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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    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Finding Vivian Maier
    Vivian Maier is a great Chicago story. And what she did for, and with, the faces, neighborhoods and character of mid-20th century Chicago deserves comparison to what Robert Frank accomplished, in a wider format, with "The Americans."
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Yes, God, Yes
    In several scenes, the camera stays close to Dyer’s dazzling array of expressions at the computer keyboard, while Alice processes the latest rabbit hole or interior dilemma. Maine knows a pitch-perfect performance when she sees one.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Countdown to Zero
    Like Charles Ferguson's excellent Iraq documentary "No End in Sight," "Countdown to Zero" has an agenda but has the cogent, reasoned rhetoric to support it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    A Real Pain
    A Real Pain, shadowed by the Holocaust and the grandmother we never see, may be a modestly scaled second feature, but Eisenberg makes an enormous leap forward, coming off his promising directorial debut, “When You Finish Saving the World.”
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    We Grown Now
    Rather than go for the throat, its central friendship makes room for feeling, but also for listening, and watching, and reflection. You may cry or you may not. But the movie is up to far more than making sure you do.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Return to Seoul
    It treats Freddie not as a problem to be solved, but as a peripatetic life to be followed. What begins as two weeks in another town, in search of the past Freddie never knew, becomes a reminder that there are feelings, longings, connections in life that remain not impossible, but certainly elusive, and precarious.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Brand Upon the Brain!
    The film is a singular achievement.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
    For all these self-effacing but highly valuable reasons, when the triumphs of the human, agricultural and engineering spirits arrive, they work. It’s moving, and it’s earned. Ejiofor is off and running as a director.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Life and Nothing More
    It’s full of life, guided by first-time screen performers portraying versions of themselves. And because Esparza’s a dramatist, not a melodramatist, the experience of watching Life and Nothing More becomes truth, and nothing less.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Beanpole
    The film is about bargains made and broken and re-negotiated. You watch it in an anxious, protective state, regarding the fate of these characters, and this fallout.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    76 Days
    The result is a narrow slice of a much, much larger story, somewhat akin to the hands-off, eyes-wide-open documentary approach of Frederick Wiseman — if Wiseman were a war correspondent. Rarely has recent global history seemed so far away, yet so present. It’s one of the year’s essential documents.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Cold War
    Kulig comes with everything the role of this sullen, reckless siren demands, and then some.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Transit
    A more threatening embodiment of that idea, of new times that seem like old times, comes to subtly provocative life in Transit, one of the most intriguing films of the new year. Written and directed by German filmmaker Christian Petzold, it’s an audacious reminder that there’s more than one way to adapt a so-called “period” novel for a new era.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Is That Black Enough for You?!?
    [Mitchell’s] celebration of these films is seriously entertaining.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Juno
    Ellen Page is key to its success, as much as Cody, or director Jason Reitman.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The Central Park Five
    An unusually good documentary about an outlandish miscarriage of justice.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Judas and the Black Messiah
    Judas and the Black Messiah is my kind of dramatized Chicago history. It’s a real movie, for one thing — brash, narratively risky, full of life and sneaky wit (even if the dominant tone is one of foreboding) and brimming with terrific actors.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Casino Royale
    Eleven years ago director Campbell made "GoldenEye," the first of the Brosnan Bond pictures. Casino Royale trumps it every which way.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The Unknown Country
    There’s a dreamy and poetic side to the visual texture in The Unknown Country, as photographed, often gorgeously, by Andrew Hajek. The Badlands, the snakelike highways, the rippling sunsets step right up and strike their poses, but unselfconsciously.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Get Out
    It's a little of everything: unnerving, funny in just the right way and at the right times, serious about its observations and perspectives on racial animus, straight-up populist when it comes to an increasingly (but not sadistically) violent climax. That's entertainment!
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Half Nelson
    No halves about it: Half Nelson is a wholly absorbing and delicately shaded portrait of an educator played by Ryan Gosling, a young man harboring an offstage secret.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The Italian
    Earns its happy ending like few other contemporary dramas concerned with the fate of a child. It puts you through hell for that ending, in fact, hell being modern-day Russia.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Conclave
    Sleek, confident and peppered with delicious portraits in pursuit, deceit and evasion, the carnival of papal intrigue known as “Conclave” works like gangbusters.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    Without undue fawning, Neville’s moving portrait does a lovely job of presenting Rogers as two people, the public figure and the private one, sharing the same closet full of zip-up sweaters.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Frances Ha
    You may watch Frances Ha relating to little of it, or a lot of it, but this "road movie with apartments," as the director (shooting here in velvety black-and-white, recalling Woody Allen's "Manhattan" in its texture) so aptly put it, is informed by a buoyant, resilient spirit.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The Five-Year Engagement
    As in last year's "Bridesmaids," an authentic, dimensional human element animates the jokes and the characters with whom we spend a couple of highly satisfying hours.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The Martian
    It's one of the most comforting science fiction films in years.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Happy Valley
    Happy Valley might've fleshed out some of these larger implications. The film could've benefited from another 15 or 20 minutes of detail and nuance. What's there, though, is strong, thoughtful and disturbing.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    A Prophet
    A Prophet pushes its protagonist into circumstances he did not choose but in which he watches and learns and kills and eventually becomes all he can be, albeit criminally. Certainly Muslims living in France have embraced the movie and Malik, played by Rahim
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Howard
    Howard does a fine, loving job tracing who he was as a gay Jewish boy growing up in Baltimore; as an aspiring playwright and theatrical impresario, schooled at Boston University, Goddard College in Vermont, the summer theater program at Tufts University, and a graduate student at Indiana University; and as a hungry young New York City transplant, eager to make his mark.
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