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. Wonder Woman 1984
    Jenkins had an opportunity to build on the flawed but rousing headlining debut of DC's greatest woman warrior. Instead, she delivered the modern DC Extended Universe's Superman III. It's a lumpen mass of half-ideas and glaring fan service, topped by a horrendous montage ending that is clearly designed to inspire hope, courage, and kindness, but will more likely make everyone wonder if that was why they waited two and a half hours.
  2. The Woman on the 6th Floor
    A coda set in 1965 seals the film's status as a bourgeois fantasy, but fear not: Paris' student and worker riots of 1968 are only a hair's breadth away.
  3. First Sunday
    Tyler Perry has already been here and done that to such a degree that this particular cinematic field should now be plowed under and salted so that nothing might grow thereupon forevermore. Amen.
  4. Blackhat
    Blackhat plays a surprisingly flat and ever-flatter cinema texture against the careful roll-out of an elaborate plot. Not only is the pacing deliberate, but Mann often supplies only about 80% of the information needed to understand what is going on in a scene.
  5. 5 Flights Up
    Terribly slight but not unpleasant, 5 Flights Up is hardly worth the climb.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Pyramid
    The Pyramid is a mere matinee meat-grinder, neither terribly original nor all that tense. The real pyramids have been remembered for millennia. This one will be lucky if it lasts a week.
  7. Man on a Ledge
    In the end it's all much ado about not so much, a semifunctional thriller that tingles but never terrifies. Ledge schmedge.
  8. Dark Blue World
    The film is more of an old-school wartime yarn, crackling with the expected camaraderie among the hardscrabble volunteers.
  9. Star 80
    When all is said and done, director bob Fosse (Cabaret, Lenny, All That Jazz) delivers a sluggish movie that exhibits none of his usual flash and even less psychological drama.
  10. Madea's Family Reunion
    When you've got Maya Angelou and Cicely Tyson in the kitchen, laying on the sophomoric laughs is just plain stupid.
  11. The Miracle Club
    Alongside Kathy Bates and Laura Linney, Smith is one of three grande dames of acting headlining The Miracle Club. Disappointingly, director Thaddeus O’Sullivan doesn’t put any of them to good enough use in this featherweight Irish dramedy set in 1967.
  12. Gas Food Lodging
    It's too bad that Gas Food Lodging is as disconnected as it is because there's a real current of feeling here, especially in Balk's sympathetic performance and the film's unflinching depiction of a single woman trying to raise a family on her own. Rather than make a lasting impression, it makes only a passing one, as impermanent as the momentary view of a dying town on the highway.
  13. Unfriended
    Unfriended provides a modicum of chills and more gore than you’d expect.
  14. Forks Over Knives
    Frankly, Mr. Shankly, I've seen Morrissey videos that are more life-changing than this well-intentioned but ultimately yawn-inducing barrage of factoids.
  15. Félix And Meira
    That’s the problem with this well-meaning but ultimately hollow film romance: You don’t see it; you don’t get it.
  16. The Sum of All Fears
    Feels awfully rushed, as Ryan flies from the Ukraine to Moscow to the Russian hinterlands and back to Baltimore to make sweet, sophomore agent love to his physician girlfriend (Moynahan). It has the feel of one of 007's globe-hopping adventures, but without any of that franchise's giddy sense of fun.
  17. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    In its laziest moments, MBFGW3, like the 2016 sequel preceding it, dutifully plays these greatest hits on repeat to reassure its loyal core audience it hasn’t abandoned the memory of the first film, even at the risk of demonstrating its creative bankruptcy.
  18. It Might Get Loud
    The film's very title is a tease, however: It never gets all that loud, and you might doze off after 30 minutes of watching this unwieldy power trio recount their formative years and visit old haunts before heading on to a soundstage for their minimum rock & roll "summit."
  19. Hesher
    Hesher is a muddle of inchoate feelings that never really grasps the clichés to which it raises its middle finger.
  20. The Animal
    Hardly a comic masterpiece -- the jokes are awfully broad and obvious -- but I couldn't help feeling relieved at the film's absence of malice.
  21. The Luzhin Defence
    It's one of those period dramas about upper-crust Europeans in vacation resorts, which at first we think we've seen a million times before.
  22. The Nun II
    The Nun II might be a slight step up from the slog that was The Nun, but that’s a low bar to creep up from.
