Michael Phillips

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Chicago Tribune
For 2,578 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 42% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1 point higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Michael Phillips' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 The Third Man
Lowest review score: 0 Did You Hear About the Morgans?
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,779 out of 2578
  2. Mixed: 510 out of 2578
  3. Negative: 289 out of 2578
2578 movie reviews
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    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    The Lucky Ones
    The film itself, which has everything from erection jokes to a computer-generated tornado, comes down to a battle between the interpreters and a screenplay riddled with convenience, cliche and well-meaning contrivance.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Fanboys
    A genial, sloppy, minor affair, offering a smidgen of inside baseball, which includes a gag at the expense of the forgotten, late '80s Lucas-produced epic "Willow."
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Napoleon
    Napoleon was many things, and with this dutiful career highlights reel, Phoenix and his director deliver glancing blows to as many aspects of the warrior-tyrant-genius-fool-lonely heart as cinematically possible in two and a half hours.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Beasts of the Southern Wild
    But even with the great good efforts of Wallis, the results, to some of us, betray a distrustworthy slickness reminiscent of a British Petroleum oil spill clean-up commercial.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
    Though Ball's workmanlike handling of the second in the trilogy, "The Scorch Trials," proves mainly that he can keep a franchise from running completely off the rails when the tracks have been laid perilously near a swamp of "dys-lit" cliches.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Adult Beginners
    The relative success or failure of Adult Beginners, directed with a steady, nonjudgmental hand by Ross Katz, depends on how funny you find Kroll. I find him funny-ish.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    The Haunting in Connecticut
    The movie bumps along from low-grade scare to scare, and it's not lousy, mainly because Virginia Madsen prevents it from being so.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Pacific Rim: Uprising
    Pacific Rim: Uprising may be not be much, but in the spirit of the film itself, let’s be realistic. It’s better than any of the “Transformers” movies, and shorter.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Django Unchained
    By the two-hour mark the fun had oozed out of the movie for me. It's long. Or feels it.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    The Flash
    Keaton is the one who brings both effortless gravity and subtle levity to a film that, without him, wouldn’t have much of either.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Midway
    Midway isn’t bad, really. Certainly, it gets a lot more done than the cinematic cinder block that was the 1976 historical drama also titled “Midway.”
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    The Internship
    Levy surely knew that the script at hand didn't warrant a full two-hour running time; even if you enjoy The Internship, as my son did, it feels 20 minutes over-full at least. Cut out half of the "Flashdance" and "X-Men" references, and you're halfway there.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    The Proposal
    The Proposal reworks "Two Weeks Notice" with the genders switched.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Savage Grace
    Savage Grace comes up bland and seems to go nowhere in particular.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    The Naked Gun
    It’s not bad. The reboot of The Naked Gun tosses off a few sharp and/or stupidly effective gags of the hit-and-run variety, nice and quick.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    It’s a strange, grimly comic collection offering many grotesque sight gags, the occasional moment of seriousness and a general wash of melancholic, photogenic, elegiac Old West atmosphere. I liked the least jokey tale the best; by the time it came along, in the fifth-out-of-six slot, I’d had it with the kidding.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Manufactured Landscapes
    Feels constrained and rather dutiful, no matter how passionate these people are about what they're observing.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    The Tempest
    She tackled "The Tempest" on stage, years ago. On screen I wish she'd (Taymor) adapted it with a freer hand, and then directed it with a more considered one.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    The Substance
    [Moore's] gripping in ways the rest of the picture is not, transcending the thesis points and comic exaggerations simply by playing against the comic extremes and holding a card or two, always, in reserve. She reminds us here how good, and tough, she is at her best, when she gets half a chance.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    The Aftermath
    Director James Kent’s pretty, frustrating picture has atmosphere in spades, and a diamond-like sheen, but its tale of hearts aflame is slowly clubbed into submission by an excess of taste.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    You Don't Mess with the Zohan
    An Israeli-on-Arab version of "Shampoo," You Don’t Mess With the Zohan is terrible in many ways, and shoddy in every way that has to do with filmmaking. But politically it's sort of interesting.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Logan
    Logan is deadly serious, and while its gamer-style killing sprees are meant to be excitingly brutal, I found them numbing and, in the climax, borderline offensive.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    The Disaster Artist
    Fans of “The Room” — they’re everywhere — will get something out of it, though I’d argue not enough; director Franco’s camera sense is neither quite in synch with Wiseau’s (thank God) or quite distinct enough in its own style.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Death of a President
    The flaw in Death of a President isn't one of morality. It's one of dramatic interest.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    The Amateur
    Just when movie theaters don’t need another one, The Amateur comes along to join the roster of 2025 releases that lack the knack, the juice and exciting reasons for theatergoers to theater-go.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Man on a Ledge
    The supporting players in Man on a Ledge bring more to the party than the leads, and my suspension of disbelief seems to have gotten hung up in traffic while attempting to cross the suspension-of-disbelief bridge from the Brooklyn side.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Love and Other Drugs
    They put the "obvious" in "obvious."
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Ruben Brandt, Collector
    A satisfying heist movie, animated or live-action, requires more selectivity and less clutter than this one. The movie dashes by door after door, but it lacks the key.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    Funny Games (2008)
    Funny Games is fundamentally a bourgeois exercise in authorial sadism. As the methodical games grind on, the suffocatingly beige and white surroundings start to look like a mausoleum.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Michael Phillips
    The Wolf of Wall Street
    The movie's benumbed by its own parade of bad behavior. Like some of Scorsese's other second-tier works — "Casino," "Bringing Out the Dead" — the gulf between virtuoso technical facility and impoverished material cannot be bridged. It's diverting, sort of, to see DiCaprio doing lines off a stripper's posterior, but after the 90th time it's like, enough already with heinous capitalistic extremes.
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