UPDATE: Additional Critics Weigh In on Denzel Washington's FENCES

Denzel Washington and Viola Davis reprise their roles in a big screen adaptation of August Wilson's 1983 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play FENCES. Washington directs the film, hitting theaters on Christmas Day, December 25th from Paramount Studios.

The Broadway show received Tonys for best revival of a play, best actor in a play (Washington) and best actress in a play (Davis). Stephen McKinley Henderson also received a Tony nomination as best featured actor in a play. Other cast members from the 2010 production who will reprise their roles for the big screen, include Russell Hornsby, and Mykelti Williamson.

Let's see what the critics have to say about the film adaptation thus far:

A.O. Scott, The New York Times: "Fences" is much more than a filmed reading. Mr. Washington has wisely resisted the temptation to force a lot of unnecessary cinema on the play. The action ventures beyond Troy and Rose's yard - into their house and onto the street, mostly - to give them a bit more room to move and the audience a little more to look at.

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Like being hit by lightning - that's how I felt on Broadway watching Fences, the Pulitzer-prize-winning play by August Wilson. Now lightning strikes twice, this time in the film version that director-star Denzel Washington brings to the screen with flame-throwing ferocity and feeling.

Brian Truitt , USA Today: The knockout adaptation of August Wilson's 1983 play is paced by standout performances from its entire cast, not only Washington and no-brainer Oscar contender Viola Davis but also character actor Stephen Henderson and newcomer Jovan Adepo. It's a Shakespearean family drama set against 1950s suburban Pittsburgh with everything orbiting one tragic African-American patriarch.

Pete Hammond, Deadline: Some may be put off at first due to the density of the conversations, but it harkens to a time when major studios regularly brought the work of great playwrights to movie theaters and audiences had attention spans longer than a gnat. It also provides Washington with the role of a very distinguished career and he knows exactly how to deliver it, without using flashy directing techniques to get in the way.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, AVClub: The film script-based on an unfinished draft by Wilson, who died in 2005-doesn't muck with the dialogue or add characters. Instead, it opts to break up scenes across multiple locations and to fill in points with brief wordless sequences or montages, ultimately betraying the stark and elliptical structure of the drama to which it tries to be so faithful.

Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter: Great in these roles onstage, Washington and Davis repeat the honors here, he with quicksilver shifts from ingratiating tall-tale-telling and humor to bulldog-like demands to his wife and offspring that he be treated like the boss king he fancies himself to be. Davis beautifully illuminates the ways in which Rose has learned to live with this man, to be quiet or cut him slack when it's not worth the effort of a fight.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety: The acting is all superb. At the moment Troy's selfishness is fully revealed, Viola Davis delivers a monologue of tearful, scalding, nose-running agony that shows you one woman's entire reality breaking down. For a few shattering moments, when she talks about her family of half-brothers and half-sisters, it drags the fallout from America's racist past right into the glaring light of the present. Yet a drama like this one should build in power, and after a while it begins to dissipate.

David Ehrlich, Indiewire: At a time when a percentage of the population needs to be reminded that black lives matter, "Fences" insists on their magnitude. It urges white viewers to see the scope of black lives elevated into view, and implores black viewers to see "the content of their lives elevated into art." Wilson adopted the latter phrase as something of a mission statement, and if Washington doesn't do much to expand on that ethos, his film nevertheless makes it easier for all of us to bear witness.

Robert Abele, The Wrap: The only real drawback is one that belongs to the original play, an overextension toward the end that threatens to dissipate some of the second half's emotional might. But this amounts to quibbling when you have in "Fences" a movie that shows enough promise for the future of transposing Wilson's work to this medium, and a pair of actors in Washington and Davis that turn passion, ache, helplessness and regret into the most shimmering of character duets.

Watch the trailer for FENCES below: