The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane with a less-than-favorable review of Sex and the City, which is getting similar reviews across the board.

The women in “Sex and the City,” by that standard, are little better than also-rans, and their gallops of conspicuous consumption seem oddly joyless, as displacement activities tend to be. “When Samantha couldn’t get off, she got things,” Carrie says. Look at the beam in your own eye, sister. Mr. Big not only buys her a penthouse apartment (“I got it”), he offers to customize the space for her shoes and other fetishes. “I can build you a better closet,” he says, as if that were a binding condition of their sexual harmony: if he builds it, she will come.