The New Republic:

Nolan weaves his genre obligations into this dark vision as seamlessly as one could reasonably hope. He still has some trouble establishing the geography of his action sequences and his fight scenes tend to be a bit muddled, but he nonetheless stages a number of memorable set pieces: a winged swoop over a slumbering metropolis, shot on ultra-high-definition IMAX film; a frenetic car (actually, truck) chase that culminates in the end-over-end somersaulting of an 18-wheeler. Nolan wisely minimizes the use of CGI (even when the semi is flipped), and the difference is palpable.

The director's most remarkable special effect, however, is Heath Ledger's Joker. It's a difficult performance to rate on any conventional scale, a whirlwind of energy and effects, tics and tells, Brando and Hopkins and Nicholson thrown in a blender set to "puree" and then dynamited mid-spin. To call it compelling would be a criminal understatement, and yet it seems less the creation of a living self than the annihilation of one, an exercise in the center not holding. Even without Ledger's death, this would be a deeply discomfiting performance; as it is, it's hard not to view it as sign or symptom of the subsequent tragedy.

NPR:

Ledger's Joker is every bit as disturbing as he is disturbed — tongue-flickingly reptilian, and yet disarmingly common-sensical in the way he relies on the dark side of human nature to aid him in wreaking havoc. He uses crowd psychology to endanger crowds, subverts legal niceties (wait till you see what he does with that one phone call he's allowed when arrested), and greets the perpetually self-doubting Batman as a fellow damaged soul. It's a heart-stoppingly unpredictable performance, haunted by the audience's knowledge of Ledger's death earlier this year, and rendering even darker what has to be as dark a superhero fantasy as Hollywood's likely to produce any time soon.

The A.V. Club:

Nolan lets the film's spectacular action scenes seem like the natural consequences of the conflicts between characters, conflicts that build until Gotham becomes less a setting than a stage for an operatic conflict between tortured good and contented chaos. As strong as The Dark Knight's setpieces are—and they're all pulsing showstoppers of a kind not seen in Batman Begins—the real tension comes from Nolan's willingness to let that battle's ultimate outcome remain in doubt even as the credits roll. The film's capes and cowls suggest one genre, but it's a metropolis-sized tragedy at heart.

Washington Post:

This is not because Heath Ledger died in January, though that event does perhaps add some otherwise unearned melancholy to the film. It's because Ledger's performance is so intense and so lasting; it's because despite the insane mask, it's a subtle, nuanced piece of acting so powerful it banishes all memories of the handsome Aussie behind it. The makeup seems to have liberated him: He's supple of body, expressive with only his eyes, and his voice has undulations of irony and mockery and psychopathology to it. He's an essay — in a way he's never before been, playing straight-faced characters — in pure charisma.

The New Yorker:

It’s a workable dramatic conflict, but only half the team can act it. Christian Bale has been effective in some films, but he’s a placid Bruce Wayne, a swank gent in Armani suits, with every hair in place. He’s more urgent as Batman, but he delivers all his lines in a hoarse voice, with an unvarying inflection. It’s a dogged but uninteresting performance, upstaged by the great Ledger, who shambles and slides into a room, bending his knees and twisting his neck and suddenly surging into someone’s face like a deep-sea creature coming up for air. Ledger has a fright wig of ragged hair; thick, running gobs of white makeup; scarlet lips; and dark-shadowed eyes. He’s part freaky clown, part Alice Cooper the morning after, and all actor. He’s mesmerizing in every scene. His voice is not sludgy and slow, as it was in “Brokeback Mountain.” It’s a little higher and faster, but with odd, devastating pauses and saturnine shades of mockery. At times, I was reminded of Marlon Brando at his most feline and insinuating. When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, bring the children), and, as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering—in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism—how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.

New York:

Oh, the verbiage probably wouldn’t matter if those truck crashes were any fun, but the tumult is spectacularly incoherent. Nolan appears to have no clue how to stage or shoot action. He got away with the chopped-up fights in Batman Begins because his hero was a barely glimpsed ninja, coming at villains from all angles in stroboscopic flashes. There are more variables here, which means more opportunities to say “What the f—- just happened?” I defy you to make spatial sense of the early scene in which Batman battles faux Batmen, gangsters, and the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy in a cameo that comes to nothing). If you can, move on to Level 2, diagramming the “Bat-tank versus Joker-truck versus cop car” chase. Then, finally, take the Ultimate Challenge: following the climax with Batman, the Joker, more faux Batmen, decoy hostages dressed as clowns, a SWAT team, and Morgan Freeman’s Lucius with some kind of sonar monitoring gizmo that tracks all the parties on video screens. Actually, Freeman looks like he knows what’s going on. Maybe the sequence plays well in sonar.

Slate:

There's an undeniable sense of one-upmanship at work in this sleek, luxurious-looking production—a subtext of "Oh yeah? Top this." But for all The Dark Knight's occasionally bombastic excess, it sort of does top them all, and not only in star power and sheer number of things blown up. Nolan turns the Manichean morality of comic books—pure good vs. pure evil—into a bleak post-9/11 allegory about how terror (and, make no mistake, Heath Ledger's Joker is a terrorist) breaks down those reassuring moral categories.

Globe And Mail:

Though none of the other actors comes close to matching Ledger's hideous lustre, everything in The Dark Knight is a bit more over the top than in Batman Begins. The Batman character seems to have been freshly dipped in darkness, with a new, more flexible outfit, and his raspy Batman voice sounds like a cross between Clint Eastwood and Darth Vader. His alter ego, Bruce Wayne, is even more of a smug jerk, a smooth-as-shellac billionaire who travels with a chain of fashion models on his arm.

As an actor, Bale's a bit of a stick, but at least he's constantly intense. Ditto for Eckhart as Harvey Dent, Wayne's out-of-the-closet crime fighter, his rival for the assistant district attorney Rachel Dawes. Maggie Gyllenhaal, who takes over the role of Rachel from the too perky Katie Holmes, brings welcome emotional gravity to the part, but she's far too mumsy to be convincing as the romantic ideal of both of Gotham City's most eligible hunks.

Salon:

There's no dramatic arc in "The Dark Knight" — only a series of speed bumps. The moments in the movie that should be the most dramatic are glanced over so quickly that we barely have time to register what has happened. I'm not sure the actors know what's going on, either. Bale was a tolerable Batman the first time around, even though he ultimately failed to dissolve the distance between us and that mask. Here, he tries to build on that earlier performance. In "The Dark Knight," Batman is misunderstood and mistrusted by the people of Gotham, who see him as a vigilante and not a hero who strives to protect them. Bale is slightly better as Bruce Wayne — he's such a good actor that he's capable of conveying the deepest anguish in a single, flashing blink. But his Batman, lumbering through the movie in a suit that's supposed to be lighter than previous incarnations, is a flat, dull creature, with no new tricks up his gauntlets: Playing this moody superhero, Bale has run out of shades of gray to work with.

USA Today:

The Joker is more than wild.

It's a tribute to the power of Heath Ledger's transcendent performance in The Dark Knight (* * * * out of four) that we can watch him, transfixed and deeply unsettled by the character's creepiness, laugh at his comic menace, and still manage to block out thoughts of the actor's tragic and untimely death. This is a career-making performance if ever there was one. Too bad it was a career-ending one as well.

The New York Times:

The new Batman movie isn’t a radical overhaul like its predecessor, which is to be expected of a film with a large price tag (well north of $100 million) and major studio expectations (worldwide domination or bust). Instead, like other filmmakers who’ve successfully reworked genre staples, Mr. Nolan has found a way to make Batman relevant to his time — meaning, to ours — investing him with shadows that remind you of the character’s troubled beginning but without lingering mustiness. That’s nothing new, but what is surprising, actually startling, is that in “The Dark Knight,” which picks up the story after the first film ends, Mr. Nolan has turned Batman (again played by the sturdy, stoic Mr. Bale) into a villain’s sidekick.

Los Angeles Times:

Because these kinds of movies are only as strong as their villains, a good part of the credit for the potency of "The Dark Knight" has to go to the unusual and unusually creepy and sadistic way the Joker was conceptualized by the Nolans and David S. Goyer (who has a story credit) and played by Ledger in what turned out to be his last completed screen role. The Joker's is a different kind of evil than we're used to, one that is harder for both Batman and the audience to dismiss than what Jack Nicholson did with the part nearly two decades ago.

'Dark Knight' Speed Towards Records: Midnight Shows Broke 'Star Wars: Sith' Numbers; More & More Screens Being Added [Deadline Hollywood Daily]

'The Dark Knight' opens today, nationwide.

The Hollywood Reporter:

Reteaming with "Norbit" director Brian Robbins, Murphy tries some sharp physical comedy on for size, and though he's terrific (especially as that space ship), too often the Fox vehicle is content to meet the jokes halfway.
Still, like most of Murphy's recent output, the movie aims low — as in, the targeted pint-sized audience — and its family-friendly results should translate into some solid summer numbers.

Variety:

“Meet Dave” works best when helmer Brian Robbins, working from a clever script by Rob Greenberg and Bill Corbett, uses the f/x trickery relatively sparingly, and allows Murphy to shine as the pic’s most special effect. His gracefully awkward body language in Dave's early scenes recalls Steve Martin's herky-jerky hilarity as the spiritually possessed lawyer in "All of Me."

But even after the man-shaped spaceship adapts to ambulating, Murphy remains amusing as Dave does his best to mimic the expressions and understand the language of Earthlings.

E! Online:

Think of this as Coming to Earth with Murphy not only playing a cultural fish out of water but also an unfamiliar and uncoordinated body. Scenes like the one where Dave wrestles with both a sweater and the English language in an Old Navy store are really pretty funny, but the film falls apart once it tries to become an action movie and force a big climax.

Murphy's still got chops, but unfortunately doesn't seem to care much about the scripts he picks.

The A.V. Club:

Proven comic talents like Judah Friedlander and Ed Helms make up much of Murphy's crew, but apart from speaking in contraction-free spaceman-ese, the film doesn't give them anything funny to do. Murphy's performance is little more than an unblinking variation on his Coming To America stranger-in-a-strange-land shtick crossed with gags left over from the late, unlamented '90s sitcom Herman's Head. Here a sample: Banks offers Murphy-the-ship some meat loaf. Cut to Murphy-the-captain being confused when shown footage of the singer Meat Loaf. It's comedy that doesn't ask anyone, onscreen or in the audience, to try too hard.

Chicago Tribune:

The scenario's influences range from "All of Me" to "Innerspace" to "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex" without the sex. Murphy's Dave is typified by a look of pop-eyed otherworldliness. Better material and more adept direction might've made this a perfectly solid commercial enterprise. As is, "Meet Dave" is imperfectly lame, and until Murphy—and other movie stars in his relative position of power—hold out for fresher goods, the multiplexes will continue to offer sporadically diverting time-wasters such as this one.

USA Today:

Jokes are laced with racism, homophobia and stereotypes of all stripes.

Given that co-screenwriter Bill Corbett was a writer for the quirky Mystery Science Theater 3000, Meet Dave really should have been funnier. Things certainly don't improve when the movie plunges into trite sentimentality: "The most powerful force in all the universe often comes from the smallest stars," Dave tells Gina's son, Josh. And: "Promise me you'll always take pride in being different."

The New York Times:

Of minor note is that Mr. Murphy’s penchant for playing more than one character, which until recently suggested an impatience with the limitations of most of his roles, has started to feel like a hedge against boredom. Though mildly amusing, his two characters in “Meet Dave” — a wee captain and a humanoid spaceship — neither tax nor stretch him. When the captain instructs the spaceship to walk and talk among the earthlings, it does so perfectly, the very picture of a well-oiled comedy machine.

Los Angeles Times:

If Murphy seems to have learned something from the scathing reaction to the excessive and generally grotesque "Norbit," Brian Robbins, who directed that movie as well as this one, has not. As if to make up for Murphy's tightly controlled performance, the movie's other actors are pushed past the limits of parody. A graceful actress in a thankless role, Banks is given little but a string of open-mouthed reaction shots, and Gabrielle Union fares no better as the captain's onboard love interest. The ship's unnamed crew members are a collection of undifferentiated types who evolve into lazy caricatures under the influence of Earth's undisciplined emotions. There's a black crewman (Kevin Hart) who becomes a trash-talker lech after he's exposed to hip-hop, a mustachioed grunt (Pat Kilbane) who catches a glimpse of "A Chorus Line" and swiftly goes gay, and a nerdy engineer (Judah Friedlander) who starts racking up MySpace friends. For a self-proclaimed superior race, these Lilliputian explorers are notably underdeveloped.

AOL via AP:

Essentially phoning in the broad, family friendly shtick that has become his trademark over the past decade, Murphy stars as both a human-sized spaceship that has landed on Earth and its itty-bitty captain, who is at the controls from inside the ship's head.

It's a high-concept premise from screenwriters Rob Greenberg ("Frasier") and Bill Corbett ("Mystery Science Theater 3000"), but the execution is mostly lowbrow. Director Brian Robbins, whose "Norbit" with Murphy last year looks like a bold slice of comic genius by comparison, runs through a variety of bland fish-out-of-water scenarios in workmanlike fashion. (And let's not forget that for all eternity, we can refer to it as the Academy Award-nominated "Norbit," since it was recognized for its complex makeup.)

'Meet Dave' opens in theaters nationwide today.

Wall Street Journal:

"Hancock" has been packaged and heavily promoted as a summer blockbuster — a big, spectacular production starring the ever-likable Will Smith. It is indeed summer, and Mr. Smith plays the title role, but that's as far as any truth in advertising goes. The movie seems negligible; its running time is a mere 92 minutes. And it succeeds only at the hitherto-impossible task of making Mr. Smith disagreeable (though never boring; whatever he does, he's a movie star). He plays a gangsta superhero — a foulmouthed, misanthropic, booze-slugging slob who happens to have superpowers. It's a tricky notion done badly, though surely an oddity that will find a large audience. Any notions of demolishing black stereotypes — and what else could have possessed Mr. Smith to do this? — are dashed by the coarseness of it all, and by the narrative incoherence; a surprising plot twist turns a sloppy action-comedy into a totally different movie, and an even worse one.

Wired:

To match the film's tonal shift after the thrilling twist, cinematographer Tobias Schliessler trades in the sun-bleached Los Angeles cityscape that marks Hancock's early adventures for gorgeously distorted close-ups rendered in a rain-soaked color palette. These closing scenes work as the audience — and Hancock — finally learn the secret to the superhero's orneriness.

Unlike bland Everymen from Bruce "Hulk" Banner and Peter "Spidey" Parker to Clark "Superman" Kent, Smith's reluctant superhero shares an invaluable superpower with Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man. Both may have screwed-up personalities, but at least they know how to crack a joke.

TIME:

I just realized something. None of this matters. A critique of Hancock is an essay in irrelevance. It's Independence Day Week, and six times since 1996, that's meant a Will Smith movie — a mega-giga-gigantic hit. Independence Day; Men in Black; Wild Wild West; Men in Black II; I, Robot: He shows up, people line up. Thomas Jefferson used to own this holiday, but now the former Fresh Prince does. So why should critics even bother to review a new Will Smith movie? You'll go see it anyway.

Entertainment Weekly:

Hancock can revel in schmuckery, of course, because you and I and cute kids and peaceful oldies worldwide know in advance that there's no way on Hollywood's green earth Will Smith will ever play someone seriously, dangerously unsavory. Charm is the star's armor on either side of the alien-human divide, whether he's a Fresh Prince, a Bad Boy, a Man in Black, the last man alive in New York City, or Muhammad Ali. And so, in the beginning, the movie — part comedy, part action-thriller, and a whole lot of earnest, addled mush about purpose, fate, and angels — lets Smith (who is also one of the producers) have fun goofing on all that has already served him so well as a performer: Here's a hero in need of remedial charm school.

The New Republic:

Yet a dozen years after Independence Day, Smith has once again staked a claim to Independence Day, with the superhero subversion Hancock. And, like any good self-fulfilling prophecy, it will likely reign supreme at the box office because everyone has already assumed it would: Summer's other blockbusters have all deferentially ceded the field, so Hancock will go head-to-head against only a few limited releases and a kids-oriented film, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, which just happens to star Smith's seven-year-old daughter, Willow, whom we can safely assume has been promised a lifetime of spinach if she doesn't take a dive for Daddy.

Which is a shame because, Smith's indisputable talents notwithstanding, Hancock is an utter mess.

The New York Times:

The extent of that complexity doesn’t emerge until the big reveal, which involves Ms. Theron’s character and is so surprising that I heard several grown men loudly gasp. (“No way!”) I was more struck by Ms. Theron, an actress who, I think, is capable of greater depth than most of her performances require, even those that try to rub the glamour off her. She helps Mr. Smith enrich the story’s emotional texture, which is no small thing, since the movie itself starts to falter just when it begins to deepen. That’s too bad because while “Hancock” is far from perfect — it feels overly rushed, particularly toward its chaotic end — it has a raggedness that speaks honestly to the fundamental human fragility that makes the greatest heroes super.

CNN:

It's when this scenario plays out that Peter Berg's movie jumps the tracks. Writers Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan have concocted an outrageous, mind-boggling twist that comes so far out of left field you would need a crystal ball to see it coming.

No spoilers here, but it doesn't work, not in the short term and not in the big picture either. It's as if we've been whisked from one kind of movie — a brisk, superficial but entertaining high-concept comedy — and into the theater next door, where they're showing some sort of tragic "X-Men" knockoff. The last half-hour of this 92-minute movie is a fiasco.

Berg's shaky-cam technique doesn't help, nor does a weak, inadequate villain (played by Eddie Marsan). Still, it's rare — and startling — to see a big-budget movie fall apart so dramatically. Whether it was inspired by ego or economics, more than anything the turnaround feels like a colossal collective failure of nerve.

NPR:

It's a strange feeling to see the summer's most promising premise self-destruct into something bizarre and unsatisfying, but that is the Hancock experience.

It has to be emphasized that though the film's trailers carefully hide it, Hancock has a blisteringly profane tongue. How diatribes that would make a stevedore blush got a PG-13 rating is a question for another day.

The A.V. Club:

Still, it's a daring, even mildly challenging mixture for a superhero film, and while the pieces don't entirely add up, the puzzle is at least original. Smith is too much a ubiquitous superstar to entirely disappear into his role, but his playing against type offers its own flavors of comedy, and Bateman, in his comfortably well-worn role as a glib peacemaker, fills the charisma void left by Smith's stony performance. Hancock is an odd film—part My Super Ex-Girlfriend, part Transformers-esque messy blockbuster, part weird indie comic—but while it isn't necessarily as poignant as it wants to be, it manages the humor and heroics side of the equation admirably enough. If nothing else, it's worth it just to see a ready-made Superman-sized superhero in action without all the baggage of decades of retellings and reworkings; even looking at familiar faces working through a familiar genre, it's nice to be surprised for once.

Dallas Morning News:

Mr. Smith's charm helps sell the transformation of the character and the movie; part of the joke lies in seeing a megawatt star embrace his inner grouch with fantastical blunders, and part of the anticipation lies in seeing Hancock become, well, Will Smith, king of the summer box office. Some of the CG effects come off as chintzy, which may have as much to do with our general effects burnout than with deficiencies of this particular movie. (As David Denby recently noted in The New Yorker, we've reached a point where effects-driven movies come off as both too much and not enough.)

Your ultimate judgment of Hancock will likely hinge on whether or not you buy the film's dramatic identity shift. I found it rather sudden and perfunctory. I was also a little relieved to discover there's more here than initially meets the eye, that there's a movie to go along with the concept.

NY Post:

To say that Mary has a past would be the understatement of the summer. Let's just say her character makes no sense.

Nor are Mary's relationships with Ray or Hancock remotely plausible, even in a fantasy context.

Leaving behind the laughs for schmaltz, "Hancock" chickens out

at the last minute, lurching toward a cop-out happy ending that gives every indication of having been reshot at the behest of test audiences. Well, at least you won't be bored.

'Hancock' opens today, nationwide.

NPR:

Even at their bloodiest, though, those directors never sent their characters through the abbatoir the way Wanted does. As part of his training, Wesley gets pummeled mercilessly — and the existence of the Fraternity's miraculous "recovery room" doesn't make the damage any easier to watch.

Bekmambetov sometimes shows evidence of a lighter touch, as in the scene where a furious Wesley smashes a computer keyboard and the now-detached keys spell out a taunting message as they hurtle through the air.

Too bad the director doesn't show a similar irreverence toward such inane plot devices as "the loom of fate." Night Watch and Day Watch had ludicrous elements of their own, but those movies weren't nearly as into their own nonsense as Wanted is.

Los Angeles Times:

In a movie that musters barely more than a dozen speaking parts, there are heroes and there is cannon fodder. In a thrilling face-to-face battle that sends a passenger train plummeting into a gorge, there's not even a pause to acknowledge the collateral damage of the duel between supermen. Bekmambetov savors the way a target's forehead explodes as a bullet burrows through from the back, but the slaughter of innocents fails to hold his interest.

As much fun as it is to watch Bekmambetov play with his action figures, the movie would be more engaging if he ever got under their polyurethane skin. McAvoy tries mightily to bridge the gap between wheezy nebbish and eager assassin, but there's nothing pushing him forward beyond the movie's pronounced contempt for his former life. In "Wanted's" cosmos, there are wolves and there are sheep, and the sheep are not even worth pitying.

New York Sun:

The movie has its moments, one or two good jokes, and a satisfactory number of exploding heads, but, whatever its director's aspirations, it fails to convey that sense of another world — ours but not quite — that ought to be key to any comic book adaptation. A film of this type should be a magic carpet ride, exhilarating and impossible. "Wanted," by contrast, is as functional as a trip on the crosstown bus, complete with stops, starts, and periods of boredom.

Salon:

That's why Wesley's escape from mundane life is so cathartic for us, the audience. McAvoy is a young actor who has already proved himself in several radically different roles, among them a clueless young doctor in "The Last King of Scotland" and a tragic romantic hero in "Atonement," as well as, of course, a faun in a jaunty red scarf. Here, he's an Everyman with a shot at finally being somebody. Watching Wesley imitate, or attempt to imitate, Fox's leapfrog flips and gazelle-like grand jetés (on top of a moving train, no less), is freeing for us, too. "Wanted" has a sense of humor about itself — a sick one — and a pulse, albeit one that beats deep beneath the corpselike coldness of its surface. But McAvoy, jittery and alive, is its central nervous system. He feels it where it hurts.

Entertainment Weekly:

Wanted is kind of unintelligible and idiotic. Also kind of nasty and brutish. And also undeniably kind of fun, especially when Angelina Jolie, as an assassin (assassiness? assassinix?) appropriately named Fox, narrows her cat eyes, sets her lush mouth, flashes an Illiad's worth of tattooed text on her impossible bod, and brandishes firearms.

Wired:

Orchestrating the picture's gut-thumping action is Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (the Night Watch horror trilogy). He goes to the well a few times too many with his beloved slo-mo sequences, but Bekmambetov's noir heart is in the right place. Live-action stunt work dominates CGI effects in Wanted: Rats attack, cars vault through space with unearthly grace, shooters bend their bullets' trajectories, trains fall into gorges with a satisfying crunch and faces get pummeled in the best Fight Club tradition.

The New Republic:

Any film that features Angelina Jolie as an international assassin is, pretty much by definition, a film that glamorizes violence. But Wanted, the Hollywood debut of Kazakh-Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, does more than glamorize. It glorifies. It fetishizes. It consecrates. The crunch of bone against bone, the rasp of blade through flesh, and (especially) the planting of bullet in forehead such that it may emerge as a crimson bloom out the back of the skull—the movie's commitment to the staging of such traumas is so complete that they almost seem justified on aesthetic grounds alone.

Wanted is in many ways a deplorable film, but it is also—and, depending upon your perspective, this is either a good or a bad thing—an immensely stylish, effective one. More than any film since The Matrix, it is a ballet of brutality. But unlike Keanu's excellent adventure, which tarted itself up with mystical mumbo jumbo and a sci-fi conceit (and made sure most of its victims were computer simulations), Wanted is blunt and unapologetic. I don't believe I've ever seen a movie that advertised itself more plainly as an escapist fantasy for masculine impotence.

The New York Times:

What does turn up looks familiar — the slowed bullets, the air that ripples like water, an underground group, here called the Fraternity — especially if you’ve seen “The Matrix.” Although Mr. Bekmambetov and his team take plenty of cues from that film, they have tried to distinguish their dystopian nightmare by borrowing from even farther afield. To that end the Fraternity practices its murderous skills on pig carcasses (much as Daniel Day-Lewis does in “Gangs of New York”) while bunkered in a sprawling factory (that looks like Hogwarts). I’m pretty sure I saw the fabulous recovery room — a concrete spa filled with sunken tubs and lighted candles where Fraternity members go for restorative soaks after a hard day of carnage — in a layout in Vogue.

TIME:

As if in instant celebration of the Supreme Court's ruling on a citizen's right to bear arms — and of the newly articulated "individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation" — the burly new fantasy Wanted reveals the magic that can blossom when you put a gun in the hand of a meek wage slave and tell him he was born to be a righteous killer. Directed at a pitch of gritty giddiness by the Kazakhstan-born Timur Bekmambetov, who did the DVD faves Night Watch and Day Watch, this hard-R splatter-fest about a team of sanctified assassins is also the summer's zazziest action movie.

'Wanted' opens today, nationwide.

New York Post:

There is far too much going on in "WALL-E" to take in during a single sitting; I would have happily watched two or three more times the other night.

Some day, there will be college courses devoted to this movie.

Kids will love "WALL-E," the robot's epic adventure and his heart-tugging love story. Some adults may be less comfortable, which is fine with me; most great works of art are inherently subversive.

NPR:

But through it all, Wall-E never loses its sense of wonder: wonder at life, wonder at the universe, even wonder at the power of computer animation to bring us to worlds we've never seen before.

Wall-E is daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental — and how often do we get to say that in these dispiriting times?

The New York Times:

ather than turn a tale of environmental cataclysm into a scolding, self-satisfied lecture, Mr. Stanton shows his awareness of the contradictions inherent in using the medium of popular cinema to advance a critique of corporate consumer culture. The residents of the space station, accustomed to being tended by industrious robots, have grown to resemble giant babies, with soft faces, rounded torsos and stubby, weak limbs. Consumer capitalism, anticipating every possible need and swaddling its subjects in convenience, is an infantilizing force. But as they cruise around on reclining chairs, eyes fixed on video screens, taking in calories from straws sticking out of giant cups, these overgrown space babies also look like moviegoers at a multiplex.

They’re us, in other words. And like us, they’re not all bad.

Salon:

"WALL-E" falls somewhere between those two poles. It's not as beautifully crafted a piece of work, either visually or narratively, as "Ratatouille" is. But it does have a soul, and for a portion of the movie, at least, Stanton (who co-wrote the script, with Jim Reardon; he and Pete Docter conceived the idea for the story) does take a surprisingly firm stance on the uselessness and unlikability of humankind. "WALL-E" shows us a future world in which humans — fed largely on junk food — have become so fat they look like old-fashioned rubber dollies bloated to obscene proportions. They're obese partly because they're lazy: Instead of walking, they've gotten used to coasting along on floating chaise lounges, and robots cater to their every whim. Instead of talking to each other face-to-face, they chat with their friends on computer screens that appear to be permanently affixed just a few inches from their faces — even when their friends are sailing along right next to them.

Slate:

Directed and co-written by Andrew Stanton, a longtime Pixar collaborator who also directed the Oscar-winning Finding Nemo in 2003, Wall-E isn't quite as transcendent as last year's Ratatouille, but it's more formally innovative. Some of the lesser characters, particularly the misfit bots who help Wall-E stow away on the Axiom, could have been better fleshed out (if one can say that of a robot). But the central couple—forlorn, googly-eyed, stubbornly loyal Wall-E and sleek, directive-obsessed, but ultimately tenderhearted Eve—are triumphs of the animator's art, as their characters are established almost entirely through movement and gesture (though Burtt, who also provided the "voice" for Star Wars' R2-D2, is an expert clicker and beeper). Despite the virtuosity of its technical execution, Wall-E never feels like a soulless, well-oiled entertainment machine. Rather, the movie resembles its resilient, square-shaped hero: a built-to-last contraption with a disproportionately big heart.

Entertainment Weekly:

WALL-E is a movie you want to discover, but without giving too much of it away, I'll just say that the early ''silent movie'' section, quietly enticing as it is, is merely the prelude to an eye-boggling future-shock adventure. WALL-E himself is the movie's mascot and unlikely hero; it's up to him to save a spacebound colony of humans who've ''evolved'' into hilariously infantile technology-junkie couch potatoes. Yet even as the movie turns pointedly, and resonantly, satirical, it never loses its heart. I'm not sure I'd trust anyone, kid or adult, who didn't get a bit of a lump in the throat by the end of WALL-E, a film that brings off what the best (and only the best) Pixar films have: It whisks you to another world, then makes it every inch our own.

Variety:

That, presumably, could be addressed in a sequel. In the meantime, "Wall-E" pushes an agenda that could, and no doubt will, be interpreted as "green," or ecologically minded. It's a theme that is certainly present, at least as pertains to what forced humanity off the planet in the first place. But in a bigger sense, the picture seems to be making a quiet pitch for taking clear-headed responsibility for the health of the planet as well as one's body and mind.

The adages about how you must lie in the bed you make, and you are what you eat, both would seem to apply here. But Stanton, his co-story hatcher Pete Docter, co-scenarist Jim Reardon and the entire Pixar team operate on the principle that entertainment values come first, and they have applied it throughout to sprightly effect.

