Austin Chronicle's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Chef Flynn
    While the movie principally focuses on Flynn’s professional aspirations, including his desire to be accepted as a chef in his own right despite his age (the online trolls had a field day after the NYT article), a prickly relationship with his mother, Meg, provides a subtextual narrative that sometimes feels a bit uncomfortable.
  2. Unlawful Entry
    Oddly enough, Unlawful Entry can keep you from sleeping but when you wake up the next moring, it's hard to remember much about the movie.
  3. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    Still, as a nostalgia trip that knows exactly what die-hard Star Wars fans want and then layers in some memorable new characters, The Force Awakens is exactly what it needs to be: an old-school Saturday afternoon sci-fi matinee writ big.
  4. Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band
    In most ways, the film is a conventional rock doc, a nostalgic and valorizing chronicle of a group’s rise and fall. The Band is one group that deserves the deep dive.
  5. Kung Fu Panda 3
    This is a visually stunning picture, a rhapsody of saturated color and contrasting texture, from the painstaking detail of coarse panda fur to the painterly dreamscape that is the spirit world.
  6. Sister Act
    Despite its predictability and sappiness, this conventional comedy about a worldly lounge singer who masquerades as a nun as part of a witness protection program busts loose as one of the funniest -- and happiest -- films in a long time.
  7. Midsommar
    While Midsommar never bores or truly overstays its welcome, its languor wobbles into meandering tonal shifts, with unlikely intrusions of absurdist humor.
  8. Just Like Heaven
    There's a manipulative streak to the proceedings, and you'd have to be stone cold dead not to grasp the inevitable outcome long before the third act, but it's a professionally handled sort of emotional manipulation common to its genre, dating back to "Blithe Spirit" and, somewhat less memorably, "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir."
  9. White House Down
    White House Down is amply endowed with enough tension, humor, and calamitous action to ensure it a solid berth in the summer box-office sweepstakes. Channing Tatum comes into his own as a leading man in this picture, proving himself as a beefy yet agile action star and not just the pure beefcake of "Magic Mike."
  10. Confetti
    The film veers toward sheer silliness at times, losing the sweetness that defines its strongest moments.
  11. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    This is classic Hollywood, at its best and worst, sticky rich and scabrous. It may not be the truth, per se, but it sure sounds good.
  12. The Way
    The Way never arrives anywhere you couldn't see coming a mile away, but it does so with such empathy that its conclusions feel comforting rather than overly predictable.
  13. Death to Smoochy
    It's good -- no, great -- to see Williams as a mean rat bastard.
  14. K-19: The Widowmaker
    Remains an above-average and affecting descent into both heretofore unknown Soviet naval history and the always popular submarine-in-peril genre.
  15. Revolutionary Road
    Shannon is monstrously good – unpredictable where the other actors are clipped and careful – and he steals the whole picture in two short, shattering scenes. When Shannon exits the film, the air gets sucked out again, and you realize the pretty artifice extends to more than just the Wheelers.
  16. Olympus Has Fallen
    Melissa Leo has some standout scenes as the secretary of defense, who gets pretty well beaten up for defying her captors, but others, such as Angela Bassett and Morgan Freeman, have little to do but bite their lips and look tense from the confines of their command posts.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Luminarias
    With wonderful music, interesting characters, and lots of laughter, this picture feels much bigger than it really is.
  18. The Rookie
    Doesn't break any new ground in the baseball movie playbook. However, it does bring it all back home with the assurance of seasoned pro.
  19. Chevalier
    The extraordinary performances on the Paris stage and fencing piste come early in Chevalier: They set a bold and lively tone the remainder of the film has trouble matching. Instead, it melodramatically proceeds, trope by trope, as Bologne receives his comeuppance for believing in his own brilliance.
  20. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
    A poke in the eye of genre convention with a flensing blade and a disarmingly charming razor-blade grin.
  21. My Fellow Americans
    It's almost as enjoyable watching these august septuagenarians jumping from trains, cruising with Harley-riding dykes, and exchanging pubescent screw-you/blow me repartee as it must have been for them to do it. And fun, sometimes, is its own best rationale.
  22. Freetown
    Cinematographer Jeremy Prusso catches some stunning imagery, Robert Allen Elliott’s score is genuinely stirring, and the cast, most of whom are from Monrovia, is uniformly excellent.
  23. This One's for the Ladies
    Graham’s film teems with fascinating characters – ultimately, too many for the abbreviated running time.
  24. Waterworld
    Nowhere near the Hollywood disaster that was foretold, Waterworld is a near-model summer fantasy: two hours and 21 minutes of loud, expansive fun.
  25. Evil Dead Rise
    Cronin's film feels very Evil Dead-y – no mean feat considering these films have evolved from low-budget gorefests to comedies to high-budget gorefests. There are elements of all those prior summonings, making Evil Dead Rise a chimera that is somehow unique.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Bobby
    The movie isn't about Kennedy; rather, Kennedy is the sun around which all the other planets of the film revolve. And like some epic Louis B. Mayer picture from the Thirties, Bobby has a thousand stars in its galaxy, some of them great (Fishburne, Rodríguez), some of them not (Wood, Hunt), and one of them brilliant (Hopkins).
  27. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
    Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie may not win over many or even any new fans, but devotees of the TV show, and even diehards from the single-n Nirvana web days will relish having their favorite gentle idiots back and hearing the same joke on a bigger stage.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Knowing
    It's just engaging enough to make you accept the possibility that two kids from the Boston suburbs may just be mankind’s only hope for the future, and just exciting enough to make you forget that you're watching a Nicolas Cage movie.
  29. Bless Me, Ultima
    Although Bless Me, Ultima can feel a bit overstuffed, it’s an honest and naturalistic kids’ story about growing up Mexican-American.
  30. The Informant!
    Maybe Soderbergh felt as though he already did a straight-ahead version of this story with "Erin Brockovich" and therefore decided to revamp the tune in the key of Richard Lester.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »