Avis Metacritic

Moore's most assured, least antagonistic and potentially most important film.

In a summer of dumb, shameless drivel, Moore delivers a movie of robust mind and heart. You'll laugh till it hurts.

Highly entertaining and informative.

This is a movie, not a position paper, and Moore aims to entertain as he informs.

As a documentary, this movie has the same problems as all of those in Moore's oeuvre; as a polemic or a visual op-ed piece, it's an effective piece of filmmaking.

This being a Michael Moore film, the filmmaker is as enraging as the subject: His belligerent court-jester shtick wears thin fast and undermines the segments on universal health-care systems in Canada, the U.K., France and Cuba.

While Sicko is the most persuasive and least aggravating of all of Moore's movies, it still bears many of the frustrating Moore earmarks -- most notably, a deliberately simplistic desire to render everything in black-and-white terms, as if he didn't trust his audience enough to follow him into some of the far more complex gray areas.

Sicko is the least controversial and most broadly appealing of Mr. Moore’s movies. (It is also, perhaps improbably, the funniest and the most tightly edited.) The argument it inspires will mainly be about the nature of the cure, and it is here that Mr. Moore’s contribution will be most provocative and also, therefore, most useful.

It’s as a rhetorician that Moore is most original and effectively demagogic.

The silliness of Moore's oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is not liberal or conservative, either; it's a basic intelligence test, like the ability to match square peg with square hole. His documentaries are political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or a fourth Stooge.