“Director Zack Snyder’s cerebral, scintillating follow-up to ‘300’ seems, to even a weary filmgoer’s eye, as fresh and magnificent in sound and vision as ‘2001’ must have seemed in 1968, yet in its eagerness to argue with itself, it resembles ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ ” writes my esteemed junior colleague Kyle Smith in his four-star review of the graphic-novel epic “Watchmen” in The Post’s print edition today. “Like those Stanley Kubrick films – it is also in part a parody of ‘Dr. Strangelove’ – it transforms each moment into a tableau with great, uncompromising concentration. The effect is an almost airless gloom, but the film is also exhilarating in breadth and depth.” With some of the dwindling band of daily newspapers critics — 117, including Kyle, V.A. and me, by David Poland’scount — waiting until Friday to weigh in, the film is currently rating 73 percent positive reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. That score drops to an alarming 14 among RT’s “Cream of the Crop” with withering pans from such heavy hitters as New Yorker’s Anthony Lane (“incoherent, overblown and grimy with misognyny”), New York’s David Edelstein (“the movie is embalmed”) and the Village Voice’s Jim Hoberman (“its failure is one of imagination”). Over at the mainstream-critic-heavy Metacritic, which converts reviews to a 0-to-100 point scale, the average score is 44. Kyle leads the parade with 100 points, followed by Ian Nathan of the UK’s Empire Magazine (80), Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly (67), Hoberman and Variety’s Justin Chang with 50, Devin Gordon of Neweek (40), Edelstein (30), and Lane and the Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt with 20 apiece.