Austin Chronicle's Scores

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For 8,787 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: 4,781 out of 8787
  2. Mixed: 2,559 out of 8787
  3. Negative: 1,447 out of 8787
8787 movie reviews
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  1. Leaning Into the Wind
    Iconoclastic British environmentalist and sculptor Andy Goldsworthy doesn’t experience the world in the same way the rest of us do. Using more than just the conventional five senses, he profoundly intuits his surroundings as if in a meditative trance, mentally and physically absorbing the details of his environment like a forensic scientist in the pursuit of a unique artistry that’s brought him worldwide acclaim.
  2. Youth in Revolt
    It’s an enjoyable enough exercise in teen angst triumphing.
  3. The Promised Land
    In those complexities, and its more mordant analyses of the arbitrary mechanisms of power, The Promised Land bears impressively bitter fruit.
  4. 42
    Boseman as Jackie Robinson and Beharie as Rachel Robinson both deliver terrific performances, and the cast of managers and ballplayers – are excellent. Harrison Ford plays Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey as a larger-than-life eccentric, seeming almost like a demented Orville Redenbacher at times.
  5. The Nightmare Before Christmas
    Nightmare’s macabre humor is very adult, yet the storytelling is woefully simplistic.
  6. The Promise
    The Promise may not be the greatest movie of its type since "Hotel Rwanda," but purchasing a ticket to this solid if predictable movie is a sure way to thumb one’s nose at deniers of the Armenian Genocide.
  7. Dogville
    Von Trier’s vision is amazingly thorough and exquisitely executed, but the audience may feel executed as well.
  8. Saved!
    While Saved! initially gets in some good gags at the expense of religious hypocrisy, it eases off, opting not to skewer religion but rather to poke it gently with a stick to see what happens.
  9. The Sapphires
    Exuberant but fairly formulaic.
  10. Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula
    Less initially mawkish than the first film and more entertainingly overblown, Peninsula keeps to the established paradigm that the living are far worse than the dead, then goes on a gonzo excursion through a wrecked city.
  11. Dope
    Messages about learning to be comfortable in one’s own skin and the hypocrisy of the ruling class are delivered with genial humor and mild pokes.
  12. Scream VI
    Compared to other franchises that have resurrected their seemingly indestructible purveyors of murderous mayhem long after they should have remained dead and buried (Halloween Ends, anyone?), this latest entry in the ongoing saga of Ghostface demonstrates its premise remains viable, though admittedly showing a few signs of calcification.
  13. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
    In many ways, this is the thinking-person's teen movie.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Protector
    But while every expertly choreographed Muy Thai bout delivers, the film suffers from haphazard editing. Entire sequences of explanation are missing, as if Pinkaew made a 2 1/2 hour martial-arts film and then cut everything but the fighting scenes.
  15. The Girl Cut in Two
    A Girl Cut in Two is Hitchcock sans the whodunit, essentially a long preamble of seduction and spiritual ruin, capped by a crime everyone saw coming (and an eye-dazzling coda that twists the title from metaphor to … something else).
  16. Shorts
    Rodriguez’s technical wizardry is less showy here than in his other recent outings, which helps Shorts connect with kids on a basic human level.
  17. Letters to Juliet
    Is Gary Winick atoning for his sins? If “Bride Wars” was an acid spill -- and that’s putting it generously -- then Letters to Juliet is like the safety shower in your high school chemistry class, delivering an unsubtle blast of sanitized sentimentality.
  18. Unhinged
    All in all, it's a bleak lesson in civility: don't honk your horn, because you just never know who you're honking at.
  19. Step
    The music by Raphael Saadiq also belongs in the film’s plus column, helping to make Step one of the feel-good documentaries of the year.
  20. Ali
    Mann's film is beautiful to watch. Cinematogrpaher Emmanuel Lubezki employs a washed-out, harshly lit style that makes everything look vaguely menacing and hyper-real, which is complemented by Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke's Africanized score.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Summer Book
    Nature may be healing, but too many static shots of it can drag an already slow movie out even more. Still, it’s not enough to detract from the moving performances of its three leads, who make The Summer Book well worth the watch.
  22. A Civil Action
    The underlying problem is the mainstream film format's length constraints, which seem to have forced a rude bowdlerization of the story.
  23. 13 Tzameti
    One wonders what its objective is other than the cynical obliteration of all hope.
  24. Deathgasm
    Peppered with clever, self-referential one-liners that whip by almost too fast to catch them, Deathgasm is – like most metalheads/punks/Morrissey fans – a helluva lot smarter than one might at first suspect.
  25. Notturno
    Rosi seeks to give glimpses of insight, to find emotional truths in the mother keening in the prison cell where her son died, and the courting couple who comment on the imminent rain but ignore the distant sound of machine gun fire. To fill in the contextual gaps would damage those truths, but to leave them inevitably will leave the audience questioning what's outside of his frame.
  26. Exit 8
    A few unforgivably heavy-handed nods to The Shining aside, [Kawamura] has created a fresh new addition to contemporary J-horror, one that deftly warps the characters around its own rules without rendering them merely props for the next shock.
  27. Loveless
    All three leads give subtly wrenching performances that wouldn’t have been out of place in Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre.
  28. The Last Days of Disco
    It is a story about loyalty, friendship, and honor. In other words, it's less titillating than you might expect.
  29. Wind River
    Sheridan’s screenplay, despite some very nice touches and his typically laconic dialogue, is the weakest of his recent trilogy in terms of building tension and mystery. Nevertheless, it succeeds well enough on its own terms.
  30. Pulse
    The film's ideas are provocative, yet vague and unfully formed. It's much like Pulse itself, which is a bit too long, despite several great sequences.
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