International Law

A sampling of the critics' sharpest snipes:

• Kyle Smith at the New York Post: "As tasteless as an Arabian cathouse, as worn-out as your 1998 flip-flops and as hideous as the mom jeans Carrie wears with a belly-baring gingham top, 'Sex and the City 2' is two of the worst movies of the year."

• A.O. Scott at The New York Times: "The sequel -- which should have borrowed a subtitle from another picture opening this week and called itself "Sex and the City: The Sands of Time" -- begins with a wedding and never seems to end. Your watch will tell you that a shade less than two and a half hours have elapsed, but you may be shocked at just how much older you feel when the whole thing is over."

• Andrew O'Heir at Salon: "When Carrie asks Big, 'Am I just a bitch wife who nags you?' I could hear all the straight men in the theater -- all four of us -- being physically prevented from responding."

• Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times: "I wondered briefly whether Abu Dhabi had underwritten all this product placement, but I learn the 'SATC2' was filmed in Morocco, which must be Morocco's little joke. That nation supplies magnificent desert scenes, achieved with CGI, I assume, during which two of the girls fall off a camel. I haven't seen such hilarity since 'Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion.'"

• Kurt Loder at MTV News: "The writing, which was one of the glories of the TV series, sharp and pungent, is here abysmally juvenile."

• Richard Roeper at Richard Roeper & The Movies: "For about an hour we get a lot of domestic handwringing and bad puns and fashion porn and then out of nowhere a sheik offers to pay for all four women to go on an insanely expensive trip...to abu dhabi. This is where the movie goes from boring to lame and cartoonishly offensive and just ridiculous."

• Michael Phillips at the Chicago Tribune: "Why have these women, photographed drearily and insanely costumed, become full-on drag queens?"

• Ella Taylor at the Village Voice: "But it's one thing to create a group of BFFs who have become, in their way, post-millennium pop female icons as beloved as Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern were in the late 1970s. It's quite another to drag them well into middle age, dress them like mutton passing as lamb, and lumber them with female troubles culled straight from the mommy or single lady blogs."

• Keith Ulrich at Time Out New York: "Watching (Liza Minelli)that queerest of queer icons risk her umpteenth hip replacement by performing Beyoncé's 'Single Ladies' (dance moves and all!) is as suspenseful as a Hitchcock set piece, and a difficult act to top. So writer-director Michael Patrick King doesn't even try."

via www.theatlanticwire.com