Austin Chronicle's Scores

For 8,783 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:
8783 movie reviews
  1. The Cable Guy is being marketed as a dark comedy, which I suppose it is, to some extent. Honestly, though, it's just not dark enough.
  2. The Guy Movie to end all Guy Movies, a ridiculously overblown summer testosterone blowout right down to the Wagnerian strains of the soundtrack and its stunningly high body count. It's also a hell of a lot of fun.
  3. The Nintendo generation may not “get” The Phantom any more than those original Thirties fans would have understood Bruce Wayne's tortured psyche, but that aside, Wincer's updating of an old warhorse is lovingly done. It's a Saturday afternoon matinee for the Nineties, 60 years old and totally new.
  4. The movie demands to be watched and rewards that attention handsomely, though at times Heavy seems a little too introverted for its own good.
  5. Goofy summer fun that makes Earth vs. the Flying Saucers look like Citizen Kane.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dragonheart is a disappointingly hit-and-miss affair.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 11 Critic Score
    Filled to the bursting point with witless, sub-Mad magazine movie parodies, pointless cameos by a seemingly endless parade of has-beens, and once-hysterical, now stale jokes lifted straight from "Airplane!" and the original "Naked Gun", Spy Hard is a truly desperate comedy.
  6. Whatever the reason for its disappointments, Mission: Impossible is a mission gone awry, prompting you to hope that reruns of its television incarnation will pop up on cable soon.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Flipper's story is a tired fish tale.
  7. It's a keeper, a tumultuous love story set against the backdrop of 24 hours of really, really inclement weather in the Oklahoma heartland.
  8. It's not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, just one that grabs your attention and then lets it go, time and time again.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Together the cast, the director, and the screenwriter work to make the characters off-centered but realistic, with plenty of room for warmth.
  9. It's a comic book movie in the broadest sense of the term, and although it's neither as emotionally resonant as "The Crow" nor as surreally goofy as "Tank Girl," Barb Wire still manages to get you going, Anderson Lee fan or not.
  10. It's Teen Witch for the Nineties: dark, brooding, dangerous, and, come to think of it, a lot like high school.
  11. Mary Harron's movie turns out to be anything but a sensationalistic bio-picture; it neither sanctifies nor demonizes the shooter or her famous victim. What the movie accomplishes is something trickier: It treats its two principals, Solanis and Warhol, with respect and humanity.
  12. Kingpin is no classic, but I've got to admit that after sitting though a number of the film's less-than-inspiring previews over the last few weeks, I wasn't exactly expecting the second coming of Laurel and Hardy.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Executive producer and screenwriter Audrey Wells' script portrays most of the men as repulsively one-dimensional; the women fare only slightly better as two-dimensional beings: smart and plain, or dumb and drop-dead gorgeous.
  13. For the first time in her film career, Plummer really owns the movie. Plummer's habitation of the character of Eunice in Butterfly Kiss is a creation that sears itself permanently into the viewer's consciousness, though it's possible that, ultimately, you may wish the memory to be quite otherwise.
  14. A classic sophomore slump, all bark and very little bite.
  15. The improbabilities pile up on top of each other in Mrs. Winterbourne, an anxious-to-please romantic comedy about mistaken identity that sounds vaguely familiar.
  16. Cobbling together so many different characters (nearly all of them familiar to regular viewers) has left the Kids' feature debut as something of a letdown. We've seen it all before, and better, on HBO and Comedy Central.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    As Tears Go By has some interesting ideas and is an adequate first film, but, ultimately, is only slightly more interesting than any number of similar pictures made in the wake of John Woo's seminal 1986 trendsetter A Better Tomorrow.
  17. Scenes rarely exploit their full potential and, frequently, it's clear that the slightest bit of effort might have made the shots work more smoothly. Movies like this could start giving sports a bad name.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Exploitation fans will be disappointed to see that Roy Frumkes, who wrote the incredible cult favorite Street Trash and directed the excellent documentary Document of the Dead, and Alan Ormsby, who collaborated with Bob Clark on his forgotten classics Deathdream, Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, and Deranged, were partly responsible for The Substitute's abysmal screenplay.
  18. It's full of special effects that are big on smoke and noise, but short on logic and payoff.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    While the account of Walden's heroics doesn't necessarily move from legend to fact, it does push the bounds of truth and raise interesting questions about the function of truth for the survivors of war.
  19. Despite a few scattered moments of visceral excitement, the only thing truly frightening about the oh-so-ominously titled Fear is how so many talented people came to be involved in so inane a project.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 89 Critic Score
    I hope we don't have to wait another quarter-century for the next great Dahl adaptation, but for a film as good as this one, I'll wait.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Norton's performance and the well-paced tension preceding the movie's climactic sequence provide an entertaining if slightly predictable thriller.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    With acting legends Duvall and Jones in the lead roles, the story stays afloat, but occasionally these actors seem to be lurching around in a script that's too "small" for them.

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