Chicago Sun-Times:

What’s more, I don’t think I’ve quite captured the film’s enchanting storytelling. Directed and co-written by Andrew Stanton, who wrote and directed “Finding Nemo,” it involves ideas, not simply mindless scenarios involving characters karate-kicking each other into high-angle shots. It involves a little work on the part of the audience, and a little thought, and might be especially stimulating to younger viewers. This story told in a different style and with a realistic look could have been a great science-fiction film. For that matter, maybe it is.

Newsweek:

Following high-concept movies about a superhero family, talking cars and a gourmet rat, this is the Disney computer animation arm's boldest experiment yet. "WALL-E" is essentially a silent film in which the two main characters, a mismatched pair of robots, communicate through bleeps and blips and maybe three words between them.

And yet director Andrew Stanton ("Finding Nemo") is resourceful enough to find infinite ways for them to express themselves — amusingly, achingly, and with emotional precision. He's also created, with the help of a team of animators, a visual marvel. Not that this is in any way surprising from a Pixar flick, but still, it's worth noting.

Wall Street Journal:

The first half hour of "WALL-E" is essentially wordless, and left me speechless. This magnificent animated feature from Pixar starts on such a high plane of aspiration, and achievement, that you wonder whether the wonder can be sustained. But yes, it can. The director, Andrew Stanton, supported by a special-forces battalion of artists, voice artists and computer wizards, has conjured up a tender, comical love story between two robots whose feelings for each other seem as nuanced and deep as any you're likely to encounter these days in live-action drama. Better still, their story plays out in two disparate worlds that amount to a unified vision, stunning and hilarious in equal measure, of what we human creatures have been up to and where it could get us.

'Wall-E' opens today, nationwide

• Sarah Jessica Parker, The Ivy Chronicles: Parker is in talks with Warner Bros. to star in the film version of the eponymous novel by Karen Quinn. The film centers around a woman living in New York (we know) who gets divorced and loses her cushy job and is forced to move downtown and pull her kids out of private school (the horror!). Ivy then starts a business to help upper-middle-class women get their children into posh kindergartens. What a saint. Verdict: You would think SJP would like to branch out of these class-concious, NY-single-rich-white-woman roles but apparently she has no desire to stop spreading crap to women across the world. All that aside, this sounds like a victim role.

• Hilary Duff, Stay Cool: Hilary Duff still acts? Duff will play a supporting role in this upcoming Polish brothers comedy, described as a "knowing-your-age comedy." A successful author (Mark Polish) will deliver a high school commencement speech and be seduced by a sexy high school senior (Duff) who invites him to her prom. Wow! A young gal flirting with a successful older writer - sounds realistic! (At least in the minds of the male thirtysomethings who constantly write about it.) Verdict: Duff's role is minor and certainly the "babe" one of the film, so she could be any version of various cliches depending on how she plays it.

• Tilda Swinton, The Ghost: Swinton will star alongside Nicolas Cage and Pierce Brosnan in this new film by Roman Polanksi. The film centers around Cage, who plays the ghostwriter for a former prime minister in England who is writing his memoirs, but all of his ghostwriters seem to end up dead. Swinton will play the PM's wife who falls for Cage's character as her marriage crumbles. Verdict: We really love Swinton but this role could border on a hooker-victim role. But, again, it depends on how she plays it.

• Christina Ricci, The Hero Of Color City: Ricci is the first cast member to be announced for this new animated CG feature. She will play the role of a "timid crayon" called (and we can only assume, is) Yellow. The plot of the film revolves around a group of crayons whose "colorful world is threatened by an evil tyrant." Verdict: We know that stereotypes can be found in kid's films as well, but she is playing a crayon. Probably no real stereotype to speak of.

• Lily Rabe, All Good Things: Rabe joins the cast of this upcoming thriller that includes Kirsten Dunst and Ryan Gosling. The film centers on a NY real estate scion (Gosling) who gets involved with a girl from the wrong side of town (Dunst) before she disappears. Secrets are revealed, and Rabe will play one of Gosling's character's friends who knows some of those secrets. Verdict: Honestly, her role sound so part of the exposition of the story that we doubt she will be even given a stereotype to play. Rabe is probably safe with this one.

"Movie And TV Studios Brace For An Actor's Strike" [NYT]
"Sarah jessica Parker Lines Up 'Ivy'" [THR]
"Hilary Duff Joins 'Cool' School" [THR]
"Cage, Brosnan See Polanski's 'Ghost'" [Variety]
"Christina Ricci Joins 'Her' Voice Cast" [THR]
"Lily Rabe" [Variety]

The Love Guru:
The A.V. Club:

Pop-culture riffing, winking double entendres, scatological humor, and silly names aren't just the foremost weapons in Myers' comic arsenal, they're all he's got. Myers combines his love of references, silly names, and mindless repetition by having his guru use "Mariska Hargitay" as a greeting/mantra. The first time it's employed, it's merely unfunny; by the 13th or 40th time, it's almost hypnotic in its awfulness. Then again, given Myers' love of the tried-and-true, maybe Guru's compulsive comic recycling and endless repetition are intentional.

The New York Times:

…Which might sum up The Love Guru in its entirety but only at the risk of grievously understating the movie’s awfulness. A whole new vocabulary seems to be required. To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word “unfunny” surely applies to Mr. Myers’s obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, The Love Guru is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

Chicago Sun-Times:

Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents. Every reference to a human sex organ or process of defecation is not automatically funny simply because it is naughty, but Myers seems to labor under that delusion.

Get Smart:
The A.V. Club:

For some unfathomable reason, Adams' original Max has been reconceived here as a considerably more competent operative, a brilliant analyst who can also kick a little ass when 99 isn't rescuing him from various scrapes. How is that funny? Carell will do anything for a laugh, and as with his character in The Office, Max's obliviousness to other people and to his own ineptitude plays to Carell's strengths. But Get Smart is too slick by half, and there's little in the script to support the star but a series of warmed-over spy games punctuated by pain humor and strained banter with Hathaway's snippy, scolding 99. In updating a beloved TV show, the filmmakers have gone out of their way to excise everything that was fun about it.

Chicago Tribune:

Missed it by that much. Actually, the new version of Get Smart misses by a fair-size margin. It's too bad. It's just trying to give us a good time at the retroplex. Even if you're 14 and you've never heard Irving Szathmary's classic deedley-deedley-deedley-deedley theme before, it's enough to make you smile. This is all any of these TV-to-screen comedies are after: a few laughs. Who knows? Get Smart, starring Steve Carell in the role originated by Don Adams (though initially offered to Tom Poston!), may well turn into a summer hit of the "well, it's good enough" variety.

E! Online:

Sadly, gags fall flat, one-liners lack pizzazz and the leads generate little chemistry. Sure, Carell is cute, and Hathaway looks sassy in multizippered leather jackets and slit-to-there gowns, but without snappier banter and greater sexual tension, their pseudo romance (even involving a flashback montage, ugh!) feels forced… Those seeking more entertaining fare would be, well, smart to look elsewhere.

Verdict: Oh hell, you knew The Love Guru was going to suck more than Get Smart! It stars Justin Timberlake in a comedic role! Get Smart may stink, but at least it has Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway to rescue it from being a complete mess.

Maybe if you are in the mood for some nostalgic movie-going you could go see Kit Kittredge: An American Girl instead.

The A.V. Club:

Sandler plays the title character as an over-the-top cross between Paul Bunyan, Rambo, and Warren Beatty in Shampoo. He catches bullets with his nostril, swims like a dolphin, has what appears to be an overweight groundhog in his shorts, and is able to instantly transform a volley of stones hurled at him by angry Palestinian kids into a charming rock animal. To borrow a phrase from Mr. Show, Zohan repeatedly brings moviegoers to the verge of laughter, only to leave them there; it's sure to inspire plenty of embarrassed smiles but few belly laughs, unless audiences find the unconventional use of hummus, hacky-sack, and disco-dancing (three of the film's limp running gags) inherently hilarious. Sandler's famously easy-to-please fans will certainly find it amusing, but for anyone over the age of 12, it's considerably more goofy than good.

