Washington Post review

By Ann Hornaday

Girls, can we talk? When it comes to "Sex and the City," the breathlessly anticipated feature adaptation of the hit HBO show, the question isn't whether it's good. The question is whether it delivers the goods -- the goods being shoes, romance, ribald humor, shoes, sex, shoes, pithy observations about single life in New York and more shoes.

With its unapologetic materialism, raunchiness and heroines who managed to be sympathetic even in the midst of almost pathological self-absorption, "Sex and the City" became one of the most successful guilty pleasures in the history of Sunday night TV. And judged by the standards of its original medium, the movie version succeeds just as well, cramming what used to take a whole season into a nearly 2 1/2 -hour marathon of men, misery and Manolos.

As "Sex and the City" opens, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) explains that "year after year, 20-something women come to New York City in search of the two L's: labels and love." Then commences an opening montage that neatly telegraphs the past story arcs of Carrie and her three best friends, bringing them to the present day, four years after we said goodbye (the series ended in 2004). "Sex and the City" begins at the happy ending for Carrie & Co.; the challenge for writer-director Michael Patrick King, who wrote most of the show's episodes, was to inject a credible degree of conflict and suspense into the women's picture-perfect scenario. That he does, with a whopper that, even if it's not entirely unexpected, still lands like a blow to Carrie's perfectly toned solar plexus when it arrives an hour in. That twist efficiently puts the focus where it belongs in "Sex and the City": on Carrie, her friends and their relationship of acceptance and support.

"Sex and the City" has clearly and lovingly been made for the show's devoted fans, so newcomers to the story might be puzzled at the movie's worship of Louis Vuitton purses and the silly women who carry them. It's true that Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha are appallingly shallow and narcissistic; their friendship often seems based on the fact that they're simply each other's best mirrors. It's also true that time, and King, have been kinder to some characters than others. Miranda, it seems, has become even more brittle and unforgiving than before, whereas Samantha, the sex-obsessed cougar of the bunch, turns out to be even more warm, nurturing and vulnerable than some viewers might remember (and still just as racy). One of the great pleasures of "Sex and the City" is how the filmmakers embrace their characters' advancing ages, frankly addressing such issues as waning sexual desire and weight gain even while celebrating over-40 fabulosity.

Entertainment Weekly Review

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW

As a Darren Star series on HBO, Sex and the City may have come in tidy half hours, but what those sparkling and fizzy episodes added up to, in spirit, was the great chick flick of our time. The show was that rare thing, a fairy tale you could believe in. Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), the lovelorn single-girl newspaper columnist, and her devoted trio of BFFs — randy Samantha (Kim Cattrall), wide-eyed Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and neurotic taskmaster Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) — all took the fruits of feminism for granted: independence, equality, the right to sleep around, etc. Yet what they found was a new kind of liberation. High on their pink drinks and showpiece handbags, literally high on their designer heels (and on the prospect of turning the search for a mate into another form of shopping), they embraced the holy right to be cosmetic, acquisitive, and — yes! — superficial. If Carrie's desire for love had an element that was undeniably...aspirational, what of it? Wasn't that true of Jane Austen's heroines? The glory of Sex and the City is that it turned the cosmopolitan high life of girls who just want to have fun into a new feminine mystique.

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. Now that Carrie and her crew have left the bittersweet college of cosmo hedonism, the film treats them, shrewdly, as cynical wised-up fortysomethings facing life on the other side of the adult divide. The movie is about the situations Carrie can't just write off with a quip.

At the end of the series, Carrie had given her heart up to Big (Chris Noth), her Cary-Grant-in-the-age-of-Gordon-Gekko dreamboat financier. So it's a bit of a shock to see the two of them at the start of the movie, happily unmarried, living in separate apartments. I mean, what was that grand finale of ''commitment'' about, anyway? Have no fear: Carrie and Big decide to tie the knot soon enough. They're inspired after they find a Fifth Avenue apartment, described with acute understatement as ''real estate heaven'' (and that's before Big builds Carrie a walk-in closet the size of a small fashion runway).

Of course, Carrie is all set to have a princess wedding. She is featured in a whipped-frosting Vivienne Westwood dress in Vogue (Candice Bergen as her editor: "Forty is the last age a woman can be photographed in a wedding dress without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext"), and the ceremony is scheduled to unfold, in funky old-world style, at the New York Public Library. Then something very Big happens — not a cookie-cutter mishap, but a fluky, nervous, all-too-believable screwup that metastasizes into disaster. Did I mention that Miranda and Steve (David Eigenberg), in Brooklyn with their kid, haven't had sex in six months? That Samantha, living in L.A. with hunkalicious Smith (Jason Lewis), is going crazy having sex only with him? Or that Charlotte, toting her adopted daughter around like an accessory, has been rewarded for her good nature by having no problems at all?

