Sicko Reviews
Top Critic
If other countries can provide their people with universal health care, why can't we? If we can't, who are we?
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Though the focus occasionally strays, the film emerges as a fascinating exploration and powerful indictment of a pressing national problem. This is Moore's biggest, best and most impassioned work.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
'Sicko' is a quieter, more focused and less feral beast than its predecessor, 'Fahrenheit 9/11', but that's not saying much.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/6
One may quibble with Mr. Moore's anecdotal oversimplifications and his xenophilic fantasies, but he has struck a socio-psychic nerve in the body politic, generating a feeling of outrage that seems to be reverberating in every theater.
This is a movie to see in a theater. It'a group experience. All through the show you'll hear people laughing, crying, muttering, cheering, sighing, swearing, and gasping. And at the end, chances are they'll be on their feet applauding.
Sicko is worth seeing -- as long as the big grain of salt needed for it is put on more than just the popcorn.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Even Moore's worst ideological enemies would be hard put to dispute the basic argument of his new film Sicko: The American health-care system is a sick joke and has been for a very long time.
Moore has finally made a moving, whimsical, infuriating film that won't just infuriate the right-wingers who've made a cottage industry out of hating him nor sing to the liberal choir who supports even his shadiest arguments.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
"Who are we?" might be a better (if less jazzy) title for Sicko, Michael Moore's two-hour meditation on the sickly qualities of American health care.
Moore may play loose with the facts, but you don't have to believe every frame in the movie to come away thinking that the message in Sicko is not only worthwhile, it is also inarguable.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Michael Moore's latest documentary-as-soapbox-vituperation is a damning, touching, darkly comical exposé on the United States health-care system.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's doubtful even Michael Moore would claim Sicko as the last word on the subject. But it is a first word -- a very loud first word -- and while it may have been said better, at least Moore said it.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Moore could open a lot of eyes with Sicko but as the song says, we don't need another hero, especially one self-proclaimed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Sicko is a teaspoonful of documentary sugar in a summer of popcorn salt.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Raise your hand if you've had any Kafka-like health insurance dilemmas. Yes, that's a lot of hands. And as it turns out, at least one has been severed.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Moore's films usually make conservatives angry. This one is likely to strike home with anyone, left or right, who has had serious illness in the family.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Sicko is Moore's best, most focused movie to date -- much more persuasive than the enraged and self-righteous Fahrenheit 9/11.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's not impossible that this bitterly funny, bitterly sad call to alms could move reform back up the political agenda. For that reason alone, you owe it to yourself to see this movie.
Michael Moore takes aim at his easiest target to date, and no doubt the hit he scores will become a hit.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Lots of Sicko stands as boffo political theater, but its major domo lost me by losing his sense of humor.
We Americans inevitably feel we know the best way to do everything, but the great accomplishment of Sicko is that it is difficult to watch this slyly confrontational film and remain sure.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
Sicko, the professional provocateur's most accomplished and fervent film, is what the movie doc prescribes for temporary relief from the chronic headache that is the American health-care system.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The film is an alternately depressing and uplifting experience, a documentary whose ironies -- taking sick Americans to Cuba for cheaper, better health care -- won't be lost on anybody.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Sicko is Moore's most satisfying and mature film, with few cheap shots or transparent publicity stunts.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It may incite lawmakers in a position to help to trumpet their faux proletarian credentials.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
This is essential viewing -- informative, corrosive, and even sometimes hilarious.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A better, more focused effort than Fahrenheit 9/11 or Bowling for Columbine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A compelling, tear-jerking look at a vital piece of our infrastructure gone awry.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Sicko represents Moore's most mature work as a filmmaker.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Sicko, an investigation and indictment of a system choking on paperwork, greed, bad policy and countervailing goals, turns out to be a fuzzy, toothless collection of anecdotes, a few stunts and a bromide-rich conclusion.
Moore winds up treating the audience the same way that, he says, powerful people treat the weak in America -- as dopes easily satisfied with fairy tales and bland reassurances.
Sicko is Moore's best film: a documentary that mixes outrage, hope, and gonzo stunts in the right proportions; and that throws an unforgiving spotlight on what is, in both senses, the elephant in the room.
Why give Moore a free pass just because you support his ideologies? In the end, the real loyalty we owe is to truth.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Whatever anyone's feelings may be about Michael Moore, it's hard to disagree with his argument that health care in the United States is broken and needs to be fixed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
At the very least, he's raised a warning flag that shouldn't be ignored.
Michael Moore has never before made a film that stated his bedrock ideological principles as clearly and accessibly as Sicko.
| Original Score: 4/5
It is quintessential Moore: expertly crafted, eminently entertaining, one-sided and overly simplistic.
What's most striking about Sicko is how composed, even serene it is compared with Michael Moore's previous acts of cinematic insurgency.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The silliness of Moore's oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is a basic intelligence test, like the ability to match square peg with square hole.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Sicko, which takes on America's profoundly profitable and catastrophically inefficient health care system, is Moore's most assured, least antagonistic and potentially most important film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
In a summer of dumb, shameless drivel, Moore delivers a movie of robust mind and heart. You'll laugh till it hurts.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
As both harangue and movie tragicomedy, Sicko is socko.
May I introduce a new phrase into the Franglais dictionary? C'était un slam-dunk.
An affecting and entertaining dissection of the American health care industry, showing how it benefits the few at the expense of the many.
This is the movie where Michael Moore gets a few Michael Moore haters off his back.
