Sin City: Critic Reviews

So seduced by the visual possibilities of sin that style becomes its own vice.

Sin City has been made with such scrupulous care and obvious love for its genre influences that it's a shame the movie is kind of a bore.

It'll be interesting to see how time treats City's novelty value once live action/computer screen hybrids become more common. Right now it looks like one of the movies that will define its year even more than the Kill Bill duo did.

Two hours and six minutes has never seemed so much like two and six-tenths seconds. It's pure pulp metafiction.

Rodriguez and company have so faithfully captured Miller's essence, there's something beautiful about the whole thing. It's an act of inspired reverence.

Sin City is the first great Hollywood joy ride of the year.

Rodriguez loves his material so much that he embalmed it.

Mixing live-action with computer-generated images, it looks like the novels, talks and bleeds like the novels, is as muscular and voluptuous as the novels -- and it leaves you breathless as only a movie can.

While Sin City on screen evokes the same feeling of bottomless decadence and dread that the novels do, there is one crucial difference -- you can put the novels down.

Except for the striking images, it starts to fade even as you're watching it. It is such a bold and striking movie, however, that for the first time we can appreciate the full potential of what Rodriguez has wrought.

Sin City is one of those films that you know going in is either going to be super-cool or ultra-awful. And in this case, depending on how you look at it, you can't lose or you can't win, because it's both.

This big-screen treatment of Miller's graphic novels is a soft- core marathon of stylized mayhem, flesh-pot excess and cinematic pretense.

If Raymond Chandler and Daffy Duck could have produced a child, Sin City would be their baby.

Can bring more pain than satisfaction.

It's a visualization of the pulp noir imagination, uncompromising and extreme. Yes, and brilliant.

A movie of such high style, done in such a spirit of electrifying fun and creativity, that it kisses the blood right off its own violent hands.

A worthwhile piece of eye candy.

Ultimately comes off as an exercise in cold-blooded stylishness, uninvolving and overlong at 2 hours and 6 minutes.

I can't endorse the content, but I can't dismiss the presentation. Sin City is superlative filmmaking in service of a poisonous view of humanity. It's a dangerous work of art.

It's loud, large, sick and a whole lot of fun.

Every now and then, a movie does more than gamely defend the status quo but actually advances the art form. So it is with Sin City, a stunning, brutal vision of a city gone mad.

In the end, I have to say I liked Sin City almost in spite of myself.

Miller's world of rough customers living on the wild side possesses a sordid allure, which the directors dazzlingly deliver to the screen.

Unlike anything you've ever seen before.

Watch it, listen to it. Just don't chew on it too much. It's not great art, and it's not great literature. It is just the flat-out coolest looking movie to come along in years.