About Schmidt Critic Reviews

A seriously good movie, a challenge to viewers, a rebuke of the way many Americans live their lives.Read the full review

It is also Nicholson at his bravest and riskiest. By banking his fires and staying alert to the smallest details, he delivers a monumental performance that blasts your expectations and batters your heart.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

What makes this exquisitely observed slice of American screen realism transcend itself is finally its moral sensibility.Read the full review

Payne is a comic miniaturist, who works in a small compass, as if through a magnifying glass with tweezers.Read the full review

The power of this great movie -- part comedy, part tragedy, part satire, mostly masterpiece -- is in the details.Read the full review

Payne, the great satirist behind "Citizen Ruth" and "Election," loves to populate his films with throwaway details, which in About Schmidt accumulate into a portrait of Midwestern life that's almost chilling in its exactitude.Read the full review

Nicholson has at least three magnificent moments in Hour 2. The best is a wedding toast that comes after another that will painfully remind you of every banal wedding toast you've ever heard.Read the full review