Austin Chronicle's Scores

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For 8,783 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 41% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 57% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 6.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 58
Highest review score: 100 The Searchers
Lowest review score: 0 Gummo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,778 out of 8783
  2. Mixed: 2,558 out of 8783
  3. Negative: 1,447 out of 8783
8783 movie reviews
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  1. Death Becomes Her
    In the movies, black comedy is a difficult proposition: it's a genre more suited to a ten-minute sketch than a two-hour film. For every brilliant black comedy like Dr. Strangelove, there are a hundred duds. Unfortunately, the $50-million-plus Death Becomes Her doesn't quite make the grade either, although its wicked take on modern vanity is often hysterically on-target.
  2. The Minus Man
    The most lackadaisical thriller I've ever seen, overly infatuated with not only the inexplicability of random evil, but also its mundanity.
  3. CQ
    It may not be art, but it's vastly more entertaining than anything Coppola senior has done in far too long.
  4. Once Upon a Time in the Midlands
    In the end, Meadows' film lacks the bite it needs to make us care about this oddball trio, endearing though they are.
  5. Men of Honor
    Strives to be an inspirational depth charge, but its power is consistently waylaid by some genuinely hokey dialogue and situations.
  6. Phone Booth
    It's a movie perfectly designed for tossing back popcorn (the jumbo kind so you don't have to leave your seat during the show); not until later do you get the empty feeling that you've swallowed an entire bucket of popped air.
  7. The Anniversary Party
    Some of The Anniversary Party's titillation factor rests on the awareness that these are actors playing actors, in roles written specifically for them that at times appear awfully close to home.
  8. The Ladykillers
    The Coen brothers’ newest is an odd amalgam of tics and stutters that plays like something of a greatest-hits reel but never seems to jell into a real comedy.
  9. Troy
    Petersen, a director who knows his way around a crane shot better than almost anyone, rallies his troops but can't ignite his actors, and the end result is the sound and fury of Homer undone.
  10. Fast X
    For the 10th entry in such an unlikely franchise, it’s hard not to get wrapped up in all of the typical mannerisms that grant this series its identity. Even when the Fast films are stuck spinning their wheels, they still have their foot firmly on the gas.
  11. Maleficent
    Imaginatively, it places all the known elements of the story in different contexts, completely recasting this familiar fairy tale into a more poignant and resonant work.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Angelica
    The supernatural elements brush up against some heavy topics, some actual real-life horrors, but like any encounter with a ghost, Angelica is likely to simply leave you cold.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    One Fine Day
    For those viewers who can relate to Melanie's and Jack's lives, One Fine Day offers light-hearted romantic fun, but for younger viewers the film may not quite hit the mark.
  14. Bottle Shock
    Stuff the cork back in: This wine movie was sold before its time.
  15. December Boys
    Pleasant but pedestrian.
  16. Beyond the Night
    The best ingredient is the way Ray relates to his son. Those moments – sometimes quiet, but often volatile – lift the film up from being a turgid episode of "Fargo" or "Justified."
  17. Then She Found Me
    Some may dismiss Then She Found Me as a mere "women's film," but it's really a more honest and mature take on sex and the city.
  18. The Pale Blue Eye
    There’s still a lot to recommend in what is largely a charming little occult thriller, but Cooper still has a way to go before he can fully trust his instincts in horror.
  19. Manglehorn
    While Manglehorn eschews the traditional third-act redemption you’ve seen ad nauseam in films that neatly wrap things up right before the end credits roll, it’s nevertheless refreshingly optimistic about people’s ability to change. For any of us entering life’s third act, hope springs eternal.
  20. The Man Who Knew Infinity
    Matt Brown’s movie is a perfunctory highlight reel, featuring tepid performances and dull cinematic technique. Although the movie’s 108 minutes are hardly infinity, its duration gives the concept a run for its money.
  21. The Running Man
    The ending simply lacks the guts to remain committed to King’s sociopolitical fury, and what starts as Wright’s best post-Cornetto Trilogy film ends up as his weakest. But when it’s really up to speed, The Running Man laps the competition.
  22. My Girl
    Of course, the selling point of this movie is the boy wonder Culkin, making his first screen appearance since the inexplicable megahit Home Alone. Relegated to a supporting role, Culkin is natural and appealing, a picture of blue-eyed innocence. What a more interesting movie you'd have if it were entitled My Guy.
