New Line Cinema

The first round of reviews of the new Sex and the City movie came out earlier this week, and they were almost universally bad. With the film's theatrical release happening today, more critiques have been published, and in them reviewers continue to relish panning the Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte reunion:

• "Sex and the City 2" is a ghastly mess, a stake in the heart of the great TV series that ran from 1998 to 2004."–Kurt Loder, MTV News
• "Some of these people make my skin crawl."–Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com
• "The experience of listening to the girls complain about their fairy-tale lives from the comfort of an all-expenses-paid luxury vacation in the Arabian desert may leave a viewer feeling by turns nostalgic, disoriented, and impatient."—Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
• "'Sex and the City 2' is about someone else's boredom, someone else's vacation and ultimately someone else's desire to exploit that vicarious pleasure for profit. Which isn't much fun at all."–A.O. Scott, New York Times

NPR has a more charitable take on the film, implying that its flaws are intentional because the movie's a satire: "It's hard to miss that this film is making gentle fun of itself, of the franchise's materialism, even of its own cinematic allusions," writes Mia Mask. Maybe, but reviewers seem to be laughing at the film, not with it.