IndieWire by Michael Nordine

Alita: Battle Angel is [Rodriguez’s] best film since he brought Frank Miller’s graphic novel to the screen, a sci-fi epic that does something rare in an age of endless adaptations and reboots: lives up to its potential while leaving you wanting more.

The Playlist by Cory Woodroof

Alita lays out her empathetic groundwork early and rarely diverges from it. How wonderful to have a hero that always follows through with what she fights for. How wonderful to have a blockbuster that aspires for so much and mostly delivers on those ambitions.

IGN by William Bibbiani

Alita: Battle Angel is Robert Rodriguez’s best film in many years. It’s an ambitious, impressive, visually spectacular production with great performances that make its strange world seem real.

CineVue by Martyn Conterio

Not without flaws, but nothing to get too worked up about, Alita: Battle Angel is cynicism-free, first-class popcorn entertainment spearheaded by a knockout performance from Salazar. A star is born.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

If you’re in the mood for a movie like “Alita,” “Alita” is the movie you’re in the mood for.

The Atlantic by David Sims

True to its origins, Alita is a living cartoon of a film, which only makes its ridiculousness easier to absorb.

San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle

"Alita” is an action movie, and some of that is who-cares. But the bigger thing about this film is that it makes us think about humanness, what it means, what it is, and what it might be in the future.

The Associated Press by Mark Kennedy

The film crams in so many plot lines that it risks being overstuffed but somehow stays true to its mesmerizing vision and emerges as a sci-fi success, if not a triumph.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by Emily Yoshida

The only reason any of this works at all is Salazar and, I hate to say it, those goddamned big eyes. They’re the windows to the soul, after all, and this ungainly, lurching cyborg of a would-be blockbuster has more of that than meets the eye.

Film Threat by Alan Ng

If you approach Alita: Battle Angel like a standard action film, where you’re there just for the stunts, you will have a good time. The world created by James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez is visually stunning. Rosa Salazar is fantastic as Alita, and she shines in her mocap performance.

Empire by Dan Jolin

Best enjoyed for the fun, slick action and the astonishing, super-expressive realisation of Alita herself, because elsewhere it’s cyberpunk business as usual, marred by some sloppy plotting.

ScreenCrush by Matt Singer

Alita barely considers any of the existential questions about humanity that are typically central to this kind of sci-fi film. It’s just a slick action film. That is one way, at least, it does feel like a Robert Rodriguez movie.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

Alita: Battle Angel is a film with Imax spectacle and big effects. But for all its scale, it might end up being put on for 13-year-olds as a sleepover entertainment. It doesn’t have the grownup, challenging, complicated ideas of Ghost in the Shell. A vanilla dystopian romance.

Variety by Guy Lodge

This manga-based cyberpunk origin story is a pretty zappy effects showcase, weighed down by a protracted, soul-challenged Frankenstory that short-circuits every time it gets moving.

TheWrap

The film is stuffed with so many plot strands and so many different genres (sports movie, YA rebellion movie, bounty-hunter movie) that it never gets moving.

Time Out by Phil de Semlyen

This visually epic, but monotonous collaboration between James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez is less than the sum of its slick parts.

Total Film by Matt Maytum

Impressive VFX and bursts of action can’t mask the fact that this is a tonally confused start for a sci-fi franchise hopeful, made up of scrap parts you’ve seen put to better use elsewhere.

The Telegraph by Tim Robey

As you’d expect from Rodriguez, it has a decent number of pow-wow fight scenes, and sure loves to watch machinery being ripped to shreds. But it's all uncomfortably close to the gruesome Flesh Fair from Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, revamped as an ain’t-it-cool demolition derby with a charm-and-conscience bypass.