Richard Schickel

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For 569 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 55% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 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: 100 Yojimbo
Lowest review score: 0 Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 351 out of 569
  2. Mixed: 153 out of 569
  3. Negative: 65 out of 569
569 movie reviews
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    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    The World According to Garp
    What is missing from the movie is any attempt to discover a cinematic language that compares with the language of the novel. Where the book jumped, the movie plods; where the novelist came upon his themes in the course of rich exploration, the movie marches up and confronts them with all the subtlety of a morning-talk-show host. It is hard to recall any recent movie, of whatever literary lineage, that is as dully literal and unadventurous as this one.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    Sabrina
    They have fussed with Sabrina, but they have not really engaged it. They have not found the little twinges of pain, the awkward stumbles into vulnerability, that animate the best comedies, and the best love stories too. Wilder's film had a few of them--enough to ensure that the movie and its audience did not feel totally manipulated.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    High Plains Drifter
    As a director, Eastwood is not as good as he seems to think he is. As an actor, he is probably better than he allows himself to be. Meanwhile, the best you can say for High Plains Drifter is that the title is a low pun. Rarely are humble westerns permitted to drift around on such a highfalutin plane. That, however, is small comfort as this cold, gory and overthought movie unfolds.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    No Way Out
    Indeed, viewers who arrive at the movie five minutes late and leave five minutes early will avoid the setup and payoff for the preposterous twist that spoils this lively, intelligent remake of 1948's The Big Clock.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    The Laughing Policeman
    Adapted from one of the intricately plotted, well-characterized Martin Beck policiers by the Swedish team of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, it loses a great deal in the translation from Stockholm to San Francisco's Dirty Harry country. Gloomy authenticity, for one thing; pace and a genuine sense of puzzlement, for others.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    The Tailor of Panama
    The film finally collapses under the burden of implausibility.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    Demolition Man
    Ultimately the script's often sharp social satire is drowned out by the noise and confusion.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    Life as a House
    Will the movie end in an orgy of sentiment? Why do we bother to ask?
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
    Their film is not so much thought out as strung together -- colorful incident upon colorful incident, but without logic, gathering suspense or any attempt to establish emotional connections between audience and actors.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    My Best Friend's Wedding
    When our sympathies shift to [Cameron Diaz's Kimmy], the movie sours. It is no help either that Ronald Bass neglected to write (or Mulroney was unable to find) a character in Michael. Why all this fuss over this lox, we keep wondering.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    Malèna
    Things finally work out all right--except for audiences, who will find this thin movie bereft of the more richly textured sentiments of Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso."
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    Addams Family Values
    Like the first of the Addams chronicles, this is an essentially lazy movie, too often settling for easy gags and special effects that don't come to any really funny point.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    Pearl Harbor
    The net result of this mighty effort is perhaps predictable: near total inconsequence.
    • Time
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    The Santa Clause
    The Santa Clause presents us with an Anti-Claus, Tim Allen of Home Improvement, hard-edged, discomfitingly frenetic and spritzing cheerless one-liners.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    A Life Less Ordinary
    But that's the thing about this movie. It never leaves well enough, or good enough, alone. It keeps looking--sometimes a little too hard--for ways to transform the ordinary into the discomfiting.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    F.I.S.T.
    The movie F.I.S.T. stands for nearly 2½ hours of almost unmitigated boredom—a misfired would-be proletarian epic with Sylvester Stallone misplaying the Jimmy Hoffa part with a self-confidence that borders on the sublime.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    Tadpole
    This is, alas, one weary ride--77 minutes that sometimes feel like that many hours.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    I'm Not There.
    It doesn't work. It is just a mess -- though the sound track, full of Dylan songs is, of course, good to hear. But it is not better than the track on Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home" documentary of two years ago.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    La Vie en Rose
    There is no rhyme or reason to this jumble -- except perhaps to stress Edith's endless self-victimization. This lack of narrative coherence naturally has the effect of distancing us from her story.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    Get Smart
    That Max Smart is played by the admirable Steve Carell, who is desperately looking for deadpan jokes in all the wrong places, is beside the point.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    The Legend of Bagger Vance
    The actors, especially the ever appealing Smith, do what they can to ground the movie in reality, but it stubbornly remains dawdling, remote and pretentious.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    Maid in Manhattan
    Maid in Manhattan is not so much a movie as a collection of career moves. J. Lo needs a comedy hit to support her principal activity, adorning magazine covers. Fiennes needs to warm his austere British image if he hopes to become a true international star.
    • Time
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    Dick
    Sells out real satirical possibilities to its marketing potential as teen fluff. Everyone loses -- except Hedaya, who keeps faith with his character's nutsiness.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    An Officer and a Gentleman
    The result is a Big Mac of a movie, junk food that somehow reaches the chortling soul.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    Eight Men Out
    Eight Men Out lacks either the spacious simplicity of legend or the patient detailing of realism. And Sayles often seems like a man who, trying to stretch a single, gets caught between bases and is desperately trying to evade the rundown.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    What Women Want
    It just runs on and on -- like a slightly stupid story you wish you hadn't overheard in a singles bar.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    The Hours
    A grim and uninvolving film, for which Philip Glass unwittingly provides the perfect score -- tuneless, oppressive, droning, painfully self-important.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    Hulk
    Lee must have thought he could work a similar magic on this clunking, clanking machine. But despite a few witty wipes and split-screen tricks, he fails. Hulk is no better than hulking.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    The Pelican Brief
    But we don't go to movies like this in search of stylish apercus. We go to see innocents like ourselves getting swept up by irresistible tides of terror. And to have the pants scared off us. That doesn't happen in The Pelican Brief.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Schickel
    Blue Streak
    Not a bad concept, and Martin Lawrence is appealing. Unfortunately, the writers have no gift for comic writing.
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