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Richard Schickel
Tomatometer-approved critic
(Photo Credit: Michael Caulfield Archive/WireImage/Getty Images)
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Lone Star (1996) |
Sayles is a meditative storyteller, with a tendency to mute melodrama rather than letting it wail. But he is also one of the few filmmakers still ferreting out the strangeness and anxiety hidden beneath our poses of ordinariness. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 06, 2023
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When a Man Loves a Woman (1994) |
Well, this is the '90s, when weekends aren't allowed to be lost, only politely postponed. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 01, 2023
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Moscow on the Hudson (1984) |
Robin Williams, who seems to have absorbed something of the Russian soul while acquiring a persuasive Russian accent, is excellent. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Aug 22, 2023
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Bringing Up Baby (1938) |
The dialogue sparkles and the acting shines as the big cat escapes and mishap follows mishap in swift succession. - Video Review
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| Posted Jul 25, 2023
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Coming Apart (1969) |
The film's effect is powerful, not least because of Rip Torn's brilliant performance as he transforms himself from a man making a half-serious experiment in living to a creature ensnared in a trap of his own devising. - LIFE
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| Posted Jul 18, 2023
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Castle Keep (1969) |
Well worth seeing, not because perfection has been achieved, but because a good serious film response has been made to a good serious book. - LIFE
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| Posted Jul 18, 2023
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The Garden of Delights (1970) |
A well-acted study in psychological violence that tears at our consciousness with clever, velvet claws. - LIFE
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| Posted Jul 18, 2023
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Bad Company (1972) |
It's a hard movie to summarize and a hard movie to forget -- soft-spoken, hard-headed, stylistically singular. Bad Company is good company, the best I have found at the movies in a long time. - LIFE
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| Posted Jul 18, 2023
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The Matrix (1999) |
Given a budget that encourages their kinesthetic skills, the filmmakers tend to go on a bit, but it's mostly a kind of quick, glancing hipness that's being indulged here. And that's a rare and welcome commodity in mass-market moviemaking these days. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jul 12, 2023
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Magnolia (1999) |
These characters are all well played, but we don't fully connect with them. Or, finally, with an endless movie that mostly mistakes inflation for importance. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jun 29, 2023
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Phantom of the Paradise (1974) |
A crazy, savage film -- iconoclastic and truly liberating. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jun 27, 2023
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Patriot Games (1992) |
There is something abstract and distant about Patriot Games. But there are at least four exciting preliminary confrontations... Along with the expert binding of Ford's performance, these are the juicy raisins in an otherwise blandish pudding. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jun 06, 2023
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An American Tail (1986) |
The animation and the backgrounds occasionally fall below classic Disney standards, but the characterizations, both visual and vocal, are entirely endearing. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted May 17, 2023
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Fiddler on the Roof (1971) |
Topol is all shrugs and sweet ingratiation. He even gets along with Cossacks. As a result the movie is soft and sugary right at its center and, excepting Leonard Frey... all performances struck me as rather gingerly. - LIFE
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| Posted May 16, 2023
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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) |
I think this last installment in the popular series, made with the same care, conviction and energy as the first, but orchestrating the elements of a delicious formula at a still higher level of sophistication, may well be the best of his best. - Video Review
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| Posted May 01, 2023
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The Big Lebowski (1998) |
Even when they don't achieve the glorious farce of a Fargo, there is always something fascinating about following the Coens' rapt gaze as they peer into the American nut bowl. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jan 24, 2023
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Sisters (1973) |
Sisters provides moviegoers with the special satisfaction of finding a real treasure while prowling cinema's bargain basement. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 28, 2022
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Terms of Endearment (1983) |
Its quirky rhythms and veering emotional tones are very much its own, and they owe less to movie tradition than they do to a sense of how the law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jul 20, 2022
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Gandhi (1982) |
In playing Gandhi, an actor must be less concerned with physical verisimilitude than with spiritual presence, and here Kingsley is nothing short of astonishing. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jul 19, 2022
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Thief (1981) |
The bloodbaths that follow are flashy but empty exercises, pseudo-tragic searchings for a big finish. They make one tired and edgy -- and dissipate the promise that has energized much of Thief. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jul 07, 2022
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Up the Down Staircase (1967) |
Up the Down Staircase is one of those rare films in which all the important talents mesh to form a wonderfully coherent, humane and sensitive vision of an aspect of our reality. - LIFE
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| Posted Jul 06, 2022
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The Front Page (1974) |
Obviousness pervades everything Wilder and Diamond have done with the film. - (MORE): A Journalism Review
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| Posted Jun 21, 2022
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Tess (1979) |
One emerges from [Roman Polanski's] endless version of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles with a sense that one could have read the book in a shorter span and had more fun too. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jun 17, 2022
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Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) |
To put the matter simply, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is as sweet and charming and funny and, above all, human as any comedy that has been made in the United States in this decade. Indeed, one has to delve deeper in move history to find apt comparisons. - LIFE
