantly lowbrow affair from start to finish, and the humor is so sitcom-silly and the musical numbers so awkwardly integrated into the flow of the story that, all through the film's opening scenes, I found myself squirming.

For the dizzy grins that it induces, we can blame Meryl Streep, who gives a shot of adrenaline to the wheezy songs and skeletal story.

Mamma Mia! is a lark, a movie that sets out to be fun and little else. No harm in that. Better still, despite some bits that drag, it often succeeds.

How much you like it is going to depend very much on how high a tolerance for ABBA you have, however a truly charismatic and engaging cast makes Mamma Mia! much easier to swallow than it has any right to be.

Mamma Mia! too often feels like a souvenir program: something to revive the feelings you had watching the stage performance.

It's a one-of-a-kind cinematic wreck: I couldn't wait for it to end, and yet I'm strangely longing to see it again.

Camp, bawdy and with a perky innocence, it is Sex and the City meets High School Musical.

This is a mess of a movie, but I caught myself having the time of my life anyway.

In trying to think of a worse choice than Pierce Brosnan as the male star of a pop musical, the only name I could come up with is Dan Rather.

If you're willing to forego such trifles as a solid, believable plot, or clear, well-developed characters, this flick will do the trick to release your inner Dancing Queen.

There's nothing remotely subtle about the movie version of the ABBA musical Mamma Mia! and people's reactions to it won't be subtle either: You will hate this movie or you will love it.

It's tempting to say that Mamma Mia! has the worst choreography of any big-screen musical in history, though that would imply that what happens in the film is choreography.

It's dragged down by tepid direction, so-so vocals and a general lack of polish that doesn't do justice to the genre.

You may find that the movie version of Mamma Mia! brings out your inner Simon Cowell. It's likely to happen any time Pierce Brosnan gets his mitts on a melody.

Mamma Mia! and its all-age, full-contact ecstasy -- best embodied in Dancing Queen -- might do more for women (and men) of a certain age than the comparatively attenuated and over-dramatized Sex and the City.

If it weren't for Meryl Streep, you could probably rename the film Diarrhea because except for her it's pretty much.

Mamma Mia! is the worst-directed "good" movie ever. If it wasn't for the effervescent charms of ABBA's sparkling songs, and the brave earnestness of the uniformly superb cast, it would be an unbridled disaster.

It gets by on the featherweight golden oldies of ABBA, and the treat of seeing and hearing some golden oldies of the cinema break character and belt out a song.

There's light and fizzy, and then there's the Broadway musical Mamma Mia!, a confection with enough sugar to dissolve teeth like an Alka-Seltzer tablet

Meryl Streep gives it her all, but even her moxie and the absurdly catchy music of ABBA can't smooth out this uneven musical.

A clumsy adaptation of the stage show, saved only by ABBA's feel-good disco songs.

I could do without Dancing Queen stuck in my head, but that will unstick soon enough, and with any luck, so too will the memory of Streep noodling on an air guitar.

Mamma Mia!, the film of the international stage smash showcasing the greatest hits of ABBA, is like a party where everyone is so desperate to have a good time that it makes you miserable.

The plot is a clothesline on which to hang the songs; the movie doesn't much sparkle when nobody is singing or dancing, but that's rarely.

Call it My Big Comparatively Thin Greek Wedding, and let's hope the next Meryl Streep musical fares better, as does the next film by director Lloyd.

Most of the cast members don't have the pipes and appear to be in possession of two, possibly three, left feet.

First-time director Phyllida Lloyd seems to have no clue about how to adapt stage material to the big screen; and for all the movie’s entertaining moments, it steadfastly refuses to lift off.

As a movie it might suffer from flat-footed direction and lurching segues, not to mention an outlandish indulgence of bug-eyed theatrical overacting.

A rookie director helming a movie musical is like med students performing open-heart surgery on the first day of school. Consequently, this Mamma Mia! sags, stalls and does very little to earn its exclamation point.

On the scale of modern musical adaptations, it's not a disaster of The Producers proportions. But it is missing the razzle-dazzle of a success like Chicago.

By turns entertaining and excruciating, Mamma Mia!, the jukebox musical that strings together 19 ABBA hits on a narrative thread flimsier than dental floss, had me smiling and wincing, often at the same time.

When Streep, Walters and Baranski share the screen, Mamma Mia! comes alive and earns its exclamation point. The rest is forced gaiety pushed to the breaking point.

Imagine Streep making videos for MTV. Sound awkward? That's Mamma Mia!

The direction is slack -- it's Lloyd's first feature film and it shows -- the choreography clumsy and every ten minutes there's yet another gratuitous showstopper shouting in your face and insisting you have a good time.

It gets completely botched down by the poor casting of name stars in order to reach a larger audience.

With lighting and camerawork that recall Xanadu, the film’s charms come from the patentable joy of ABBA.

There are some buoyantly fun moments, but quickly Mamma Mia! becomes too much of a good thing.

When Brosnan sings, he sounds like he's gargling a cactus. Studios routinely dubbed actors' singing voices in classic Hollywood musicals; could they please start doing it again?

Streep can sing, her co-stars not so much. All the forced frivolity and faux fun in Mamma Mia! all the extruded squeals of delight -- it's just all... so... exhausting.

Watching Streep's mother-of-the-bride prance and writhe around for two hours in a pair of hideous denim overalls is awfully painful. As for Pierce Brosnan's multiple musical numbers, let's just say I don't know if I'll be able to look him in the face again.

Toward the end of Mamma Mia! Meryl Streep stands on a secluded Grecian cliff, singing. You can tell it's secluded as there doesn't seem to be a director or choreographer present.

One big problem with this big-screen musical is that nobody can actually sing. Streep's voice is passable, but Firth and Skarsgard hide desperately (or wisely) behind the overbearing score.

Director Phyllida Lloyd sets new lows in cinematic ineptitude by mixing and matching different takes at will and using frantic cutting and a lot of zooms to try to create some kind of arbitrary energy.