Richard Schickel
Select another critic »For 569 reviews, this critic has graded:
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55% higher than the average critic
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2% same as the average critic
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43% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.9 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Richard Schickel's Scores
- Movies
- TV
| Average review score: | 67 | |
|---|---|---|
| Highest review score: | Yojimbo | |
| Lowest review score: | Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 | |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 351 out of 569
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Mixed: 153 out of 569
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Negative: 65 out of 569
569
movie
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Richard Schickel
The players don't particularly look like their historical models, but they make us feel their life-threatening pain and puzzlement.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
Kids may be puzzled by rebellious worker ants chanting Marxist slogans, but their parental guides may welcome the relief from the prevailing blandness of family films. [Oct 12, 1998 v152 n15 p116]- Time
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- Richard Schickel
It is somewhat repetitive, but it is also wonderfully acted, especially by Barrymore.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
What a pleasure it is not to be hectored by a director as we laugh our own little laughs, watching a profound story unfold.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
A movie that manages to be atmospherically rich while also satisfying the slash-crash imperatives of the police-action genre.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
This is a Cuisinart of a movie, mixing familiar yet disparate ingredients, making something odd, possibly distasteful, undeniably arresting out of them. [5 Dec 1994, p. 93]- Time
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- Richard Schickel
Both actors are excellent--but there's something conventionally gimmicky about the way it plays its reality/unreality game.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
Something of an odd-duck movie. It is not a broad comedy or a wildly romantic one, either. Nor is it Edith Wharton lite. But it does partake of all those modes in intelligently observant ways.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
There's no attempt to address the show's endemic weak spots--a slow start and a contrived end. Mostly Stroman just lets it rip. But in some respects the movie is an improvement on the show.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
An uncynical sequel that actually deserves its assured success.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
Most of the fun comes from seeing people fooled by what seems to us, who are in on the joke, a completely penetrable ruse. Curiously enough, what's really unpersuasive about Mrs. Doubtfire -- not to say draggy -- is its nondrag sequences.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
Leaves a quiz show's quantity of unanswered questions. But it has the optimism and determination of a corporate whistle-blower. It makes us believe, for a moment, that it's possible to end-run the spirit of Enron.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
You may not be able to follow the overall arc of their scheming, but scene by scene they are a delightful crew, hissing away behind their cloaks and fans.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
On the whole, the eek-for-yuks trade-off is more than fair--hip without being campy or condescending to one of the better movie franchises. [1 Dec 1997, p. 84]- Time
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- Richard Schickel
If you surrender to the film's often inexplicable rhythms, if you let its dark materials reach out and envelop you, it can be a curiously rewarding experience -- a blend of silences and sudden bursts of violence that, despite its highly stylized manner, feels more edgily lifelike and more disturbing than most movies.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
One leaves the film neither hugely thrilled nor greatly awed, but with a pleasant sense of having caught up with old friends and found them to be just fine, pretty much the way one hoped they would turn out in later life.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
There is not a lot of scintillating dialogue in The Bank Job, but there are plenty of kinky sexual allusions and it includes a torture sequence about as brutal as anything you're likely to see in the movies these days.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
There is delicacy and restraint in all these performances as they ease a far-fetched premise toward believability under Richard Pearce's clear, cool direction.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
Al Pacino gives an electric performance, charged with a lunatic energy that expertly captures the weird blend of confidence and self-deprecation (if not hatred) that marks the paranoid syndrome.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
For all its brave beginnings and real achievements--its assault on western mythology, its discovery of a subversive sexual honesty in an unexpected locale--Brokeback Mountain finally fails to fully engage our emotions.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
This often vivid movie, though it doesn't quite attain its highest intentions, is well worth seeing. And thinking about.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
May not be a totally riveting movie, but it is, in its gently insinuating way, a curiously rewarding one.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
[The Coens] are therefore entitled to patience, respect and, yes, perhaps a special gratitude for this movie, which never once compromises its fundamentally unpromising yet courageously aspiring nature. [26 Aug 1991]- Time
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- Richard Schickel
The film takes this attempt to shatter narrative into little pieces about as far into incoherence as it can go; yet it is also full of odd, hypnotic menace.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
Neither slick nor glib, they all suit a film that may finally disarm everyone with its full-frontal naturalness, its unsmirking bawdiness, its obvious liking for athletes as people, and its refusal (most of the time) to poeticize sport. Personal Best is likable precisely because it is so unembarrassed.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
Alive to the--yes--sometimes humorous, and therefore humanizing, struggles of the slaves and their would-be rescuers to surmount the language and cultural barriers that separate them. [15 Dec 1997, p. 108]- Time
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- Richard Schickel
There's nothing world shattering about Smart People. No one is ever going to call it a "must see" movie. But it is a trim, intelligent, reasonably amusing little movie. Call it a "could see."- Time
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- Richard Schickel
The film offers us Mel Gibson as a new Bret Maverick, the Western gambler, as well as the old TV Maverick, James Garner, now playing a wry frontier sheriff. These two guys can make you smile contentedly even when the script is wandering and they're just sort of standing around waiting for its next good part to develop.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
The journey is never boring, and it's morally satisfying too. O.K., the movie is what Hollywood likes to call "a ride." But it's one worth taking.- Time
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- Richard Schickel
Maggie Smith and Judi Dench are glorious comic actresses, while Joan Plowright provides a firm, touching moral center to the film. They almost make you forget Cher's totally out-of-it work as a disapproved-of American and carry the film to its destiny, which is one of inoffensive inconsequence, prettily staged. [24 May 1999, p.88]- Time
