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Sicko given clean bill of health by US critics

Sicko

Preview by Jack Foley

HE may antagonise the hell out of President Bush and all things associated with his administration but Michael Moore seems to know how to ensure his films get noticed.

Having already gone down a storm at Cannes, his latest documentary Sicko opened in US cinemas at the weekend (June 29, 2007) to almost universal acclaim – with some critics even going so far as to suggest it would get the Michael Moore haters off his back!

The film takes a hard look at some major American pharmaceutical companies and at alleged corruption in the Food and Drug Administration. It includes a sequence in which Moore takes rescue workers from the September 11 attacks in New York to a location near the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay and a Cuban hospital.

The group in question are suffering from conditions thought to be linked to their work clearing up debris from the site of the World Trade Center, which continues to be a major bone of contention among rescue workers.

But in spite of the trouble he’s got in with US authorities, American critics thought that Sicko contained some very important messages.

Variety described it as “an affecting and entertaining dissection of the American health care industry, showing how it benefits the few at the expense of the many”.

While Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times wrote: “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.”

The New York Times opined: “Michael Moore has never before made a film that stated his bedrock ideological principles as clearly and accessibly as Sicko.”

And The Los Angeles Times wrote: “We Americans inevitably feel we know the best way to do everything, but the great accomplishment of Sicko is that it is difficult to watch this slyly confrontational film and remain sure.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer, meanwhile, concluded: “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 due to open in UK cinemas later this year.