Austin Chronicle's Scores

For 8,778 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 6.7 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:
8778 movie reviews
  1. The all-out Love Lies Bleeding is a love story that won’t work for everyone. However, for those who can revel in the blood-soaked, complicated, sapphic delights that make up the backbone of the film, the saga of Lou and Jackie will be one for the ages.
  2. There’s an earnestness about Accidental Texan that can only warm your heart. Every moment is predictable, but in Bristol’s capable hands that becomes a strength.
  3. Sure, the kids will giggle, and the animation is well-executed (even if there does seem to be something a little off around the eyes in this version of Po) but it just doesn't land with that same ebullient skadoosh.
  4. It's chilling and tragic in equal measures.
  5. Hundreds of Beavers works because everyone involved knows to deliver the whimsy with a straight face, treating knitted fish, puppet frogs, and the Wisconsin snowdrifts in which it was filmed all as equally real.
  6. Dune: Part Two is both horrifying and romantic, presenting a far, far future that is recognizable because people never change. While the war may be portrayed as a jaw-dropping spectacle, the answers to all those political and moral questions may leave the audience deeply uncomfortable. Herbert would be proud.
  7. Perhaps time will be kind to Drive-Away Dolls; the cast of rising stars seems destined for greatness, and the setting will sharpen into focus the farther we move away from the decade. But it’s hard not to feel that Drive-Away Dolls is the sum of its production history: a decades-old concept that missed its window for relevance.
  8. The film becomes a kind of meditative act.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The next generation won’t learn the artist’s whole life story from this biopic, but they just might be inspired to do some Googling after the credits roll.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    While a solid addition to the new canon of microbudget sci-fi flicks that look like a million bucks, with an aesthetic that’s equal parts Blade Runner and Tron, it’s really about this couple who aren’t a couple yet. It’s that old equation of two people who are clearly too high-maintenance for anyone but each other, and that’s why Litwak isn’t afraid to use oh-so-familiar beats of the rom-com classics.
  9. Madame Web is a fender bender – nothing calamitous, just a time suck. An annoyance. A waste.
  10. It’s perfectly delightful.
  11. Cumming presents a natural world red in tooth and claw, yet the inevitable lessons learned in this moss-covered and frost-blasted wilderness still have modern resonances – about fear, bigotry, superstition, survival.
  12. For a film that’s rooted in genre tropes, there’s no genre atmosphere to visually anchor down the film’s themes. With the spectacle fizzled out, visually Williams’ film isn’t enough to take it over the edge and make it memorable. Still, first-time direction hurdles aside, it’s a serviceable, fun goth romp.
  13. Trần’s script (very loosely adapted from Marcel Rouff’s 1924 novel La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet) isn’t simply an ode to the idea of food being the food of love. Instead, it’s an utterly charming and touching description of a tender relationship between two people in middle age.
  14. She Is Conann is a politically charged, blood-, sex-, and tears-soaked sword, carving through the helpless arteries to the heart of cinematic mediocrity, and it is Mandico’s strongest vision yet.
  15. In those complexities, and its more mordant analyses of the arbitrary mechanisms of power, The Promised Land bears impressively bitter fruit.
  16. After the inexplicable roars of applause for the ham-fisted Promising Young Woman, seeing first-time feature director Molly Manning Walker treat similar issues with so much more empathy and nuance makes How to Have Sex a disturbing if welcome addition to the conversation.
  17. But while Argylle’s stunt-filled antics are suitably loaded with those Vaughnian action sequences, it’s also bloated by more plot twists and reveals than a breezy action comedy can or should be forced to endure.
  18. Origin doesn’t always get there, but the effort is exhilarating. It’s the contact high of an artist really going for it.
  19. For a film with such weighty aspirations, I.S.S. lacks gravity.
  20. 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.
  21. If you're going to dig the same shallow grave for the thousandth time, at least have the verve of Eli Roth's shamelessly fun Thanksgiving – or at least make sure the entire cast knows if you're going for tension or comedy.
  22. It's a lot more than simply a string of names and dates and anecdotes, but after this many hours that's what it starts to become.
  23. A shot-for-shot remake would have had more school spirit than this.
  24. Destroy All Neighbors has all the verve of a blood clot.
  25. At times it feels like it wants to be a comedy, à la History of the World, Part I, and at others it seems solidly part of serious dramas like Ben Hur. It’s a tricky tone to balance, and The Book of Clarence doesn’t always succeed, weakening an otherwise enjoyable and entertaining film.
  26. This is Wenders’ portrait, and as such it is as unique and thought-provoking as Kiefer’s own epic works.
  27. Apart from a handful of tracking shots, the film is a series of middle-distance static shots, giving us the same detachment the Höss household possesses living next to a concentration camp. But The Zone of Interest’s coup de grâce is never showing any activity within Auschwitz itself, allowing only the sounds of the camp to be a constant, nerve-racking presence.
  28. That edge between emotional incompetence and modern macho hubris is where Waddell finds something interesting to say, but it's too often buried under barely competent filmmaking (please, filmmakers, I am begging you, do not scrimp on your sound mix), stilted performances, and some horribly outdated gags and clumsy stereotypes, all further undermining a rom-com that is rarely romantic nor that comedic.

Top Trailers