SiCKO: Critic Reviews

If other countries can provide their people with universal health care, why can't we? If we can't, who are we?

Michael Moore has never before made a film that stated his bedrock ideological principles as clearly and accessibly as Sicko.

Mr Moore's excellent new film is a wakeup call.

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.

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.

Sicko is Moore's best, most focused movie to date -- much more persuasive than the enraged and self-righteous Fahrenheit 9/11.

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.

Lots of Sicko stands as boffo political theater, but its major domo lost me by losing his sense of humor.

Michael Moore's latest documentary-as-soapbox-vituperation is a damning, touching, darkly comical expose on the United States health-care system.

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.

Sicko is a teaspoonful of documentary sugar in a summer of popcorn salt.

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.

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.

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.

A better, more focused effort than Fahrenheit 9/11 or Bowling for Columbine.

This is essential viewing -- informative, corrosive, and even sometimes hilarious.

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.

Sicko is Moore's most satisfying and mature film, with few cheap shots or transparent publicity stunts.

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.

A compelling, tear-jerking look at a vital piece of our infrastructure gone awry.

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.

An affecting and entertaining dissection of the American health care industry, showing how it benefits the few at the expense of the many.

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.

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.

Sicko is worth seeing -- as long as the big grain of salt needed for it is put on more than just the popcorn.