[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

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

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

[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 creates its own world and at the same time opens our eyes to the world as it exists.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 24, 2022

Despite the film's serious shortcomings, it does have a certain wan charm. And its surprise ending packs a strong punch.

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

One of the best things about Sidewalk Stories is how well it uses images to tell its story. The problem is, after a while, the curiosity of the device wears thin, and we're left with the story, which also is wearing thin.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 24, 2022

The interplay between Lane and his real-life daughter Nicole Alysia-who plays the foundling-is touchingly tender.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 22, 2014

Laughs, romance, and even something of an adventure flower in Lane's New York.

| Nov 5, 2013

Charles Lane's follies are enmeshed within bigger pictures of reality, reestablishing the film's thesis of comedy as a mode of survival.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 5, 2013

Ambitious but sadly misguided.

| Feb 9, 2006

Lane is endlessly inventive in the ways he finds to create humorous situations and tell his story through images, and the soundtrack music, by Marc Marder, reinforces everything that happens.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 24, 2003

Lane's conceit is handled with such unassuming sweetness and charm that it never comes across as presumptuous or pretentious, and the simple authority of his conclusion is unimpeachable.

| May 24, 2003

If sweetness and earnest social concern -- which it has in abundance -- were more active qualities, Sidewalk Stories might be more of an achievement.

| May 24, 2003