[Charles] Lane doesn’t try for silent movie conventions or style and he doesn’t attempt any of Chaplin’s elaborate gags. Instead, he offers a wordless story in poetic pantomime with a backdrop of social commentary...

| Jul 9, 2022

Is there an audience for the Charlie Chaplin style in 1990? Is an updated Little Tramp comedy viable in today's high-tech movie market? Lane's film answers with a gentle affirmative.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 24, 2022

Sidewalk Stories is the find of the season -- a small, rough diamond of great heart and humor in a season usually reserved for large projects of too-calculated social importance.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 24, 2022

Shot in black and white in a bitter-cold New York City, Sidewalk Stories is buoyed by Chaplinesque physical comedy even as it takes an unflinching look at what it means to be without a home in a violent, uncaring society.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 24, 2022

[Lane] has had the audacity to make a black-and-white silent movie and make it in the face of today's shamelessly callous values, with a brimming heart and an activist's outraged passion.

| Jan 24, 2022

Charles Lane's efforts make you wish that Sidewalk Stories, an ambitious attempt to do a Chaplinesque scenario in modern-day New York, were a better movie.

| Jan 24, 2022

[Sidewalk Stories] begins as an innocent, Chaplinesque tale about a New York street artist who befriends an abandoned little girl. It ends with a powerful statement about the homeless.

| Original Score: B | Jan 24, 2022

Sidewalk Stories is ultimately more successful as an openhearted novelty by a worth-watching new talent than it is as a work of art... Yet this silent film speaks to us with a distinctive voice.

| Jan 24, 2022

Few other first-time filmmakers would launch their careers with a feature devoid of dialogue for 95 of its 97 minutes. That Lane succeeds is a tribute to his understanding of the medium in its purest sense.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 24, 2022

Nice try, but no cigar.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 24, 2022

Sandye Wilson is appealing as the young woman, and Nicole Alysia is a cherubic infant. Otherwise, the acting is broad.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 24, 2022

It takes awhile for the contemporary moviegoer to adapt to the deliberate pace and the lack of dialogue, but Sidewalk Stories becomes harder and harder to resist as it goes along.

| Jan 24, 2022

There are several sprightly comic-nightmare passages, all animated by Marc Marder's imaginative musical score.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 24, 2022

Although Sidewalk Stories has a sentimental streak a mile wide, it is saved from seeming saccharine by the hard facts of modern life.

| Jan 24, 2022

As an experiment in filmmaking, the movie is too self-conscious and sentimental to be entirely successful. But it has a lot of heart, and the unexpectedly pungent ending makes a powerful comment on today's urban problems.

| Jan 24, 2022

The film's ardent sentimentality, as magnified by the schlurpy music, is straight Chaplin, but not as good.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 24, 2022

[Lane is] an appealing talent, and Sidewalk Stories is a likable film. Beyond novelty value, it also finds modern ways of making contact with the very real feel for poverty that was so much a part of the early Chaplin films.

| Jan 24, 2022

Sidewalk Stories is finally too sympathetic to really dislike, but too benign to leave an impression.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 24, 2022

Sidewalk Stories has its flaws, but Lane is clearly a film maker with a fresh vision as well as a social conscience.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 24, 2022

Sidewalk Stories is a comedy of forgotten pleasures. It harkens back to the purest form of cinema to silently record what passes for society today.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 24, 2022