Critic Reviews
85
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
positive
34(85%)
mixed
6(15%)
negative
0(0%)
Showing 40 Critic Reviews
100
A dark comedy that's as emotionally honest as any picture of 2002.
100
Ever the satirist, Payne mines humor from his characters, be it Randall's cockeyed pyramid-scheme ideas or the banality of a ridiculous wedding toast.
100
Payne is a comic miniaturist, who works in a small compass, as if through a magnifying glass with tweezers.
100
A quiet, heart-rending masterpiece, one with an actor's turn that people will remember, and rediscover, eons into the future.
100
What makes this exquisitely observed slice of American screen realism transcend itself is finally its moral sensibility.
100
This powerfully contained, painfully funny performance has to rank with the greatest work Nicholson's ever done -- This road movie gives you emotional whiplash, and you’ll be glad you went along for the ride.
100
What gives About Schmidt its ultimate boost, what pushes it into the stirring heavens is Nicholson, who produces the most understated -– and one of the most powerful –- performances of his career.
100
The bleakness and poignancy are inescapable in About Schmidt, a character study that has the emotional richness of the great Italian and Eastern European films of the 1960s, in which humor and pathos rode up and down on the seesaw together.
100
A comedy poised on the knife's edge of tragedy, the film is a gutsy, truthful, deeply rooted vision of contemporary American life, scaled to the size of an ordinary man. It's a humanist triumph strip-mined of bathos and confirmation that, after directing just three features, Payne has become the most gifted comic social satirist to hit our movies since Preston Sturges.
100
What makes About Schmidt so extraordinary is how ordinary its tale is; it's a gray picture about gray people looking for some kind of meaning in their gray lives.