New York Times:

“Subtle” and “maturity” may seem like odd words to use about a movie that wrings big laughs from pelvic gyrations, indoor Hacky Sack and filthy-sounding fake-Hebrew and -Arabic words. But much as it revels in its own infantilism, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan is also brazenly self-confident in its refusal to pander to the imagined sensitivity of its audience. In this it differs notably from Albert Brooks’s Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which approached some of the same topics with misplaced thoughtfulness and tact. I suppose some Middle East policy-scolds may find reasons to quarrel with Zohan, either for being too evenhanded or not evenhanded enough in its treatment of Israelis and Palestinians. Did I mention that it’s a comedy?

The Hollywood Reporter:

As a commando-turned-hairdresser with superheroic strength and a supersized crotch, Adam Sandler gets the Israeli accent and the disco swagger just right. Laughs are less of a sure thing in You Don't Mess With the Zohan, but the comedy star's legions of fans will welcome the cheerfully crude proceedings as a return to silliness after several earnest, lower-key character turns. The melange of Middle East diplomacy, action absurdity, sexual healing and, when in doubt, hummus, wavers between muscular and middling. It's a surefire hit.

Entertainment Weekly:

There is… about enough novelty to fill a seven-minute sketch, most of it relating to the sweetness with which Sandler initially presents himself as a curly-haired, hyper-macho Israeli super-Jew. This proudly Semitic James Bond is good to his parents (Shelley Berman plays Zohan's papa like a pussycat compared with the kibitzing the old pro gave Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm), good to the tawny, bikinied Tel Aviv girls who flirt with him, good to his Israeli comrades, and even good to the little Arab kids whose villages he's sometimes forced to disrupt on the hunt for terrorists. Everything he loves about his country is summed up in his love of hummus; he even brushes his teeth with the stuff. There are at least as many hummus visual jokes in this movie as there were ancient tribes in Israel.

Washington Post:

In You Don't Mess With the Zohan, Adam Sandler manages to stereotype pretty much everyone in the Western Hemisphere. It's not like he's bravely confronting political correctness by reveling in expressing the nastiest stereotypes; it's more like he hasn't heard of political correctness and is unfamiliar with the concept of stereotypes in the first place. His mind is stuck at the 8-year-old level.

Christianity Today:

But politics of some sort is never far from view, and just as I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry ended on a didactic note, so too You Don't Mess with the Zohan has scenes in which Israelis and Arabs vent all their frustrations, peacefully and verbally, before finding that they agree on the sexual allure of various presidents' and senators' wives. But while all these racial and cultural barriers are being broken, two easy stereotypes remain firmly intact: the evil white businessman, and the evil white redneck.

'You Don't Want To Mess With The Zohan' opens today, nationwide.

Wall Street Journal:

The production captures the way TV used to be — before cable, alas, and before the advent of groundbreaking shows, like SATC, that pushed, ripped and shredded the envelope of episodic entertainment. It's fitfully enjoyable, and maybe better than that for those who loved the series and have been waiting eagerly for more. But in contrast to the series, which was quick-witted, fast-paced and self-ironic — oh, and sexy — the movie is earnest, often aimless (couldn't anyone cook up a plot?), visually bland (except for the fashion shows) and, at two minutes short of 2½ hours, a decreasingly amiable meander. Here's one helping of more that manages to be less.

The New Yorker:

Not a drop of the forthcoming plot had been leaked in advance, but I took a wild guess. “Apparently,” I said to the woman behind me in line, “some of the girls have problems with their men, break up for a while, and then get back together again.” “Oh, my God!” she cried. “How do you know?”...I was never sure how funny the TV series was meant to be. It kept lapsing into a straight face, even a weepy one, as the characters’ contentment came under serious threat. This uncertainty survives into the movie, which made me laugh precisely once, as a magazine editor let fly with a Diane Arbus gag. It is no coincidence that she is played by Candice Bergen, who gets just the one scene, but who is nonetheless the only bona-fide movie star on show. You cannot simply shift a load of television actors onto a movie screen and expect them to command its greater expanse; only one in a thousand will be able to summon that mysterious confluence of presence and reserve on which stardom relies—the will both to offer oneself to the camera and yet to keep back the hidden, unguessable sources of that self. We should not be surprised, therefore, that Kim Cattrall’s come-ons wilt in the transition; but who would have guessed that Sarah Jessica Parker, a nimble performer who has had a career in movies aside from the TV show, should also seem diminished and ill at ease?

The New York Times:

There was something seductive about the bubble world that the show created back in 1998, in the fantasy that all you needed to make it through the rough patches were good friends and throwdown heels. That was a beautiful lie, as the show acknowledged in its gently melancholic return in the wake of Sept. 11. Back in Season 3 Carrie asked, “Are we getting wiser, or just older?” The ideal, of course, is to do both. There is something depressingly stunted about this movie; something desperate too. It isn’t that Carrie has grown older or overly familiar. It’s that awash in materialism and narcissism, a cloth flower pinned to her dress where cool chicks wear their Obama buttons, this It Girl has become totally Ick.

Slate:

The movie's initially brisk pacing slackens when the girls spend a holiday in Mexico that's long enough for them to cycle through an entire resort-wear collection. Samantha disappears entirely for stretches, and her story arc contains some of the movie's most painfully unfeminist jokes (in which we learn, for example, that vigilant pubic grooming and toned abs are essential to female self-esteem). And an attempt to address the series' endemic whiteness by adding a subaltern black character—Jennifer Hudson as Carrie's designer-bag-toting Girl Friday—is a major misfire that only underscores our heroine's oblivious entitlement. But if you bear even a grudging affection for the show's utopic vision of female bonding as the greatest love of all, you may get choked up when Carrie appears at Miranda's door one shitty New Year's Eve (clad only in pajamas, a sequined cloche, a full-length fur, and what appear to be patent-leather spats) and reassures her friend, "You're not alone."

Los Angeles Times:

For a film that delights in indulging in frivolity at every possible turn, it examines subjects that most movies don't dare graze for their terrifying seriousness. And when it does, the movie handles them with surprising grace, wit and maturity. In other words, it's a movie for grown-ups of all ages. The press and industry screening I attended was uncharacteristically packed with women in their 20s, and my guess is that their interest had zero to do with the inclusion of Jennifer Hudson as Carrie's personal assistant — though her character, Louise, is likable and allows the writer to expand the scope of the film from a story about four friends living in New York into a tale about the contemporary lives of urban women from early adulthood to maturity.

Salon:

Admittedly, it's harder to get away with lapses like that when you're dealing with characters that a large part of your potential audience feel they already know. Then again, why mangle perfectly good characters for the sake of your plot? The psychodrama between Carrie and Big, which looms over the movie like an oppressive mushroom cloud, does play out in a way that's true to both their characters. But King takes far too long to get to the point. What's more, the movie's second and third bananas — played by appealing actors like Willie Garson, Mario Cantone and the aforementioned Handler — have almost nothing to do. King rustles together a quickie romance for two of his minor characters, but the thing is so amateurly taped together (and so minor) that you wonder why he even bothered.

The Independent:

It certainly has its faults, from the superficial – Carrie looks like a witchy, old drag queen when she dyes her hair dark, and Samantha wears too much fur – to the serious. I seriously hated the ending. But this is not a real film, in the sense of Oscar-worthy performances or scriptwriters. It's just a big, blown-up, brash version of the show, like watching five of the soppier episodes back-to-back. But as anyone who has ever spent a day snuggled up on the sofa with a box set will know, that's no bad thing.

