| Director: | Sidney Lumet |
| Writer: | Steven Schwartz |
| Director of Photography: | David Watkin |
| Editor: | Tom Swartwout |
| Production Designer: | Philip Rosenberg |
| Producers: | Sidney Lumet and Steven Schwartz |
| Live Entertainment; R; 107 minutes | |
| Release: | 11/97 |
| Cast: | James Spader, Kyra Sedgwick, Helen Mirren, Margo Martindale, Philip Bosco, Jeffrey Wright, Wallace Shawn, Anne Bancroft, Edward Herrmann and Albert Brooks |
| Based on the novel by Richard Dooling |
A scathing, hilarious satire of the bottom-line obsessed health industry, Critical Care recalls Lumet's Oscar-winning Network with its pointed barbs as well as its overarching speechifying. Set in a big-city hospital where one's care depends on his or her ability to pay, the film follows second-year resident Werner Ernst (Spader), who has learned that MD carries a lot of clout with young, attractive women, as he learns the ropes from boozing, amoral chief resident Dr. Butz (Brooks). Ernst gets involved with a rich patient's daughter, Felicia Potter (Sedgwick), who wants to pull the plug on dear old dad, and falls into a trap when she persuades him to side with her in a lawsuit against her Bible-thumping sister (Martindale), who wants to keep dad alive. Critical Care lacks the multi-layered characters that made Network so caustically funny.
