Metacritic reviews

The Darkest Hour turns out to be a modestly inventive and involving variation on a standard-issue sci-fi doomsday scenario.

Capable and compelling performers like Hirsch and Thirlby seem left to their own devices to make some connection with the material. The idea of semi-invisible aliens, an unseen enemy, should mean the film has a lingering sense of paranoid abstraction (not unlike "Right at Your Door"), but Darkest Hour never gets beyond rote efficiency.

You should be rooting for the humans, but you might as well be rooting for the blobs. Most likely, though, you'll just be rooting for the credits.

An alien invasion flick that evidently expects dramatic shots of a depopulated Red Square to make up for a flatlining screenplay and the absence of even a single compelling character.

Once upon a time, you'd go to see a grade-C genre movie like this willing to trade consistency and artfulness for a few stray thrills or oddball charm. But Darkest Hour doesn't have even as much character as those Discover commercials.

Really, how slovenly is it to use invisible aliens? If you're going to tease us with nothing but pinwheels of light for three-quarters of the film, you'd better have one heck of a reveal up your sleeve.

This is exactly the sort of film I wasn't expecting from either Gorak or his producers. In many too-obvious ways this is just a formulaic riff on Spielberg's "War of the Worlds."

The Darkest Hour isn't just a dark horse contender for the year's biggest joke, it's the darkest.

In a year-end season stacked deep with worthwhile films, what possible incentive could there be for submitting to The Darkest Hour's utter pointlessness?

Not since Mark Wahlberg trembled in fear beside a menacing houseplant in "The Happening" has a film tried to provoke terror with such an unlikely object of menace.