Two vastly different new movies will be competing for box-office attention over the weekend, Beauty Shop, a female/African-American comedy that opened on Wednesday, and Sin City, a male/comic-book thriller. Analysts give Sin City the edge to win. But it is not a clear winner with critics, who are vastly at odds. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, while praising some of the film's stylish images, suggests that Robert Rodriguez, and the Sin City graphic novel creator Frank Miller, who collaborated on the film, have failed to bring the comics' characters to life. "When stuff goes blam, you jump like someone who's landed on a whoopee cushion. But then you just sit there, wrap yourself in the dark and try not to fall asleep," she writes. Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal describes his reaction to the movie this way: "If there's a single scene that epitomizes the sensation that overtook me slowly but inexorably, it's the one in which Clive Owen's character ... sinks slowly into a tar pit." Dan DeLuca in the Philadelphia Inquirer also admires the film's visual presentation, but concludes, "Sin City ultimately comes off as an exercise in cold-blooded stylishness, uninvolving and overlong at 2 hours and 6 minutes." Likewise, Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times concludes that the movie is mostly style and little else. "This isn't an adaptation of a comic book, it's like a comic book brought to life and pumped with steroids. It contains characters who occupy stories, but to describe the characters and summarize the stories would be like replacing the weather with a weather map," he says. Nevertheless, he acknowledges, the movie succeeds as "a visualization of the pulp noir imagination, uncompromising and extreme. Yes, and brilliant." Ty Burr in the Boston Globe puts the emphasis on the brilliant, writing that "Sin City is the first great Hollywood joy ride of the year ... a stunning, visceral piece of work -- cheap thrills polished to the level of high art." Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post describes the movie as "a dessert from hell ... pure outlaw art" and a blood descendant of The Wild Bunch and Kill Bill. He concludes: "Two hours and six minutes has never seemed so much like two and six-tenths seconds. It's pure pulp metafiction." And Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune bestows 3 1/2 stars on the film, but warns: "Sin City is an evil place, full of awful people, an obsessive movie full of monomaniacal tough guys. Yet when Miller and Rodriguez move it into gear, noir lives."
