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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    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Michael Phillips
    The Banshees of Inisherin
    The result is McDonagh’s most fully realized work since his breakthrough play, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” a generation ago. “Banshees” has its limitations; it’s pretty glib, like everything McDonagh writes, in its mashup of blackhearted laughs and occasional sincerity. He’s akin to the Coen brothers in that regard. He’s also a formidable craftsman and his best lines are pearls.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Michael Phillips
    Top Five
    In Top Five, you sense Rock trying to load all these disparate talents onto a conventional romantic-comedy structure. It's a close call, but it holds.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Michael Phillips
    Katyn
    Katyn will not join Wajda's list of masterworks. In its final flashback, however, when we're taken back to the forest and the details of what really happened, we see what we must see, the clear-eyed way we should see it.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 38 Michael Phillips
    Untraceable
    The latest, Untraceable, owes everything to “Lambs,” and to “Se7en,” and to all the “Lambs” and “Se7en” knockoffs made by directors less talented than Jonathan Demme and David Fincher. In addition to being dull, the Portland, Ore. -set Untraceable is a monster hypocrite, wagging its finger at the mass audience’s appetite for strictly regimented, “creative” torture scenarios.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Michael Phillips
    Coco
    Too often Coco mistakes chaos and calamity for comedy, and it’s a little perverse to prevent this particular story from becoming a full-on animated musical.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Michael Phillips
    Admission
    There's a good movie in this story. The one that got made is roughly half-good.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Bridge of Spies
    The film is an anomaly — a confident, slightly square, highly satisfying example of old-school Hollywood craftsmanship, starring a major movie star brandishing a briefcase, and a handkerchief, rather than a pistol.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Michael Phillips
    White Material
    Its dramatic vexations are at war with Denis' prodigious visual skill. And the fight, ultimately, rewards the viewer.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Michael Phillips
    Foxcatcher
    It's meticulous, fastidiously controlled and a tiny bit enervated. I've seen it twice; it's successful enough in what it's attempting to merit at least one viewing. But even after two, you may struggle with what's not there, and should be, or could be.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Bamako
    Sissako has an unusual camera eye, patient and alert to the ebb and flow of both the courtroom sequences and the outside scenes. The music is wonderful as well.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Michael Phillips
    Beginners
    Just cute enough for some tastes, too cute by half for others.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Warfare
    It’s a specific sort of achievement, without the full dimension or larger resonance of a classic. That’s a lot to ask of any film, especially one that does so much so rigorously and well.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Michael Phillips
    Bright Star
    In its way Campion’s film is a thing of beauty, but its characters’ inner lives must be taken on faith.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Jackie
    It's an odd, hermetic and fascinating picture.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Raw
    Like all good horror films (though it's more of a psychological thriller with a teeming, festering wealth of body-horror preoccupations), this one takes its central theme — cannibalism — as a way into a variety of other matters, other indicators of a society and a psyche under extreme duress.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Inherent Vice
    For some of us, Anderson's LA lamentation is a siren song, and there's no more ardent and poetic chronicler of California mythology.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    American Fiction
    The movie we have is a movie that works, blending seriocomic domestic material with the larger, more pointed social observations about white liberal guilt, code-switching Black authors (Issa Rae is most welcome as Monk’s primary foil) and a lot more.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Michael Phillips
    Il Divo
    Instead of a modern classic, able to travel the globe with ease, Il Divo is merely a wonderfully cast, tonally assured achievement, with a uniquely strange tour de force at its core.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Fish Tank
    A remarkable downer-upper paradox: a bruising tale of teenage resilience, honest and emotionally complicated and alive.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Phillips
    No
    No succeeds, wonderfully, because it knows how to sell itself. It is cool, witty, technically dazzling in a low-key and convincing way.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened
    Jim Walton, Ann Morrison and other original cast members talk about what the show meant to them, and how it felt (in a word: lousy) to have their dreams crash into a brick wall of harsh reviews.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Michael Phillips
    Hot Fuzz
    The best of it is a riot--a "Bad Boys II" fireball hurled with exquisite accuracy at a quaint English town peopled by Agatha Christie archetypes.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Phillips
    Police, Adjective
    It's not for all tastes; it requires some patience. The more your own job involves absurd, time-consuming bits of minutiae, the more familiar (and amusing) it'll seem.
    • 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Michael Phillips
    Pacific Rim
    It's closer to the hammering "Transformers" aesthetic than expected. Yet the weirdness around the edges saves it from impersonality.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Michael Phillips
    The Hustle
    Well, it’s a dud. Nothing quite clicks.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Us
    Jordan Peele’s Us begins so spectacularly well, and sustains its game of doubles so cleverly for most of its two hours, it’s an unusual sort of letdown when the story doesn’t quite hang together and “deliver” the way Peele managed with his 2017 debut feature, “Get Out.”
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Michael Phillips
    The Big Short
    If a film can essentially succeed while also remaining essentially frustrating, here's a prime example.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Michael Phillips
    Moana
    The film is bright, busy, enjoyable, progressive without being insufferable.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Phillips
    Still Life
    The first great film of the year. It’s beautiful but so much more—full of subtle feeling, framed by a monstrous, eroding landscape.
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