  23. Dinner for Schmucks
    There are inspired gags, to be sure, but they're few and far between.
  24. Butt Boy
    Instead of a gross-out gag fest, Butt Boy is a surprisingly tender bizarro comedy that works because it plays the strangeness straight.
  25. The Recruit
    The pleasure of watching two alpha males -– Al Pacino and Colin Farrell -– circling each other mano a mano substantially beefs up this otherwise routine spy thriller.
  26. Dinosaur
    It's a visually stunning film. For every kid everywhere, and for every adult still a kid at heart, the dinosaurs are the thing, and here, finally, Disney does justice to our dreams.
  27. The Cable Guy
    The Cable Guy is being marketed as a dark comedy, which I suppose it is, to some extent. Honestly, though, it's just not dark enough.
  28. Alive
    Alive is no Oscar-challenger, certainly, but it does treat a very dicey incident with the even-keeled direction the story deserves.
  29. 2 Days in the Valley
    On the whole, there are some good moments in the movie, but altogether, 2 Days in the Valley is about one day too much.
  30. The Fluffy Movie
    Inherently funny, with a terrific sense of timing, an amazing gift for mimicry, and an ability to perfectly imitate all kinds of everyday sounds, Iglesias is always charming and frequently laugh-out-loud funny.
  31. Joy
    At its best, Joy celebrates the passage of a demoralized woman who finds the steel in her spine. At its worst, it panders in the name of female empowerment, occasionally delivering moments of pseudo-inspiration that ring so falsely it’s difficult to hear anything else.
  32. The Three Stooges
    A work of near-existential pointlessness. It's true to the anarchic, silly spirit of the original clowning, but there's very little else to it.
  33. Wassup Rockers
    As a filmmaker, Clark still seems more beholden to his roots as a still photographer: Images are sometimes worth a thousand words, but, ultimately, they will always be skin-deep.
  34. Touchback
    Touchback may accurately be called cornball hokum by some, but it's nevertheless a well-made film filled with heart and soul (and Snake Plissken).
  35. Monsters vs Aliens
    The misfits, as ever, must take a back seat to the morality, and the result – while in no way migraine-inducing – traffics in rote truisms.
  36. Mr. Bean's Vacation
    If you like the character – his tooty yellow Mini, his busily working beetlebrows, his tendency to point and grunt and eat shellfish whole – then you will be rewarded with 90 minutes of such.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    W.
    In our age of 24-hour news coverage, this rehashing of current events doesn't just come off familiar but completely unnecessary. And, worst of all, prosaic.
  38. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
    Smith gives the appearance of wanting to provoke, but along with his smuttiness, he wears his heart on his sleeve.
  39. Twilight
    I've had mosquito bites that were more passionate than this undead, unrequited, and altogether unfun pseudo-romantic riff on Romeo and Juliet.
  40. Max
    Ultimately, Meyjes focuses too much on Max when he should be filling the screen with this tortured, dull artist and monster-in-the-making.
  41. The Manson Family
    Van Bebber's film is tough, difficult, sporadically brilliant cinema, to be sure, and I doubt he'd have had it any other way. And as strange as it may sound, neither should the audience.
  42. Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space
    As we are informed in the film’s prologue, "Cats live in loneliness, then die like falling rain." Sh--, man, whatever. This is so stupid it’s positively genius.
  43. Concussion
    If Concussion had focused on Omalu’s tireless efforts to expose CTE to the world, it would have been a powerful film. As it stands, it’s just second-string.
  44. Edge of Darkness
    Edge of Darkness has the look and feel of a Brit film shot in America – it's all dark, boxy rooms with powerful white men in impeccable black suits discussing how to tidy up the minor mishaps of their game over brandy and cigars.
  45. The Merry Gentleman
    Filled more with character studies than narrative intrigues, The Merry Gentleman also provides only sketchy personality details and background information.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 89 Critic Score
    The Beach Bum
    There’s a moment in The Beach Bum when aging wastrel Moondog smokes a joint in a hammock, surrounded by naked women, with two hands on a bongo drum and a mouthful of gibberish poetry. That moment lasts 95 minutes, and it is glorious.
