By a standard set many years ago by Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, “the women in Sex and the City are little better than also-rans,” writes the New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane, “and their gallops of conspicuous consumption seem oddly joyless, as displacement activities tend to be.

David Hughes’ illustration for Lane’s review; one of Fancis Bacon’s Popes.

√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚Äú’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.
“The creepiest aspect of this sequence was the sound that rose from the audience as he displayed the finished closet: gasps, fluttering moans, and, beside me, two women applauding.
“The tactic here is basically pornographic — arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach — and the film makes feeble attempts to rein it in.
“When the wedding hits a bump (look out for Kristin Davis screaming ‘No! No!’ at Chris Noth like a ninth grader auditioning for The Crucible), and the bridegroom veers away, our heroine’s reaction to the split is typical: ‘How am I going to get my clothes?’ What, honey, even the puffball skirt that you wear to the catwalk show — the one that makes you look like a giant inverted mushroom?