The good review/bad review merry-go-round continues. Steve Hamann forwards us a positive review from the Chicago Tribune's Michael Wilmington: (spoilers below)

George Lucas has the last laugh, or at least the penultimate chuckle, with "Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones" (which opens at 12:01 a.m. Thursday at many local theaters). The fifth movie in his long-running series of grandiose, light-hearted space operas and the second in chronological order is the most visually spectacular and exciting of all "Star Wars" movies to date.

Lucas carries the "Star Wars" saga 10 years past the much-maligned "Episode One — The Phantom Menace," extending the yarns of old favorites such as wizened master Yoda, adventurous robots C-3PO and RD-D2 and newer additions such as the youngObi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), his cocky protegee Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) and the beauteous Padme, Former Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman).This movie should thoroughly please old fans and even create new ones, even if it probably won't win over critics who believe the series has turned into the movie equivalent of a slick, vacuous theme park.

The story shows Jedi samurai Obi-Wan and Anakin defending ex-Queen Amidala (now a mere Senator, like Hilary Clinton) in a series of increasingly apocalyptic skirmishes, as more and more is revealed of a vast conspiracy to undermine their republic: a plot hatched around the creation of a formidable humanoid army cloned from surly bounty hunter Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison). Actually, it's the same set of archetypal adventures, swordfights, cliffhangers and blastaway battles and counsels of war that have marked every "Star Wars" movie.

Yet, defying the curmudgeons, who (with some justification) damned his 1999 "Phantom Menace" as a cliched, over-juvenile disappointment and bore, Lucas has stretched his imagination and technical mastery to the limit — jam-packing his movie with churning excitement and visual — if not verbal — wit. Lucas harks back to the youthful brio that informed 1977's "Star Wars" and some of the darkness that made "The Empire Strikes Back" the series' consensus critics' favorite. You can tell that he and his technicians are having more fun with this one, and they keep treating us to blowout action sequences, fantastically detailed alien worlds (an Italian renaissance hideaway that looks like a Maxfield Parrish villa, a long sandy Tattooine homage to "The Searchers") and hilarious aliens who recall old Astounding Science Fiction Magazine covers by Kelly Freas.

Visit the link above for the complete review.

And Ken Robinson alerts us to another positive review, this one from the New Yorker (spoilers below):

"... "Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones" is much better, though the plot is incomprehensible to anyone over the age of fourteen. The Republic? The Federation? The Separatists? The clone army? The droid army? The Siths? The Kith? The Kin? Everyone's in it, a blur of names and forces. And the actors, most of them vaguely British, intone their starched-collar lines as if they were attending a convention of rural vicars. But, allowing for some dull moments, this movie has considerable visual style. The spacecraft are more beautiful than any seen before—silver birds with knife-thin wings flying through slate-gray interstellar landscapes. The multilevel cities overflow with life, high up, low down, and everywhere in between. This time, Lucas's frame is alive, and he makes good dramatic use of such things as a stinging dark rain that douses two men as they fight on a sloping metallic plane. The droid factory, a sort of intergalactic satanic mill, becomes a place of newly imagined Victorian horror. Digital invention is becoming grander, wilder, more free-spirited. Lucas and his computer artists have a ball with the climactic scene in which the former queen, Senator Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman), and the Jedi knights Obi-Wan Kenobi (McGregor) and Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) are chained up in an arena. What starts as a grisly execution (clawed and fanged creatures are let loose on them) becomes a deranged gladiatorial combat in the sand. The mayhem is delirious fun.

Visit the New Yorker link above for the full review.