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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    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    In the Heights
    Like the modest but wholly winning precursor to “Hamilton” it is, In the Heights works as an essentially apolitical embrace of the American possibility and the American roadblocks to that possibility, in a canny variety of musical styles, from hip hop to salsa
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The White Ribbon
    Haneke’s vision is gripping. The craftsmanship, classically shaped narrative and icy visual beauty cannot be denied.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Mysteries of Lisbon
    It's a lot. But if you're at all inclined, it's just right.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Young Goethe in Love
    Young Goethe in Love wants only to engage an audience with a capital-R Romantic ideal of Goethe's first love. It does so very well. And it was well worth the effort.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Gimme the Loot
    This is a true New York movie, though in its ear and eye for atmospheric beauty it feels more French.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Jodorowsky's Dune
    Had this ambitious head trip come to pass, it might've made Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" look like "Go, Dog. Go!"
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Inspector Bellamy
    Chabrol's final picture was designed with Depardieu in mind. It's a small work. Yet it's so pleasurably well-made, so obviously the work of major talents in a comfortable groove, why carp about the scale or ambition of the project?
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The Wife
    An unusually good adaptation of an unusually good novel.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    King Corn
    A breezy diary from a pair of first-time farmers, as well as a wry rebuke to a nation devoted to eating cheaply but not necessarily well, King Corn makes its points without much finger-wagging.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The Invitation
    The movie is a small marvel of contained spaces, exploited beautifully by Kusama and cinematographer Bobby Shore.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Detropia
    The oddly beautiful documentary made by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Gray is subtler and richer than its blunt title suggests.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Goodbye Solo
    The acting's so true, and Bahrani's so observant, you find yourself caring about everyone onscreen.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Maps to the Stars
    It's a strange, fascinating exercise in what Joel Coen once described as "tone management," job No. 1 for any director.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    The musical score by Emile Mosseri of the band The Dig, is very fine stuff, supple and surprising in its blend of classical, jazz and pop strains. It adds to the otherworldly quality established and sustained so well by Talbot, and by the actors.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The Nightingale
    With “The Babadook” and now The Nightingale, Kent joins the ranks of a few dozen precious filmmakers able to transport us somewhere awful and beautiful, challenging us every step of the way.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    How to Survive a Plague
    From a terrible epidemic comes a beautiful documentary.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Anora
    It’s not perfect, but Anora is a touching comic and dramatic odyssey, driven by a terrific performance by Mikey Madison in the title role.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Le Havre
    Does Kaurismaki believe in his own fairy tale? The movie, a humble delight, suggests the answer is yes.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Chop Shop
    Small but sure, the film is like Alejandro himself: quick on its feet, attuned to a harsh life’s hardships and possibilities.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Doubt
    While Streep has a tiny bit too much fun with some of her character's excesses, she's awfully good. So is Hoffman, who walks a fine line between obvious guilt and possible innocence.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Columbus
    The movie is beautiful without wasting its time on cliched beauty. Kogonada, who edited as well as wrote and directed, collaborates intuitively with cinematographer Elisha Christian, who’s as good with faces as he is with sharp modernist edges etched in concrete.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Certain Women
    They're lifelike, I suppose, in that you believe and become invested in what happens to everyone. But they're poetic, too, in that Reichardt and her first-rate ensemble find intersections of the mundane and the mysterious all around this broad, blustery landscape.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Museo
    Museo is the work of a genuinely creative directorial talent, and the early family scenes, richly detailed and shrewdly acted, provide just the right emotional context for this squabbling, indecisive gang of two.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Conviction
    This is an inspirational true story worried less about turning dramatic screws than earning its feeling through character.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The Irishman
    So, yes, it’s an epic of sorts. But many years have passed since a Scorsese movie found so much life in such small moments: at a bowling alley, around a dinner table, at a telephone in the room next to the dining room, where a killer stumbles through a sympathy call to the wife of Jimmy Hoffa, missing presumed dead.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Blue Is the Warmest Color
    Even with its limitations it's one of the necessary films of 2013.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The Secret World of Arrietty
    Disney TV star Bridgit Mendler brings an effective if limited friendliness to Arrietty; Will Arnett and Amy Poehler are relatively restrained as her parents; Carol Burnett runs through a career's worth of vocal flourishes and aural panic attacks as the housekeeper.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The Runaways
    A rich and surprisingly old-fashioned musical biopic, The Runaways has neither the bloat nor the blather of your average Hollywood treatment of stars on the rise.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    The Taste of Things
    There’s life, lived with serenity and purpose and, yes, plenty of money and property, in the lives depicted in Hung’s film. Binoche and Magimel see to it in every scene, with or without utensils.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Phillips
    Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
    The movie sidesteps the conventional breadth of a documentary subject’s resume. We learn nothing about Sakamoto’s early years, and little about his private life. Yet simply by lingering with his pensive, compelling subject at the keyboard, or engaging Sakamoto (discreetly) in his thoughts on his life and his music, Schible casts a spell and captures the spirit of a uniquely gifted composer.
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