300 has one-dimensional caricatures who talk like professional wrestlers plugging their next feud.

August 08, 2008 read full article

A muscle-magazine fantasy crossed with a video game and an Army recruiting film.

March 26, 2007 read full article

300 was as pathetically puerile as I had expected.

March 21, 2007 read full article

The kids just want to have fun. Many of them will. But what does that say about another Greek contribution -- Western civilization?

March 10, 2007 read full article

If the movie's neocon message is as thin as a politician's excuse, that's to be expected. But what's surprising here is that the sights are just as meagre.

March 09, 2007 read full article

History is inconveniently complex. And so we get Frank Miller's version, in which everything is simplified to the point of porridge.

March 09, 2007 read full article

Keeping in mind Slate's Mickey Kaus' Hitler Rule -- never compare anything to Hitler -- it isn't a stretch to imagine Adolf's boys at a 300 screening, heil-fiving each other throughout and then lining up to see it again.

March 09, 2007 read full article

Watching 300, there's the arresting sense of eavesdropping on another time.

March 09, 2007 read full article

It's impossible not to be moved by its nearly nonstop visual assault.

March 09, 2007 read full article

It's most definitely a Spartan movie, yet it's really all about wretched excess.

March 09, 2007 read full article

Does the film stay faithful to the Miller and Varley's vision? Indeed it does -- to a kunch!

March 09, 2007 read full article

For once, the Larry King quote machines who supply the advance blurbs to the studio for their marketing campaigns will be correct.

March 09, 2007 read full article

Snyder gives his movie the encompassing look and feel of a graphic novel. Perhaps because he shot the actors in front of digitally concocted backgrounds, Snyder is able to sustain an otherworldly quality that perfectly suits the movie's lurid material.

March 09, 2007 read full article

[Gerard Butler's character] charisma is elusive. He vigorously enunciates like a summer stock player doing Shakespeare. But the writing's overblown. And locating the requisite sorrow in this tale of heroism is an afterthought for Snyder and co.

March 09, 2007 read full article

It is excessively, cheerfully violent -- and it is gorgeous to behold. It looks like the world's most sophisticated and expensive video game, and I mean that in a good way.

March 09, 2007 read full article

300, even with its impressive vistas of computer-generated soldiers, is just a throwaway epic.

March 08, 2007 read full article

300 is about as subtle as a spear through the head. But it's also shamelessly entertaining, and not a bad way to make time move a little faster.

March 08, 2007 read full article

300 is about as violent as Apocalypto and twice as stupid.

March 08, 2007 read full article

It also pits millions of fans of brainless violence against a gallant band, or so I choose to think of us, who still expect movies to contain detectable traces of humanity.

March 08, 2007 read full article

A mythic ode to righteous bellicosity. In at least one way, the film is true to the ethos of ancient Greece: It conflates moral excellence and physical beauty (which, in this movie, means being young, white, male, and fresh from the gyms of Brentwood).

March 08, 2007 read full article