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| Posted Jun 15, 2022
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The Last Starfighter (1984) |
Inexpressively written by Jonathan Betuel and languidly directed by Nick Castle Jr., The Last Starfighter offers the audience little more than the pleasure of naming its previous movie bases as it touches them. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted May 03, 2022
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Barefoot in the Park (1967) |
In short, Simon is a crafty operator and so are his principal principals, Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. - LIFE
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| Posted May 02, 2022
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In the Heat of the Night (1967) |
Greatly to their credit and without getting preachy, they manage to transcend their cute premise and make a sound, serious and altogether excellent film that is quite possibly the best we have had from the U.S. this year. - LIFE
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| Posted Feb 02, 2022
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Divorce American Style (1967) |
It actually has something truthful to say about the way we live now and says it with a savagery of tone that runs completely counter to the warm, babbling, socially meaningless flow of our comic mainstream. - LIFE
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| Posted Jan 05, 2022
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The Bobo (1967) |
The contraption runs well enough to serve its purpose, which is to provide us with a lengthy excursion through the Sellers' market. It is a trip worth taking. - LIFE
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| Posted Jan 05, 2022
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Wyatt Earp (1994) |
What you shouldn't do is turn [Wyatt Earp's] story into a solemn biopic, grinding relentlessly, without selectivity or point of view, through a rootless and episodic life from adolescence to old age. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 22, 2021
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The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969) |
[Kramer] strikes me as a director at once tone-deaf and color-blind and compensating for those defects by endlessly kicking us in the slats and gouging us in the eye. - LIFE
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| Posted Nov 01, 2021
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Marlowe (1969) |
Director Paul Bogart goes for a weird atmospheric mix, keeping Marlowe's crummy, picturesque 1940s-style office intact in the Los Angeles of the 1960s. It is ridiculous when contrasted to the hippie scene, the high rises, the TV production centers. - LIFE
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| Posted Nov 01, 2021
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The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969) |
A turgid thing based on a play of a few years back. - LIFE
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| Posted Nov 01, 2021
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The Undefeated (1969) |
The old frontier is alive and well in the Duke's mind and in that of his director, Andrew V. McLaglen. - LIFE
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| Posted Nov 01, 2021
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The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969) |
There are, in this film, quite a few visual and thematic references to its betters -- notably High Noon and Ride the High County -- but they only emphasize the witlessness of the script, the slackness of the acting and the tired... direction. - LIFE
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| Posted Nov 01, 2021
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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) |
Busch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a perfectly harmless and quite entertaining film. - LIFE
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| Posted Nov 01, 2021
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Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) |
Writer-director Carl Franklin's cool, expert adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress, Mosley's first novel, evokes the spirit of '40s film noir more effectively than any movie since Chinatown. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Oct 26, 2021
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The Day of the Jackal (1973) |
In short, as so often happens, a second-rate fiction has been transformed into a first-rate screen entertainment. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Apr 24, 2020
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The Journey of Natty Gann (1985) |
For the truth is that Natty Gann is a very good movie by anyone's standards. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Mar 31, 2020
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Malizia (1973) |
Malizia is overtly comic only in a few vignettes of family controversy. But people of very special -- or very broad --tastes may find it intriguing in its nasty little way. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Mar 18, 2020
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The Boys in the Band (1970) |
One leaves it exhausted, as one does all rubberneck excursions, but neither emotionally elevated nor intellectually enlightened. - LIFE
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| Posted Oct 22, 2019
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A Married Couple (1969) |
It is on the simplest verbal level that the movie, with its frank naturalism, grabs us. - LIFE
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| Posted Oct 22, 2019
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Tropic of Cancer (1970) |
In this pretty film an important essence is lost, and it is ironic that the spoken Miller prose keeps reminding us of what we are missing. - LIFE
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| Posted Oct 22, 2019
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Z (1969) |
What's so great about Director Costa-Gavras' simple, forceful reconstruction of the event is its understatement. - LIFE
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| Posted Oct 02, 2019
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Marooned (1969) |
The special effects are swell and I ended up feeling nice and tense despite myself. - LIFE
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| Posted Oct 02, 2019
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The Reivers (1969) |
A rambling and pointless movie. - LIFE
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| Posted Oct 02, 2019
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The Happy Ending (1969) |
Disgusting. - LIFE
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| Posted Oct 02, 2019
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John and Mary (1969) |
Under Peter Yates' tasteful direction, it turns out to be a mildly chic, mildly engaging little thing. - LIFE
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| Posted Oct 02, 2019
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Gaily, Gaily (1969) |
It's a likable movie, but an unsatisfying one. - LIFE
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| Posted Oct 02, 2019
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Un monde nouveau (1966) |
It remains a disappointment, as any self-consciously imitative film must be, but it is never a total lie. - LIFE
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| Posted Oct 02, 2019
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