  23. Now You See Me
    Director Leterrier keeps the camera moving and swooping throughout the film as if the Steadicam were another device in the magicians’ tool belt. A clear sense of space and sleight-of-hand is rarely achieved.
  24. Timecop
    It's dumb, to be sure, but then again, so were most of the old movie cliffhangers, from which Timecop is obviously derived.
  25. TRON: Ares
    Rønning doesn’t seem confident in his storytelling acumen, relying instead on running narration provided by real-life TV anchors cold-reading the least convincing announcements this side of a Fox News host talking about Portland.
  26. Martin Eden
    Every so often, a spark in Marinelli’s mesmerizing blue-gray eyes flickers and you can imagine the passion that drove the man to his madness. In those moments, Martin Eden subtly flames, if only briefly.
  27. Don't Look Up
    I’d be hard-pressed to find a filmmaker who, in a general sense, I agree with but whose movies irritate me in the way that Adam McKay’s do.
  28. Hello Again
    The film wears its ambitions on its sleeve as it daisy chains from lover to lover, intently focused on maintaining the rhythm of its segues from vignette to vignette to the detriment of any profound insight into its linked characters’ mostly unhappy love lives.
  29. Journey to the Center of the Earth
    Provides tepid but fun entertainment.
  30. On Fire
    On Fire does the best it can with what it has. It’s still not enough to move the needle.
  31. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
    All I can seem to muster, post-screening, is a modicum of fondness and a probably impermanent relief that the film isn't anywhere near as awful as it might have been in less capable hands.
  32. Shazam! Fury of the Gods
    The original Shazam! may not have broken new ground as a superhero movie, but it did what the rest of the recent Warner Bros. superhero films seemed unwilling to do: Restore compassion to the realm of heroes. Shazam! Fury of the Gods loses the thing that made it special.
  33. La Mujer de Mi Hermano
    The characters never come across as anything more than self-interested parties. It’s hard to have a rooting interest in any of their fates, and even less in the outcome of this movie.
  34. Le divorce
    There are flashes of wit and flair here, including two stylish sequences detailing the French obsession with food and scarves, but they are but brief respites from the film’s near-pathological drear.
  35. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    Kunis and McKinnon don’t exactly set the screen on fire with their chemistry, and there are only the most perfunctory shadings to their characters.
  36. Angel Eyes
    Viewers with a low tolerance for schmaltz may suffer; one heartfelt speech even drew nervous titters from the otherwise indulgent preview crowd.
  37. The Other Laurens
    Too slight to be intriguing, too overstretched to be absorbing, too predictable to be surprising, L’autre Laurens doesn’t exactly waste its potential but does little with it.
  38. Jackass 3-D
    Try as they might, the Jackass gang can't quite snatch the year's ultimate 3D gross-out from the pricking jaws of "Pirahna 3-D."
  39. The Accountant 2
    Peeking its head out from this pile of trash is the ghost of one of the year’s most wildly entertaining movies.
  40. A Slipping-Down Life
    There is also a lot of good supporting work in this movie, including the performances of Irma P Hall, Tom Bowser as Evie's clueless dad, and Bruno Kirby as Kiddie Acres' gruff impresario.
  41. Kikujirô no natsu
    Not only is Kikujiro sweet and funny, it is, no doubt, Kitano's experimental "art film."
  42. Beau Is Afraid
    The episodic nature of Beau's misadventures serves as both distraction and bloat, a metaphorical cavalcade that lacks the acerbic agility of many of its predecessor.
  43. My Kid Could Paint That
    My conclusion is that exploitation of a child for the sake of one's career is a shameful act.
  44. Daylight
    The script fires off clunker after clunker so fast you don't know whether to laugh or cry. (I chose to laugh as I'd already done enough crying at The English Patient.) Vintage bad Stallone, this lost-in-the-shuffle Summer of '96 blockbuster is just what you thought it would be: loud, boisterous, and without a single original line of dialogue. It's enough to make you miss Judge Dredd.
  45. Connie and Carla
    Although the transvestites’ plight – mishandled, misunderstood, and/or misappropriated – is meant to supply Connie and Carla's emotional core, one never gets the feeling of anything stronger than an at-shoulder-length's sympathy from this film.
  46. The Wolfman
    There's plenty of doom, gloom, and outright despair on hand here but very little genuine human emotion.
  47. 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.