Daily Mail:

In years to come, I suspect - and hope - that people will watch this movie, laugh at the naivety of its faux sophistication, and find its assumptions as quaint, bigoted and unconsciously racist as those of Gone With The Wind. Horribly, but typically, the four leading women end up believing, I kid you not, that their biggest fault is not loving themselves enough. One of them actually leaves her lover with the gob- smacking line: 'I love you, but I love me more.'

The Guardian:

It is all very trivial and disposable, and yet for all its contrivances, its brand-name silliness and its amplified problems afflicting the comfortably-off metropolitan classes, I can't help thinking this is still a cut above the sinister romcom slush that we are fed, week in, week out. It is still unusual to see a film that features women as the leading characters of their own lives, and which attempts to imagine life after marriage. Like something glutinous from the pudding menu, Sex and the City isn't exactly wholesome, but it won't do you much harm this once.

Rolling Stone:

Some dudes say they'd rather light their dicks on fire than endure this movie version of the ultimate in TV chickcoms. Snap out of it, guys, you just might learn something. If the film didn't go on for a punishing two and a half hours, including two fashion shows and countless designer name-checks, I might call it must-viewing for men who are clueless about the female psyche. Come on, what men aren't?

Sex and the City: The Movie opens today.

Entertainment Weekly:

The movie version of Sex and the City, written and directed by Michael Patrick King (always the show's savviest writer), is 2 hours and 22 minutes of love, tears, fashion, depression, lavish vacation, good sex, bad sex, and supreme tenderness. It's as long as five series episodes, a big sweet tasty layer cake stuffed with zingers and soul and dirty-down verve (it's not above having one of the girls poop her pants). Given the running time, though, not that much happens, and what does has several shades more gravitas. That's as it should be. We want Sex and the City on the big screen to be true to the show yet to feel more like a movie. And it does....If Sex and the City as a movie is good rather than great, that's because it lacks the show's antic, humming New York effervescence. King would have done well to come up with at least one major subplot that didn't have to do with relationships. And though Jennifer Hudson, as Carrie's assistant, has a delicate presence, the character is almost embarrassingly saintly. Why couldn't she, too, pine and chatter with the verve of the city? These are relative quibbles, however, in a movie that taps directly back into the show's primal appeal, which is the sweet, sad, saucy delight of sharing these women's company.

NY Post:

The plot, which includes a detour to Mexico, often stops for fashion parades - Carrie alone has dozens of costume changes, including montages of wedding dresses and all the '80s get-ups in her closet. An episode at Fashion Week accomplishes nothing except to bloat the punishing running time. As was often true of the series, Nixon gives the best performance and she's rewarded here with the most developed story arc. The still-sizzling Cattrall has lost none of her skill with one-liners - especially in the movie's funniest scene where the girls use the euphemism "coloring" to discuss sex in front of a child.Davis, still amusing, has almost nothing to do...This movie provides no good reasons to revisit "Sex and the City," except to fulfill fans' desires for one more for the road and add millions to Time Warner's coffers. Be careful what you wish for.

Village Voice:

Less a movie than a very long goodbye (again), at 142 minutes, Sex and the City is basically a whole season's worth of episodes—or outtakes—slung together for no better reason than to squeeze all remaining revenues from a stupendously popular show that got out while the going was good. If nothing else, Sex and the City confirms Michael Patrick King's gifts as a television director while demonstrating conclusively that he's in way over his head working on the big screen. Where TV is small and broad and domestic and episodic, movies are large and potentially deep and climactic. But here, the show's lifeblood—its trippy, backtalking, très gay script—sags into the garden-variety sassiness you'd find on any network sitcom. After sampling the movie's bloodless dialogue, I missed the show's bitchy one-liners like hell. And despite the pubic hair, well-hung penis, and mildly graphic Malibu copulating that won the movie its R rating, there are more bad sex jokes than good sex.

Ain't It Cool News:

But I just couldn’t get over how much this shared in common with BRATZ: The Movie. Montage after montage after montage with each and every problem finding a solution by the fabulously dressed four getting together, squee-ing in a pitch that will deafen dogs and neuter most of the males in the audience, and realizing that friendship will get you through any bout of rampant self-absorption. Oh, so this is what happens when you leave Bratz dolls in the sun too long.

Hollywood Reporter:

Unfortunately, where episodes of the series used to take their cue from a question posed by one of Carrie's columns, writer-director Michael Patrick King never finds that focus, and "Sex and the City" loses its tart edge in the process. In need of some serious tightening up, the flabby picture does what the old Samantha would have never done: It keeps hanging around, pushing for a long-term relationship.

Variety:

For a series so steeped in romance, the eagerly awaited “Sex and the City” movie feels a trifle half-hearted. Although there’s pleasure in seeing HBO’s fabulous four reunited, writer-director Michael Patrick King doesn’t fully bridge the gap between TV and film — delivering major story flourishes but, too often, playing like a regular episode bloated to five times its customary length.

New York Magazine:

The movie, which reunites the whole cast, even if the other actresses aren’t palsy-walsy with Kim Cattrall, has the delish/insufferable mixture about right. (It wouldn’t be SATC if it weren’t a little annoying.) Sex and the City: The Motion Picture (not the actual title) is a joyful wallow. And it’s more: In this summer of do-overs (The Incredible Hulk, a new Batman versus a new Joker), it’s what the series finale should have been. For one last time, the relationship columnist–cum (no pun intended)–anthropologist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) tests the fairy-tale trappings of modern romance—turns them inside out, pulls at the loose threads, and wrings the tears that have saturated them into iridescent cocktails. (God, that’s terrible. I have to work on my Bradshaw-esque relationship musings.) It’s not that the writer-director, Michael Patrick King, breaks new ground; it’s that these women are in their fifth decade, and age is a more insistent subtext. The time for do-overs is almost up... I shall not spoil what follows, but the wedding sequence (about midway through) is a heart-stopper—a mirthless farce in which cell phones and limos function as agents of the unconscious. It’s a chance to watch Parker pull out the acting stops, and she’s spectacularly good: The neediness that makes her one of our giddiest comediennes is also a kind of black hole. Parker has come in for some monstrous derision of late—and I suppose it’s understandable, given that she’s pushed on billboards as the personification of kitty-cat sultriness. But you can sense the fragility beneath the poses. She’s always the little girl dressing up, wriggling from one outfit to the next, elated for a bit but apt to wither in the face of rejection or self-doubt. There are plenty of reasons to resent Carrie’s incessant hunger for designer anything, but how can you resent Parker’s fleeting enchantment? It’s what anchors the show.

Yahoo! News:

It's all really soapy, though, with only some smidgens of substance. Co-star Cynthia Nixon's story line is meaty, but more often than not our heroines are defined solely by the partners in their beds and the clothes on their backs, as if to suggest that the right wardrobe and a big enough closet to put it all in are the keys to ultimate happiness. The movie (and the series that inspired it) perpetuate stereotypes of female superficiality, but then again, these women do stick by each other no matter what, which makes it somewhat easier to stick around for the conclusion... Sitting through this extravaganza of extravagance, though, I couldn't help but wonder ... is this movie ever going to end? It takes about as much time as watching five episodes of the series all in a row, which you can do for free on TBS, albeit in a form that's cleaned up for basic cable — the city sans the sex. Then again, one girl's slog is another girl's celebration.