  47. Dom Hemingway
    If there were anything approaching narrative coherence, the film might have rested on Law’s performance alone. As it stands, Dom Hemingway the character is eclipsed by the inability of Dom Hemingway the movie to decide what it wants to be.
  48. A Jihad for Love
    Technically, Jihad's images and assemblage seem on par for a first-time filmmaker, though the film's message is a moving plaint.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Love Affair
    Beatty and Bening are pleasurable to watch, but their onscreen rapport seems to lack just a bit of the fire they had in Bugsy.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Prefontaine
    This successful characterization is definitely a team effort among actor Jared Leto (the brooding Jordan Catalano of television's "My So-Called Life"), writers James and Eugene Corr, cinematographer Peter Gilbert, and musical director Mason Daring.
  51. I'm So Excited
    Even though I’m So Excited! doesn’t soar, the film is a fun flight. Maybe it needs a central character in whom the audience can invest themselves instead of flitting among a rogues’ gallery of kooky archetypes.
  52. A Tale of Love and Darkness
    It’s a pleasure to watch, if not always to sit through.
  53. Mad Love
    Pretty to look at, tamely racy, and fairly fluffy, despite its two-hour running time.
  54. America's Heart and Soul
    The real shame in the storytelling is that the people in this film are interesting and inspiring enough to warrant a real film about them.
  55. Series 7: The Contenders
    The movie's bright touches belong primarily to Brooke Smith.
  56. The Terminal
    Seeing The Terminal is like experiencing an uneventful flight: The trip was pleasant but not delightful, and you’re happy to deplane at the other end.
  57. Punks
    Never mind the fact that romantic comedies about gay African-American and Latino men aren't exactly plentiful, let alone ones this good-natured.
  58. Spark: A Burning Man Story
    Spark, however, is the best of the lot when it comes to attempting to grok the burn and the burners.
  59. Friends with Kids
    Little more than a well-written and nicely delivered feature-length sitcom.
  60. Extraterrestrial
    On the whole, Extraterrestrial is slight, filled with lots of bark but little bite.
  61. Man of Steel
    Snyder has cast Man of Steel with dramatic actors, not action stars, and it pays off.
  62. For a Good Time, Call...
    While its heart is always in the right place, the humor – especially in the sludgy first act – is hit or miss.
  63. A Christmas Carol
    Either you cotton to Zemeckis’ motion-capture aesthetic or you don’t: To me, it seems like an awful lot of effort for an insignificant payoff. But it appears that the filmmaker is stuck on the technique – at least until holographic movie technology comes along.
  64. Offseason
    Chilling and unsettling, intimate yet monstrously vast in its cosmic horrors, Offseason is as dangerously welcoming as the island itself.
  65. Desperado
    A bust-a-gut film experience that reveals Rodriguez as both a stylist versed in the mechanics of popular storytelling and a maverick whose ingenuity guides him along a singular path.
  66. To Sir, with Love
    Good performances elevate the material.
  67. Hunt
    Caught with a mixture of cool reserve and neck-snapping energy by director Kim Jee-woon's longtime cinematographer Lee Mo-gae (I Saw the Devil, Ilang: The Wolf Brigade), Hunt is an ugly morality play, briskly told and given chilling, crackling energy by Lee and Jung.
  68. Yes
    While Yes defies film's conventions in many, many ways, it's still that same old story, the fight for love and glory.
  69. Wuthering Heights
    For all of Elordi’s mutton-chopped brooding and Robbie’s vamping, there’s something shallow and glib about “Wuthering Heights.” Yet again, the psychosexual classic tragedy has been turned into a well-crafted mass-market potboiler.
  70. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
    The disappointment in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare lies in how much potential it had to be something more.
  71. Almost Christmas
    The five days of togetherness are filled with challenges and enjoyment, and if the cast is willing, I’m sure other Meyers family reunions will follow, although none is likely to be as sweet as this sugar plum.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Becoming Jane
    In fictionalizing the story of Austen, the filmmakers didn’t go far enough. Becoming Jane attempts to please the purists and the dreamers, but only results in disappointing both.
  73. Green Street Hooligans
    At its best when it goes down to the pub and captures, quite flawlessly, the grotty intoxication of these mad, bad, dangerous-to-know Hammers fans hoisting incalculable pints.
