motion picture starts out "bad" and later "gets worse". He summed up his displeasure by stating, ""Sunshine" has nothing to offer, and this nothing is going to be offered relentlessly and earnestly, like a holy missive." In a primarily negative review, Joanne Kaufman writing for The Wall Street Journal, called the film "a warmed-over stew of sci-fi and gothic horror". Unenthusiastic, she affirmed, "There are the predictable malfunctions that compromise the space craft, the banal speechifying about the fate of mankind, the issue of who will live and who will die. Who cares? The characters are so sketchily drawn that it's hard to keep them straight, let alone get worked up about their survival." Also describing an unfavourable opinion, Marrit Ingman of The Austin Chronicle professed the film exhibited "problems which arise in the film's third act" which causes "a profoundly implausible plot turn that sends the movie skidding into bogeyman horror. It cheapens the sentiment, and the film doesn't recover." Nathan Lee of The Village Voice said the film "works despite feeling both over-familiar and over-ambitious. It crescendos with a legitimate sense of wonder (if not profundity) thanks in large part to the luminous and uncanny score by electro legends Underworld." Writing for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis viewed director Boyle as a "first-rate, seemingly sweat-free entertainer" who always "sells the goods smoothly, along with the chills, the laughs and, somewhat less often, the tears." She went on to say, "He's wickedly good at making you jump and squirm in your seat, which he does often in Sunshine, but he tends to avoid tapping into deep wells of emotion." Wesley Morris in The Boston Globe mused that if the film didn't "float your boat as a work of science-fiction, action, philosophy, heliocentrism, or staggering visual spectacle (although, it really should), then it certainly succeeds as a parable for cinematic ambition." He emphatically added, "The surface of this movie is plenty enthralling on its own." Desson Thomson of The Washington Post commented that for the film, "The voyage works, beautifully. While we don't get the ticklish conceit of Scottish profanities in the celestial outer realm, we do get something surprisingly consoling: a deep sense of the humanity that we always carry with us, no matter how far we venture from home." Box office The film was released commercially in its home country of the United Kingdom on 6 April