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
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    A fast-paced amoral joyride that's more interested in the absurdities of violent criminality (torture by crayfish, anyone?) than the complications of real life.
  1. The upshot to a ticking bomb is that it only explodes the once, but Rachel's sister, Kym (Hathaway), goes off again and again.
  2. Though fashioned as popular entertainment with laughs, light moments, and mostly humorous segments, Religulous is as serious as a disapproving Jehovah about its mission to upend our rote allegiance to blind religious faith.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    This time the dog wags the tale and proves, at least to Papi, that love really is a bitch.
  3. It's a rattling, heartrending performance (Moore) in, yes, a long, hard slough of a film – one that is well worth the journey, if not a repeat trip.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Maybe he was a sucker, but it was his belief in the fundamental decency of American institutions that made his struggle for redemption so winning, much more so than the movie that was made to honor it.
  4. Michael Moore has nothing to fear from David Zucker.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Where Young's book was a slap in the face, this movie is a kick on the backside, all hokey humor and quaint lovability.
  5. 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.
  6. More than a story about Iraq war veterans, The Lucky Ones is a movie about carefully considering one's options.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Makes for fruitful soul-fishing but lousy drama.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Good, manic fun plus a heavy dose of political intrigue adding up to two hours of clamorous, mind-numbing nonsense.
  7. And for all Lee's ballyhoo about racial stereotyping, one might expect him to adopt a less hackneyed approach to his portrayals of Italians and women.
  8. Mancini's character boils down to a lot of self-loathing and unresolved mommy issues – which is as tedious as it sounds.
  9. May not be best chick flick around, but it's the flick with the best chick by far.
  10. It's like the Sixties never happened, or maybe happened too much.
  11. We've heard tell about the rebirth of the Western at least since Clint Eastwood's vicious, "Unforgiven" 16 years ago, but since the genre never truly died in the first place there's no need to flog that horse here.
  12. It’s a curiously inert, workmanlike production: a whole lot of pomp and incircumstance.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Boilerplate stuff through and through.
  13. But by the time this imperfect little film wends its way to one of the most winning exit lines I've heard in a long time, it's turned into something, well, perfectly lovely.
  14. Pixar this isn't, but neither is it "Mary Shelley's Veggie Tales." If only.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Say what you will about comedian-turned-actor Cook, the man is a force of nature, a tornado of verbal gymnastics and physical contortions who will do anything for a laugh.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Burn After Reading, the new film from the Coen Brothers, won't be mistaken for "Fargo" anytime soon. Or "Barton Fink," or "The Man Who Wasn' There." Those films were black comedy done to perfection.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    It's strange thinking of water as a market commodity, and it's hard to comprehend the kind of greed that must go into keeping it from needy mouths, but, fact is, the water business is now the world's third-largest industry, meaning there are a lot of sinister souls out there fiddling with their bank statements while Rome dries up.
  15. The story builds to a feverish pitch and then never reaches a satisfactory conclusion. But while it’s onscreen, the film moves, incites, and jabs, all while reminding us how difficult it is to grow up female and sane in this world.
  16. Contradictions abound in this messy and unfocused drama that purports to believe that family is everything, when all else fails.
  17. There's nothing righteous about this tired and tiresome good cop/bad cop NYPD procedural.
  18. It's not particularly fun, or funny, for starters.
  19. Unlike any coming-of-age movie you've seen before. Equal parts sweet and perverse, this Scottish film is unpredictable in places where it might be twee, and subversively fanciful in others where it might be punishing.
  20. From "Hands on a Hard Body" to an 89-minute ogling of another hard body: It boggles the mind that 11 years after his engrossing documentary about an endurance competition to win a truck in Longview, Texas, filmmaker Bindler has channeled his talents into this regrettable comedy.

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