  74. Taking Woodstock
    Elliot’s coming-out story is mostly shunted into the film’s latter half, and when it does emerge it is woefully conventional and diluted by other goings-on.
  75. The Third Miracle
    The problem with The Third Miracle is that it is thematically ambiguous and never lays out its position on whether it thinks saints are or are not real.
  76. The Relic
    Much like the DNA-scrambled beast to which the title alludes, this film is a chimerical chop-shop product, consisting mostly of spare parts pulled from Alien, Jurassic Park, and even The Ghost and the Darkness.
  77. The Eagle
    A mildly engaging and roughly historical action picture.
  78. The Brothers Bloom
    Never achieves the satisfaction of a real crackerjack con movie.
  79. Cloud Atlas
    This remarkable adaptation of the supposedly "unfilmable" novel by David Mitchell achieves near-perfection on virtually all levels.
  80. Clifford the Big Red Dog
    Watching this vaguely preternatural, shoddily animated interpretation of a beloved character parade around really makes you feel the disconnect between page and screen.
  81. Hitchcock
    This film is more a love story about the marriage between Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) and his wife, Alma Reville (Helen Mirren), rather than a historically accurate backstage look at the making of this important movie in the Hitchcock filmography and the American psyche.
  82. Resurrecting the Champ
    Stays on its feet through all the rounds, but it never “floats like a butterfly.”
  83. Hyde Park on Hudson
    When Murray's around, he's the only hot dog in the room.
  84. Beast Beast
    The narrative trick that worked within the narrower confines of Krista seems almost absurd here, a leaden feel-good ending that sits at complete odds with the formless opening. Beast Beast is far better when it's abstract and observational, drifting somewhere between the wistful compassion of Jonah Hill's Mid90s and the sociological immediacy of Larry Clark's Kids.
  85. Old
    To be fair, at least Old captures the sense of time passing past too fast: Rarely have I felt more like my life was slipping away in the cinema.
  86. Dark Shadows
    Dark Shadows seems more like a mash-up of leftover ideas from "Beetlejuice," "Edward Scissorhands," "Sleepy Hollow," and "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" – but they're ideas without the souls of characters.
  87. The Fall of the American Empire
    True to Canadian stereotypes, it is a polite evisceration: a slap and a tickle, as it were.
  88. Eagle vs Shark
    The film’s resolution is more implied than complete.
  89. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
    Loud, abrasive, and featuring performances seemingly calibrated to be heard over the cacophonous roar of Travolta's mad, bad overacting.
  90. Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela
    Remarkable and enlightening.
  91. Camp
    Camp has also been compared to Alan Parker’s "Fame," which operates with a similar love of behind-the-scenes melodrama and youthful idealism, but different in that it doesn’t induce brain-swelling revulsion in the viewer.
  92. Street Kings
    A solid contemporary crime drama.
  93. Money Monster
    While the Occupy Wall Street rage supposedly fueling this thing is flimsy, what’s left is still solidly entertaining.
  94. Yesterday
    As the whimsical setup in Yesterday deteriorates until its unimaginative conclusion, the familiar Lennon/McCartney collaborations (along with a couple written by Harrison) provide the only solace, timeless songs that make it better. Viva Los Beatles!
  95. An American Werewolf in London
    This movie presented a radical melange of genuine horror and self-aware comic touches, not to mention the fabulous Rick Baker special effects.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ambulance
    Look, I can’t even pretend like Ambulance is great movie. I can’t even say it’s good, but, and it’s a really big but here, I can say for more than half of the run time, I was entertained.
  97. The Purge: Election Year
    It's the narrative equivalent of Twitter: so much there, but nothing going on.
  98. Seven Years in Tibet
    Annaud (The Lover, The Name of the Rose, Quest for Fire) may be, with all due respect to Stanley Kubrick, the most talented adapter of literary source material in recent film history. Seven Years confirms his mastery by doling out a perfect ratio of moving interpersonal drama and visual enchantment.
  99. The Boogeyman
    The direction and performance do the heavy lifting, but we have seen so many versions of this movie in recent years – films about mourning characters in a spiral of death and demons – that it is admittedly hard to engage honestly with a film that falls into the same traps.
  100. Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase
    Screenwriters Nina Fiore and John Herrera have modernized Keene’s decades-old storyline without completely chucking the quaint qualities of the original.
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