Washington Post by Gary Arnold

The largest shares of credit for this pleasant surprise evidently belong to director Ron Howard--whose assurance behind the camera may come as a revelation to people still associating him with the roles of little Opie on "The Andy Griffith Show" and clean-cut Richie on "Happy Days".

Variety by Staff (Not Credited)

Though the plotline hardly sounds like a family film, this is probably the most sanitized treatment of pimps and prostitution audiences will ever see. None of this much matters, because director Ron Howard and screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, all TV veterans, are only bent on giving the audience a good time.

Washington Post by Rita Kempley

Michael Keaton's the live wire and Henry Winkler's the deadbeat in director Ron Howard's new hit, Night Shift, a whorifying undertaking that solicits its laughs by pairing the quick and the dead.

TV Guide Magazine by Staff (Not Credited)

Ron Howard's direction is carefully balanced, and he treats his characters with humanity and respect. Winkler turns in the best performance of his career, and Keaton is wonderful.

LarsenOnFilm by Josh Larsen

When it comes to 1980s comedies about urban anxiety, I prefer this Ron Howard lark to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. Partly this is due to the manic brio of Michael Keaton in his feature debut, but it’s also the fact that the movie—written by the team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel—has a better control of comic pacing and energy. Not all the jokes land (and some are problematically dated), but an awful lot of them do, with exactly the right timing and intensity.

Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum

This isn't as snappily directed or as caustically conceived as the subsequent Risky Business, which has a similar theme, but it's arguably just as sexy and almost as funny.

Time Out by Staff (Not Credited)

Likeable.

The New Yorker by Pauline Kael

This isn't much of a movie but it manages to be funny a good part of the time anyway.

The New York Times by Janet Maslin

This is a halfway funny movie, one that's got loads of good gags in its first half and nothing but trouble in its second.

Miami Herald by Terry Kelleher

Winkler isn't half-bad in a role that requires quiet reaction rather than the facile caricature we see in "The Fonz." Keaton is aggressively funny for awhile, though the lasting impression is of a cut-rate Bill Murray. [30 July 1982, p.D2]