Michael Wilmington

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Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times
For 1,969 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 75% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 23% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 7.1 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Michael Wilmington's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 73
Highest review score: 100 Sweet Sixteen
Lowest review score: 0 Repossessed
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,505 out of 1969
  2. Mixed: 305 out of 1969
  3. Negative: 159 out of 1969
1969 movie reviews
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    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    Swing Time
    Swing Time, a Depression-era Manhattan ballad -- and best of the bunch by a hair over Top Hat -- has Fred as a threadbare gambler named Lucky, Ginger as a saucy dance teacher named Penny and a heart-stopping Kern-Dorothy Fields score that includes The Way You Look Tonight, A Fine Romance, Pick Yourself Up and their masterpiece farewell duet number, Never Gonna Dance. [23 Aug 2005, p.C3]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    After Life
    One of the most beautiful and profound films to emerge from Japan during the past decade.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    I Am Cuba
    It's impossible, when we watch "I Am Cuba" today, not to see some poignance in its soaring shots, sadness to its thrilling vistas. [08 Dec 1995, p.C]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Wilmington
    Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    An incredibly silly film of great humor, brilliant design and epic insanity.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    The Man Who Would Be King
    An adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's tale of the follies of adventure--beautifully directed and shot (by Oswald Morris) and perfectly cast. [11 July 2003, p.C5]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    All Quiet on the Western Front
    It remains an anti-war masterpiece. [09 Feb 2007, p.C6]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Michael Wilmington
    Vacancy
    It's a sordid but expert shocker.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    Beau Travail
    You may not like Beau Travail - which is, after all, a quintessential "critic's film" - but I think you'll have to admit it's been almost perfectly executed.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    The Sweet Hereafter
    Masterpiece is the right word for The Sweet Hereafter. It is extraordinary: a poem of familial pain, a song of broken embraces. [25 December 1997, Tempo, p.1]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 91 Metascore
    • 75 Michael Wilmington
    Ghost World
    What I did like unreservedly was the acting. Enid, as enacted by the sometimes astonishing Birch, is one of the more convincing, no-nonsense teens in recent movies.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    Before Sunset
    This is a romance with minimal physical contact and sex--and that's part of what makes it work so well as a love story.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    Saving Private Ryan
    A watershed picture, for both Spielberg and war movies.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    Le Samouraï
    It is a story of eerie beauty, overpowering fear and almost no solace at all -- save perhaps for a few jazzy chords on the night club piano and the chirp of the bullfinch in that empty, empty room. [06 Jun 1997, p.C]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Wilmington
    Punch-Drunk Love
    An Adam Sandler movie with class, and if that sounds like an oxymoron, so be it. The movie is a happy nightmare of silly-smart movie comedy that defies category - and challenges expectations involving Sandler and his pictures.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    The Godfather: Part II
    This magnificent 1974 sequel, the centerpiece of Coppola and writer Mario Puzo's 20th Century gangster saga, is still one of the most ambitious and brilliantly executed American films, a landmark work from one of Hollywood's top cinema eras.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Wilmington
    The Hustler
    Rossen treats the jousts at the pool tables here like mythic battles waged by legendary knights on a playing field composed of nicotine, dirty felt and wasted dreams.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
    An improbable masterpiece -- a bizarre mixture of grandly operatic visuals, grim brutality and sordid violence that keeps wrenching you from one extreme to the other.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
    Tati's fabulous comedy about a bumbling French vacationer in Brittany -- the first appearance of his hilarious pipe-smoking alter-ego Hulot -- is almost a silent movie done in sound, with spare dialogue, affectionate characterizations, sunny beach scenes and complex sight gags that recall the genius of Chaplin and Keaton. [19 Dec 1997, p.T]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    Gosford Park
    It's a scintillating comedy-drama and one of Altman's most richly moving and entertaining pictures.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    To Have and Have Not
    The things that make me love the movie are the mood, the hardboiled but good-hearted morality, Hawks' consummately professional eye-level style and those wonderful characters. [28 Jul 2006, p.C7]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    Topsy-Turvy
    Some movies delight you. Some stimulate and provoke. Some enlighten and inform. And some simply hand you a rousing good time-- does all of that and more.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Wilmington
    Samurai Rebellion
    Ferocious action saga about an old samurai (Mifune) taking a stand against his lord's cruelty and injustice. [03 Mar 2006, p.C5]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 90 Metascore
    • 75 Michael Wilmington
    Being John Malkovich
    Weird to the max, smart, sneaky as a Wall Street pickpocket and revved up with cruel wit and brazen imagination, Being John Malkovich is a dark movie comedy that you couldn't forget if you tried.
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    Almost Famous
    I loved this movie madly, and so will many of you.
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    Paths of Glory
    Paths of Glory is an antidote to false movies about the glories of war, nonsensical fantasies like John Wayne's The Green Berets or Sylvester Stallone's Rambo. [25 Feb 2005, p.C2]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    Scarface
    Gangster classic. [21 Jan 2005, p.C6]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    High and Low
    Superb crime thriller. [07 Sep 1998, p.1N]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    The Truman Show
    Delicately subversive, hypnotically sardonic, full of terror, banality and wafer-thin lyricism.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    Going My Way
    It sounds slightly absurd, but McCarey was a master of on-set improvisation, and Going My Way has the easy-going rhythm, humanity and warmth of life itself. [09 Feb 2007, p.C6]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Michael Wilmington
    The Gold Rush (1925)
    The funniest -- and almost the saddest -- silent comedy. [20 Apr 2001, p.C1]
    • Chicago Tribune
      • Posted Jun 25, 2025
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