Austin Chronicle's Scores

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For 8,793 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:
  1. Positive: 4,786 out of 8793
  2. Mixed: 2,560 out of 8793
  3. Negative: 1,447 out of 8793
8793 movie reviews
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    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Miss Bala
    There are times when it’s funny. There are also times when it beats you over the head with context clues. When the action ramps up, the over-the-top music score seems to stomp its foot and say, “Something is hap-pen-ing!” Certain plot points are overemphasized. It veers toward parody. But it’s also satisfying to see the outcome.
  2. Glengarry Glen Ross
    Interesting to watch like well-performed gymnastics but it never really connects.
  3. Faster
    The straight dope for speed junkies and fans of the art of flinging one’s well-padded frame through the contortions enabled only by disastrously catapulting oneself off a slippery asphalt track at speeds even Dale Earnhardt would have dismissed as lunacy.
  4. Extraterrestrial
    On the whole, Extraterrestrial is slight, filled with lots of bark but little bite.
  5. Nurse Betty
    Its uneven comedy may leave moviegoers yearning for the confidently choreographed banter and moral sludge that marked LaBute's previous outings.
  6. Early Man
    Early Man is wanting: of a cleverer narrative, of memorable characters. It’s not bad, necessarily. It just feels like an early draft of a better movie to come.
  7. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    Filled with some marvelous dialog and quips delivered by some of the best in the business. There are worse ways to while away the time.
  8. Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story
    An interesting subject does not make for a great documentary. Stuntwomen, while clean cut, has the feel of a made-for-TV edit, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn’t wow.
  9. Nixon
    For all its unwieldy temporal scope and narrowness of perspective, Nixon is an amazingly graceful beast, flawed yet invigorating, packed with enough material that will fascinate and irk moviegoers of all stripes for quite a time to come.
  10. Down in the Delta
    Down in the Delta, like a gratingly platitudinous self-help tape, sugarcoats the complex one-step-back, two-steps-forward nature of personal and social progress. And like the drugs and booze it condemns, it provides a warm rush of euphoria, but no real answers.
  11. Miracles from Heaven
    As Christy, Garner gives an earnest performance, her perpetually worried expression put to good use here as the Beams grapple with the unimaginable possibility of losing Anna.
  12. The Mask
    Carrey has yet to find the perfect vehicle for himself, but The Mask, while hardly as fantastic as it should have been, is a step in the right direction.
  13. Following
    Unnerving and occasionally witty, were it not for its weak third act, Nolan's film might fall just short of genius. As it is, though, it's unique nonetheless.
  14. The Beat That My Heart Skipped
    The problem with The Beat That My Heart Skipped, as it was with "Fingers," is that the gravity of the character’s psychological divide is clear after the first half hour, and both films add little in the next hour to deepen our – or the characters’ – understanding or entanglement.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Herb Alpert Is...
    Wisely, writer/producer/director John Scheinfeld mostly keeps to the sound capture of his subject and a little soundtracking on Alpert’s storied imprint with Jerry Moss.
  16. Solomon & Gaenor
    The landscape and the lovers are pretty to look at, but two households divided should really pack more of a punch.
  17. Rent
    Despite the grating, workmanlike direction of Chris Columbus (he's no Robert Wise, and Rent is nobody's idea of "West Side Story"), this boisterous adaptation is both a vivacious, wiseacre musical and an inarguable morality lesson: Love is all you need. Oh, and rent, of course.
  18. Le Chef
    Le Chef is practically bursting with good-natured bonhomie.
  19. Trade
    It points a determined finger (a middle finger, almost) at law enforcement, which cannot or will not recognize kidnapping victims in our midst, especially if they are undocumented and brown-skinned.
  20. Good Boy!
    It’s ingratiating in that nice doggie way, but the dogs, who have had their lips enhanced via CGI to aid in the illusion of speech, don’t have much more on their minds than where the next stick is going to sail in from.
  21. Nights in Rodanthe
    May not be best chick flick around, but it's the flick with the best chick by far.
  22. The Lucky Ones
    More than a story about Iraq war veterans, The Lucky Ones is a movie about carefully considering one's options.
  23. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
    By the end of this film/experiment/prank – which, to be blunt, is pretty unsatisfying – the viewer is left to ponder what it's all about, and what its purpose may have been, which, knowing Lynch and Herzog, might well be what it was about, and what its purpose was.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Now and Then
    Now and Then somewhat successfully pushes all the right emotional buttons by depicting themes common to most young girls, but I expected more, not less, from the now in Now and Then.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
    If this film is a jumping off point into more and, quite frankly, better discussions, then I guess it is worth watching?
  26. The Greatest Game Ever Played
    Never thrills on an emotional level the way the best of sports films – a "Hoosiers," say – can, but it's a satisfying entertainment nonetheless.
  27. One Last Thing...
    Two Eighties genre staples – Disease-of-the-Week and Poppin' the Cherry – meet, shake hands, and mostly play nice in this sweet, if overly earnest feature.
  28. But I'm a Cheerleader
    Rises above its problems to deliver the essential goods.
  29. The Happy Prince
    There are scenes during which Everett’s Wilde commands our wide-eyed attention, still mesmerizing despite his physical and psychological decline. Yet in between those quickened moments, The Happy Prince trudges forward with monotonous uniformity.
  30. Hannah Montana: The Movie
    Cornpone caricatures abound (witness "Hoedown Throwdown," in which Miley sunnily urges us to "pop it, lock it, polka dot it"), but so do worthy messages about responsibility – to family, community, even Mother Earth.
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