This week, New York's Winter Garden Theatre played host to the much-anticipated stage adaptation of the 2005 Oscar-nominated movie Good Night, and Good Luck, starring none other than George Clooney himself. Directed by Tony-winner David Cromer, the play is set at the height of McCarthyism. Clooney plays broadcaster Edward R. Murrow as he faces off with U.S. Senator McCarthy in a televised, history-making event that finally saw the tide turn on the senator's rampant and often baseless campaign against the 'communists' he believed to be infiltrating much of American life, media, and politics.

Critics have delivered a mixed verdict on New York's latest addition. Curious to see who found it worth the hype and who remained unimpressed? Dive in below to discover their perspectives!

The Reviews: The Good, The Bad and The Meh

The Good

The New York Times
"Clooney's glamour, abetted by David Cromer's suave direction, does a lot of that work; even when the actor is in some remote corner of Scott Pask's huge and infinitely reconfiguring set, you find him immediately, torso tilted in the Murrow manner and lit Hollywood-like by the designer Heather Gilbert."

Variety
"This transfer from screen to stage is as intense and laser-focused as the penetrating gaze coming from its star and co-writer, George Clooney."

The Wrap
"There's a lot of very busy, over-the-top acting on stage this season. Clooney bucks that trend, and a feature of David Cromer's direction of "Good Night" is how restrained he keeps this entire cast of 20-plus actors. His direction lets us eavesdrop on a moment in history at the CBS studios at Grand Central as the country experiences a political earthquake not unlike our current one."

The Bad

Theatermania
"An empty reassembly of their screenplay, with period chicness substituting for tension, the play doesn't trust the audience to see the parallels between past and present, creating little more than a well-intentioned echo chamber instead of a gripping 90-minutes of theater."

The New York Post
"By the end, "Good Night, and Good Luck" manages what evening news shows have reliably done for decades: It makes the viewer sleepy."

Timeout
"Will this play, handsomely mounted though it is, actually change any hearts and minds about resistance in America? Or will it merely contribute to Broadway's drift toward exorbitantly pricey events reliant on star casting? That's the $799 question. For producers of this show, it may not matter either way. For everyone else, Good Night, and Good Luck is probably bad news."

The Meh

Vulture
"It's quite a beginning, but then that curtain rises, and as lovingly detailed as Pask's newsroom set is, Cromer has to enliven a still highly cinematic script in a wide-open theatrical space; the result is that Good Night almost immediately starts to diffuse."

The Hollywood Reporter
"If the drama at times seems almost as educational as it is theatrical, David Cromer's deluxe production remains classy, absorbing entertainment. It conjures the professional milieu with evocative detail and captures the grit and backbone of a news team at a time before the major networks lost their exclusivity with the fragmentation of the information landscape."

Deadline
"Good Night, and Good Luck certainly doesn't lack point of view or conviction, but neither of those things can do much with an overly familiar story, a lack of subtlety and an odd tone of understatement that extends to everything from the writing to Clooney's performance. The actor seems to be fighting against the natural charisma that has played such an important role in energizing his film and TV performances."