  48. The Water Diviner
    A far more profound and moving film about this particularly Aussie/Kiwi campaign (and one that will probably never be topped) is Peter Weir’s devastating Gallipoli, starring a very young Mel Gibson. Given the choice, I’ll take that over Crowe’s earnest bombast any day.
  49. Stuart Little
    Retelling of White's classic children's book is a spun-sugar treacle-bomb, though a darn good-looking one.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba -To the Swordsmith Village-
    While first film Mugen Train was a box-office smash and a rare instance of using the movie format to more succinctly and dynamically tell the next arc of the Demon Slayer story, To the Swordsmith Village is – and I can’t stress this enough – just a music videoesque recap of the first couple seasons followed by three episodes sloppily jammed together, with even their intro and outro segments still fully intact.
  51. Woodshock
    The first impression is definitely one of all style, and precious little substance.
  52. The Killer Inside Me
    The Killer Inside Me is hardly uninteresting, and you get the sense that everyone involved tried really hard to pull off this difficult adaptation. But it would be impossible to view The Killer Inside Me as anything but a vast miscalculation.
  53. Salinger
    Salerno spends more time talking to photographers with telephoto lenses who, over the decades, laid in wait for Salinger in the hope of capturing a grainy picture, than he does talking to literary analysts and historians.
  54. Murder on the Orient Express
    Turning Poirot into an action figure with a gun is simply heresy.
  55. Thanks for Sharing
    It’s a bold and certainly credible move, but the execution is something of a belly flop. Thanks for Sharing isn’t really about a disease, only the cure, and that bias makes it a plausible picture of the Friend of Bill community-based recovery, but kind of a sham as a portrait of actual human beings.
  56. The ABCs of Death
    A good concept yields scattershot results in this horror-film anthology.
  57. Freud's Last Session
    Except for a potent scene in which Freud rages against Christianity’s conceptual embrace of “God’s plan” to explain why a supreme being would allow terrible things to happen, it’s a relatively bloodless tit-for-tat conversation that shoots sparks that rarely catch fire.
  58. Paris Can Wait
    Paris Can Wait may be a film à clef of sorts – there’s a hint of the autobiographical in it, the suggestion of something experienced – but even that angle doesn’t make the movie terribly appetizing. What it needs is a little salt.
  59. Last Summer
    The narrative is too flat, too drily filmed by César-nominated cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie (8 Women) to induce much emotion or debate about Anne’s hypocrisy and abuse of power.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
    Time and time again, Ritchie proves to be an effective action director. When it comes to writing the picture, less so, and The Covenant stands as another reminder of that sturdy dichotomy.
  61. Driving Lessons
    Because screenwriter-director Brock fails to create a moving relationship between its mentor and student in life's lessons, the film hardly resonates five minutes after it's over.
  62. I.S.S.
    For a film with such weighty aspirations, I.S.S. lacks gravity.
  63. Bee Season
    Myla Goldberg's novel about spelling-bee fever, a family in chaos, and religious/mystic exploration arrives on the screen with all its faults intact, but few of its charms.
  64. Dandelion
    The story, alas, is colorless and flat: a terribly earnest picture of two sad people looking for somebody or something to jump-start their battery.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Nativity Story
    The story is good, but the execution favors the safe over the challenging. Personally, I'd rather just read the Bible.
  66. Pokémon: The Movie 2000
    The storylines are as confusing (or as simple?) to the uninitiated as they were before, but that doesn't stop them from making sense to the kids.
  67. Savage Grace
    You can almost smell the desperation in the twisted psychosexuality of Savage Grace.
  68. The Girl from Monaco
    Equal parts French sex farce, Mai-Decembre romance, middle-aged white male fantasy, and wannabe Hitchcockian intrigue, Fontaine's film can be a chore to sit through, but not for any of the obvious reasons.
  69. Spawn
    It's all one big blur: sound, fury, and Martin Sheen devouring scenery as if it were going out of style (and in Spawn, it's definitely not).
  70. To Catch a Killer
    Szifron and his co-writer Jonathan Wakeham play it too safe, creating an aggressively stale procedural that doesn’t pack the gut punch it wants to deliver.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Initiation
    What could and should be a serious commentary becomes a meandering deviation in an otherwise standard slasher.
  72. Ghost River
    About the only thing that makes any sense in La Vie Promise is Huppert's face, a visage that has aged in the most extraordinary way.
