About Schmidt Reviews
Top Critic
These filmmakers have a feeling for the isolation of blasted lives, but they also can't resist putting them down.
A poignant marker in the career of a major artist.
I liked About Schmidt a lot, but I have a feeling that I would have liked it much more if Harry & Tonto never existed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A thought-provoking and often-funny drama about isolation.
| Original Score: 4/5
A cuttingly funny, moving portrayal of a man searching for meaning in his unremarkable, unmemorable life.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Each deft stroke of Payne's pen is matched by a Nicholson flourish, transforming the film into a moving, bittersweet ballet.
| Original Score: 5/5
Nicholson ... produces the most understated -- and one of the most powerful -- performances of his career.
The pleasures of About Schmidt are what might be called Midwestern pleasures: a sly sense of humor, sturdiness, self-discipline, solidarity.
A road trip of self-discovery, by turns hilarious and poignant, for a man unexpectedly at odds with the tiny world he has so laboriously made.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
To see a master actor rejoicing in his craft -- and a character both simpler and more complex than most of the people we ever meet on screen -- About Schmidt is a worthy, artful journey.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A seriously good movie, a challenge to viewers, a rebuke of the way many Americans live their lives.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
The film aims to be funny, uplifting and moving, sometimes all at once. The extent to which it succeeds is impressive.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
The movie isn't just about Schmidt as a personality, it's a portrait of his world, and Payne and co-writer Taylor show a rare compassion for the superficially comfortable.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
By turns hilarious and poignant, Schmidt is about nothing special and everything important.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
There is a casual courage and dignity, and no small amount of obliviousness, in Nicholson's Schmidt that will remind many younger people of their parents, and many older people of their brothers and friends -- and themselves.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
That Jack Nicholson makes this man so watchable is a tribute not only to his craft, but to his legend.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A brutally dry satire of Middle American numbness.
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| Original Score: 3/4
This is Christmas Future for a lot of baby boomers.
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| Original Score: B+
Schmidt's ponderings will touch every demographic. Like all our lives, his is hilarious and tragic, filled with probing thoughts and whimsical nonsense.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
A quiet, heart-rending masterpiece, one with an actor's turn that people will remember, and rediscover, eons into the future.
Nicholson's cranky father of the bride is as touching as he is exasperating, and the delightfully oddball About Schmidt is just about perfect.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
This is a superb film and one of Nicholson's great performances, tamped down but magnetic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Payne also understands what it has taken me most of a lifetime to comprehend: that the Schmidts of this world are not to be easily dismissed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Flamboyant in some movies and artfully restrained in others, 65-year-old Jack Nicholson could be looking at his 12th Oscar nomination by proving that he's now, more than ever, choosing his roles with the precision of the insurance actuary.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Even while playing in a minor key with low-to-moderate tone colors, Jack Nicholson can knock your socks off.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Perfectly pitched between comedy and tragedy, hope and despair, About Schmidt instead comes far closer than many movies to expressing the way many of us live -- someplace between consuming self-absorption and insistently demanding otherness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
About Schmidt is undoubtedly one of the finest films of the year. If you're not deeply touched by this movie, check your pulse.
Payne's movie is flat, depressed, and at times -- given this director's talent -- disappointingly curdled.
Despite Jack Nicholson's competence, this comedy about a Midwestern retiree never goes beyond mocking its characters and flattering its audience.
An impressively bleak comedy with intimations of social satire.
On balance, I recommend the movie both for Nicholson's performance and for the opportunity to spend some time with the kind of man that we often meet in real life, but rarely see on screen.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This road movie gives you emotional whiplash, and you'll be glad you went along for the ride.
It's an astonishing piece of acting and a really interesting film.
Nicholson's acting sets a new gold standard, making Schmidt a movie you won't forget.
| Original Score: 4/4
Both as satire and as drama, About Schmidt turns out to be a fascinating setback.
One of the best, most understated performances of [Jack Nicholson's] career.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
A must-see for Nicholson's mesmerizing performance, which would probably hold interest even if the sound were turned off.
| Original Score: 3/4
Lays out an expansive, impressively even-handed vision of life in contemporary Middle America.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
It's a commanding Jack Nicholson lead performance that puts it into a sublime league of its own.
Nicholson has provided an open window into this man, one like so many in that he had youthful ambitions to accomplish more than he actually did ...