MSNBC:

Writer-director Michael Patrick King, one of the driving forces behind the original series, has cannily avoided trying to open up the material too much in taking it to the big screen. Samantha doesn’t go into outer space, Miranda doesn’t start talking to dead people, and Charlotte doesn’t break into a musical number. It’s simply an extension of the groundwork that the show already laid down, and for “Sex” fans who have waited four years for another fix, that’s all it has to be...While [Jennifer] Hudson is just fine in her first screen appearance since winning an Oscar for her “Dreamgirls” debut, the rest of the cast has the advantage of slipping back into characters they played for years on cable, and that comfort comes through in the performances. The leading quartet pings and zings as well as ever, and even second bananas like Stanford (Willie Garson) and Anthony (Mario Cantone) get their moment as well. (Candice Bergen returns briefly as Carrie’s editor at Vogue, delivering a brutally funny line that will be quoted in bridal shops for years to come.)

New York Times:

Dressed in gray coveralls, her hair bobbed and Slavic accent slipping and sliding as far south as Australia, Ms. Blanchett takes to her role with brio, snapping her black gloves and all but clicking her black boots like one of those cartoon Nazis that traipse through earlier Indy films. She’s pretty much a hoot, the life of an otherwise drearily familiar party. Among the other invited guests are Ray Winstone, John Hurt and Shia LaBeouf, who plays Mutt, the young sidekick onboard to bring in those viewers whose parents were still in grade school when the first movie hit. Karen Allen, who played Indy’s love interest in “Raiders,” is here too, with a megawatt smile and a bit of the old spunk.

Rolling Stone:

The good news is that Harrison Ford can still rock a fedora and a bullwhip like nobody's business as the globe-trotting archaeologist. The dark side is that after 19 years of wrangling between Spielberg and Lucas — in a mind-meld with writer David Koepp to craft just the right script for Indy 4 — they came up with this mess. Everything looks raided from the lost ark of the three previous Indy hits. What's worse is that after a smashing opener involving Indy getting captured by Russians in Nevada, circa 1957, the film starts piling on atomic subplots. It's a cliché overload. By midpoint, the movie starts to play like National Treasure meets The X-Files, with a touch of The Goonies, and I don't mean any of these comparisons as a compliment.

Dallas Morning News:

The problem in Crystal Skull is that too many of the set pieces lack heart or visual integrity. They feel random and piled on – witness the aforementioned monkeys – and, subsequently, safe and sterile. Hints of personality emerge in the banter between Mr. Ford, Mr. LaBeouf and Karen Allen, reprising her role as Indy's old love interest Marion, but the fallback pattern always kicks back in. Our heroes are trapped by Russians with guns. Our heroes escape. Our heroes are trapped again by Russians with guns. Mix. Stir. Repeat.

Newsweek:

It's hard to say which audience will be better suited to this latest installment. Established Indy fans may find nostalgia clouding their ability to accurately judge The Crystal Skull in the context of the first films, but young viewers who are unfamiliar with the first three will miss a lot of the jokes and may wonder what the fuss is about, especially compared to more sophisticated fare. Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, Indy is still big; it's just that, in the new world of movie franchises, The Crystal Skull feels smaller.

Chicago Sun-Times:

The Indiana Jones movies were directed by Steven Spielberg and written by George Lucas and a small army of screenwriters, but they exist in a universe of their own. Hell, they created it. All you can do is compare one to the other three. And even then, what will it get you? If you eat four pounds of sausage, how do you choose which pound tasted the best? Well, the first one, of course, and then there's a steady drop-off of interest. That's why no Indy adventure can match Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). But if Crystal Skull (or Temple of Doom from 1984 or Last Crusade from 1989) had come first in the series, who knows how much fresher it might have seemed? True, Raiders of the Lost Ark stands alone as an action masterpiece, but after that the series is compelled to be, in the words of Indiana himself, "same old same old." Yes, but that's what I want it to be.

The Hollywood Reporter:

This film feels like work, whether it's poor Harrison Ford straining to keep pace with his younger self or Spielberg and writer David Koepp piling on the thrill-ride acrobatics that have only scant connection to the plot.

Los Angeles Times:

…Given its Saturday matinee genre nature and the fact that star Ford, creator Lucas, director Spielberg, composer John Williams and editor Michael Kahn, among others, have all returned, it was inevitable that this film was going to fall within a very narrow range in terms of quality. It was either going to be a worse- or better-than-average Indiana Jones film. It turns out it's one of the better ones and everyone involved can breathe a sigh of relief.

Entertainment Weekly:

The skull may be transparent, but the plot is murky as hell.

Ain't It Cool News:

I also believe that each of the Indiana Jones films are about different things at their core. Raiders is about BELIEVING. Temple Of Doom is about TRUST. Last Crusade is about abandoning obsessions and choosing to live. And that leads us to The Crystal Skull… What is it about? Well, that I’m literally just 40 minutes from having seen it at this point – I’m going to say I feel the film is about letting go of the past and choosing a happy future. It’s LIFE. It’s also… like the Indy’s before it… A SHITLOAD OF FUCKING FUN! There’s silly shit here – but it’s FUN SHIT. But it’s loaded with classic bits.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opens today

Sure, there's also an Angelina Jolie assassin film (Wanted) and Cameron Diaz stars with Ashton Kutcher in What Happens in Vegas, (which, as Dargis writes, is "a role that shrieks Brittany Murphy five years ago." But seriously. Where are the big-budget, quality films with women in them? Writes Ms. Dargis:

In 2008, when a white woman and a black man are running for president and attracting unprecedented numbers of voters partly because they are giving a face to the wildly under-represented, you might think that Hollywood would get a clue.

Earlier: Whatever Happened To The "Comedy Of Equals"?
Does The Female "Buddy" Movie Exist?
The Future Of Female Comedies May Sit Squarely On Tina Fey's Shoulders
Where The Hell Are The Strong Women?

*Inspired by Shirley MacLaine's assertion that the best parts for actresses fall into one of the above categories.

• Angela Bassett, ER: Bassett will be playing a troubled doctor who comes back to Chicago after doing tsunami relief in Indonesia. Her arrival promises to "shake County General's ER to the core." Verdict: Well "troubled" usually translates to "victim," although a victim usually doesn't shake a television series to it's "core." She might be playing a shrew as well.

• Nicole Kidman, Dusty Springfield Biopic: Novelist Michael Cunningham (The Hours) has revealed that Kidman will star in the upcoming Dusty Springfield biopic he's writing. The film will explore Springfield's tortured, drugged, and depressed years, as well as her successes. Verdict: No one does victims quite like Cunningham, and Springfield's biography is not lacking in victimized and depressed elements.

• America Ferrera, An Invisible Sign of My Own: Ferrera will star in this coming-of-age film about a 20-year-old loner who turns to math for salvation when her father becomes ill. [Uh, isn't that a play called 'Proof'? -Ed.] When the character becomes an adult, she must teach math to students using her crisis as inspiration. BO-RING. Verdict: All of the victim keywords are here: "crisis" "salvation" and "ill father," but the character might overcome her own victimization in the end, so we will have to see how the movie plays out. The only thing that is unfortunate about this is the talented Ferrera starring in another snoozer.

• Shenae Grimes, Beverly Hills, 90210: Former Degrassi: The Next Generation star, Grimes, will play Annie in this 90210 remake on the CW Network. The Annie character will be based on the character played by Shannen Doherty in the original. Verdict: Although Doherty was a decent character on the show, off-set, she was generally too busy victimizing people to be a victim herself.

Angela Bassett Makes Rounds For Last ER Shift [Reuters]
Nicole Kidman Playing Dusty Springfield In Biopic, Says Michael Cunningham [NY Mag]
America Ferrera Joins Invisible [THR]
90210 Cast Continues To Grow [Variety]