  73. Straw Dogs
    Ultimately, the remake is, at best, rote and, at worst, totally unnecessary.
  74. Killer Elite
    There's nothing here for the viewer to do, no kinks to work out, no double-crossings to anticipate, not even a half-hearted flail at figuring out how Danny ticks.
  75. Highwaymen
    Highwaymen is an also-ran. It lacks the sprawling, Westernized mythos of The Hitcher and feels, in the end, like a previously owned nightmare sorely in need of a new universal hell joint.
  76. Picture Perfect
    The result is a vacuous feel-good movie that leaves you feeling nothing at all.
  77. Back to Black
    Taking its title from her second and final critically-acclaimed blockbuster album, music biopic Back to Black gives you all those details you’ll recognize – but not much beyond that.
  78. Flightplan
    Flightplan should have remained grounded for repairs.
  79. Trolösa
    As far as I'm concerned, the fact that Bergman is finally getting around to asking himself questions he now realizes he should have asked long ago is not sufficient enough premise for a movie. The answers may be news to Bergman, but the rest of us might just want to opt for divorce.
  80. First Snow
    First Snow tries hard but lacks originality.
  81. Analyze That
    Even Cathy Moriarty-Gentile's role as a rival mob boss (with a nod to "Raging Bull") can't save this DOA affair.
  82. Die Hard: With a Vengeance
    McTiernan is an old hand at actioners and, like the pro he is, keeps the film rushing along from fiery stunt to stunt.
  83. Final Destination
    Flawed but often entertaining teen horror flick.
  84. I'm Still Here
    It's hard not to feel punk'd and trapped amid the company of jerks.
  85. The Lady and the Duke
    A bold (and lovely) experiment that will almost certainly bore most audiences into their own brightly colored dreams.
  86. Hillbilly Elegy
    Howard, mercifully, dumps most of Vance's political cant in favor of a maudlin, slow, rehab drama, carried on the backs of a cavalcade of wafer-thin characters.
  87. Star Trek: Nemesis
    Nemesis, by comparison, is about as exciting as a Tribble on Vicodin.
  88. Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero
    This is still Dragon Ball, with all its quirks so well established that they're just part of the process now.
  89. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    The problem in adaptation here is that Collins’ source book accessed Snow’s inner monologue, a churn of competing emotions and priorities at odds with his unruffled outer self. Without that insight, Snow’s evolution from war-scarred orphan to what Donald Sutherland is playing in the original quadrilogy is rendered as blank as, well, snow.
  90. Lights Out
    It’s the cinematic equivalent to a carnival funhouse: a bit scary when you’re traversing it, but utterly forgettable (and mildly regrettable) once it’s over.
  91. Contagion
    Contagion is certainly the most realistic portrayal of a global pandemic I've seen, but that doesn't make it the most entertaining, or even all that intellectually interesting.
  92. Bad Boys for Life
    Bad Boys for Life – while not as combustibly fun as the second installment – is fine, cheesy, Saturday afternoon mayhem, smoothly served with a heaping helping of “We’re all getting older.”
  93. Crank: High Voltage
    Laughably and knowingly preposterous, cheerfully un-PC, and violent in a way that makes the myriad slaphappy deaths of Wile E. Coyote seem downright dull in comparison.
  94. The Watch
    The Watch is awfully lightweight, and while it earns its R rating via some comic gore and a whole lot of hyper-sexualized tomfoolery, it's hardly the best work of anyone involved.
  95. 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.
  96. What's Love Got to Do with It?
    Between the half-formed romance, the uneven comedy, and the observations that stop just short of real insight, it's a wedding invite that's easy to skip.
  97. Shanghai Ghetto
    Should be applauded for finding a new angle on a tireless story, but you might want to think twice before booking passage.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lakeview Terrace
    Boilerplate stuff through and through.
  99. Mr. Jones
    Gere is excellent as this disturbed fellow; his twitches and too-happy smile are right on the money, but this only serves to illuminate the ramshackle state of the rest of the film, which is a shame: good, honest films dealing with mental illness are exceedingly few and far between. This, however, is not one of them.
  100. The Vow
    Perhaps Sucsy was overwhelmed by his immersion in such colorful and outré material; he's chosen for his followup, the I Can't Believe It's Not Nicholas Sparks weepie The Vow, the cinematic equivalent of a lie-down.
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