It was the Vatican's most stinging broadside against an author and a film since it roundly condemned "The Da Vinci Code" in 2005 and 2006.

The Vatican newspaper said the film and [author] Pullman's writings showed that "when man tries to eliminate God from his horizon, everything is reduced, made sad, cold and inhumane."

Maybe you've never heard of l'Osservatore Romano, but the broadsheet's a must read for industry players; they're renowned for editorials assailing television's most immoral shows (Desperate Housewives and Nova), as well as top coverage of the executive shuffle ("Nina Jacobson Ankles Mouse House, Going to Hell For Being Gay")

• Vatican Blasts "Golden Compass" [Reuters]

· "The best you can say about The Golden Compass is that it's merely the second-dullest Nicole Kidman/Daniel Craig film this year." [NY Post]

· "For once, the smooth planes of [Nicole Kidman's] face, untroubled by visible lines, serve the character...But [the film is] hampered by its fealty to the book and its madly rushed pace..." [NY Times]
· "Big, noisy, and fantastic yet curiously sodden, too, filled with talking animals, sparkly light showers, and vague hints of ''religious'' feeling that are never more than distant echoes, The Golden Compass is a snowbound mystical-whizbang kiddie ride that hovers somewhere between the loopy and the lugubrious." [EW]
· "You need proper charts, a year's supply of baked beans, and Sir Ernest Shackleton if you've got any hope of finding the plot." [London Times]
· "If you have a friend who has read the books, buy him a ticket and take him along. You'll need him. Otherwise you will find yourself scratching your head at a movie that tries way too hard to do way too much in way too short a time." [Arizona Republic]
· "The Golden Compass ultimately fails as a film in its broad strokes and inadequate scene development. The film undershoots the high mark for fantasy-franchise momentum set by New Line's previous epic success The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring — to the point that, at its abrupt end, Compass rudely insists that its audience follow the story to a second effort." [Premiere]

UPDATE: Someone who worked on the movie wrote in to take issue with the inherent subjectivity of a round-up consisting entirely of amusing bad reviews. To be sure, not everyone hated it—Roger Ebert even gave it a rave!—so in the name of fairness, we reprint the e-mail, along with links to some of its glowing notices. Merry Compass everybody!

Question, and yes, I worked on Golden Compass, do you have an agenda in posting only negative quotes for the film? Yes, arguably the reviews have been somewhat polarized, but the LA Times, Roger Ebert (four stars), NY Daily News, Newsweek among many others love the film.

Way to be objective.