A therapeutic trip to Mexico goes on for too long, yet it sets the tone: more melancholy than before, and more romantic. Sarah Jessica Parker is lovely here, and she has the confidence to know that we'll follow her even when she's not throwing off sparks of joy. She makes Carrie's journey lustrous and vivid, and Cynthia Nixon does the same for Miranda, daring to push her perfectionist impatience to acrid new extremes. We keep waiting for these two to forgive their men; that it's so hard for them to do so speaks deeply. 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. B+

NY Times Movie review

By MANOHLA DARGIS

A little Botox goes a long way in “Sex and the City,” but a little decent writing would have gone even further. A dumpy big-screen makeover of that much-adored small-screen delight, the movie was written and directed by Michael Patrick King, one of the guiding lights and bright wits of the original series, based on Candace Bushnell’s newspaper columns and subsequent book. Once again, Sarah Jessica Parker has stepped into the dizzyingly high heels of Carrie Bradshaw, that postmodern Lorelei Lee — a hardly working New York writer with a passion for men and Manolos — but this time she’s taken a terrible tumble.

Fans of the show were accustomed to Carrie’s falls, metaphoric and literal (as in her spectacularly horrible trip during her catwalk promenade); they were crucial to the show’s appeal, softening its hard, brittle edges. Then in her mid-30s, Carrie was one of New York’s most fearless of the zipless It Girls, able to leap tall men in a single bound without batting a single mascaraed eyelash, but as the show’s nifty opening credit sequence reminded you, episode after episode, she wasn’t above getting muck on her tutu. Her vulnerability — and that of her girlfriends — was the badly kept secret of the show, the glue holding together the froufrou, the lunches, those absolutely fabulous and ghastly clothes and all that muscly man bait.

The froufrou and the lunches are back, as are, kind of, Carrie’s three girlfriends, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall), all tricked out with their customary accessories (men, children, handbags). Also back and in and out of Carrie’s bed is Mr. Big (Chris Noth), the longtime lover and habitual heartbreaker with whom she had (hallelujah) reunited during the show’s bitter and sweet finale four years ago. Written by Mr. King, that episode opened with Carrie wandering Paris in a funk and then stumbling into bliss by literally falling to the ground with Big. At once melancholic and defiantly hopeful, it was the kind of rueful happy ending that didn’t make you choke on your own tears.

“Sex and the City” delivered the television goods for six seasons, no small thing in the pop culture annals. That should have been enough or at least plenty for all concerned, but Ms. Parker apparently felt compelled to go big screen, making good on a project that had started to come together in 2004, only to fall apart over money issues and Ms. Cattrall’s reluctance to climb aboard. I wish Ms. Parker had let that bee in her bonnet go silent, because the movie that she and Mr. King have come up with is the pits, a vulgar, shrill, deeply shallow — and, at 2 hours and 22 turgid minutes, overlong — addendum to a show that had, over the years, evolved and expanded in surprising ways.

There are no surprises in the movie, at least not good ones. On opening, all the peas are in their designer pods, from Carrie and Big cooing in his swank New York digs to Samantha and her boy toy, Smith (Jason Lewis), sunning in a seaside Los Angeles perch. Charlotte and her husband, Harry (Evan Handler), are nesting in Manhattan; Miranda and her husband, Steve (David Eigenberg), are bunking in Brooklyn. All is right in this carefree world until Big casually asks Carrie if she would like to get married, a question that leads to the usual luncheon postmortem (oh my gawd, he proposed) and then the usual rom-com clothing montage and a staggering number of product placements. (Louis Vuitton co-stars.)

Somehow it all goes lugubriously south. Carrie is let down Big Time, and she licks her wounds down Mexico way, accompanied by her amazingly accessible gal pals. Jokes about Montezuma’s revenge ensue (really), along with hard laughter and free-flowing tears and yet more clothes (and clothing montages) and jokes and jokes, most of them flatter than Carrie’s steely six-pack. Unlike the show, which allowed the men to emerge occasionally from the sidelines with lines of actual dialogue, the male characters in the movie stand idly by, either smiling or stripping, reduced to playing sock puppets in a Punch-free Judy and Judy (times two) show. I’m all for the female gaze, but, gee, it’s also nice to talk — and listen — to men, too.

I guess size does matter after all, if not in the way that the sex-addled Samantha might assume. On television and in tasty 30-minute bites, the show “Sex and the City” managed to entertain and sometimes even enthrall with self-consciously glib morality stories about love and desire in the modern world. Everything scaled nicely to television’s modest dimensions, from Ms. Parker’s Cubistic face to Patricia Field’s costumes. Kooky and at times insanely unflattering, the clothes caught your eye instantly, directing your attention to the itty-bitty figures, exactly what they were supposed to do. But those same loud outfits, mugging faces and picayune dramas just don’t translate when blown up on a movie screen, which makes all that small-screen stuff seem even punier.

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.

“Sex and the City” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Sex in the city.