Austin Chronicle's Scores

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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 6.9 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: 4,778 out of 8783
  2. Mixed: 2,558 out of 8783
  3. Negative: 1,447 out of 8783
8783 movie reviews
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  1. No Bears
    Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s feminist views have consistently been at the center of his work, but his latest film, No Bears, is an ambitious, powerful piece that puts himself in the center of two narratives, parallel to each other, in which two generations of women are forced into difficult situations because traditions and laws have made it almost impossible for them to be with who they love.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 89 Critic Score
    8½
    With 8 1/2, Fellini cast aside all vestiges of the naturalism that informed his early work. From here, he stepped off into the dazzling fantasyland of Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, and Roma, but for many, this remains the quintessential Federico.
  3. Spotlight
    Spotlight is a great newspaper movie, ranking up there with "All the President’s Men" and "Citizen Kane", and it’s certainly the best of its kind since "The Paper" in 1994, which also happened to star Michael Keaton.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Band Wagon
    Minnelli's direction has seldom attained such a perfect fusion of form and content. The Band Wagon is quite simply a masterpiece.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ride the High Country
    When you see a great Peckinpah film like his second feature, Ride the High Country (1962), you feel that the director has found a way to tell a story that lays his own soul across the screen. This movie celebrates a hero of self-control. But each frame is energized with a sense of what that self-control has cost the man in love, friendship, and glory.
  6. Memoria
    Even for the most adventurous viewers, it may prove taxing. But to embrace its strange singularity yields a thought-provoking experience, and perhaps even a transformative one.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 89 Critic Score
    The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    Could easily have tipped over into melodrama, but Schnabel is too much an artist to let that happen; he realizes that in order to make his hero truly substantial, and not just sympathetic, he has to present him as an ordinary man making the best of extraordinarily lousy circumstances. By doing so he’s created a character we not only marvel at but identify with.
  8. The Class
    The keen observations of The Class ultimately become a remedial education in themselves.
  9. No Country for Old Men
    The adaptation by Joel and Ethan Coen (both co-credited as writer and director) of McCarthy's as-if-written-for-the-screen No Country for Old Men becomes a marvelous meld of narrative faithfulness and pre-established sensibilities.
  10. Secrets & Lies
    Secrets & Lies, despite my dwelling on its problems, is a really solid and enjoyable movie. It's just not what I would call "best of the fest."
  11. The Florida Project
    Depending on your perspective, Moonee is either youth incarnate making the most of her circumstances, or Dennis the Menace determined to drive the oldsters stark-raving mad. Her escapades eventually take a turn from boisterously fun-loving to downright dangerous, which kicks the movie’s low simmer into full boil.
  12. Timbuktu
    The film is a magnificent document of secular humanism.
  13. Frenzy
    Frenzy is one of the great latter-day Hitchcocks; great technique, great suspense, and very black humor drive this tale of an innocent man hunted by Scotland Yard for a series of sex murders.
  14. Cool Hand Luke
    One of the sharpest prison dramas ever, although it's graced with some very humorous portions as well.
  15. The Act of Killing
    It comes as little surprise that Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, both masters of sly documentaries in which the subjects nail themselves with their own words, are the executive producers of Oppenheimer’s film.
  16. Maborosi
    The concept of loss, and the sorrow that shadows it, is not what you'd call an uncommon theme in films, but rarely is it handled with such uncommon eloquence as it is in Maborosi.
  17. Apocalypse Now Redux
    Such gorgeous explosions, such a terrible vision, such an amazing work of art. Go. Now.
  18. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    This is high fantasy of the best kind.
  19. The Zone of Interest
    Apart from a handful of tracking shots, the film is a series of middle-distance static shots, giving us the same detachment the Höss household possesses living next to a concentration camp. But The Zone of Interest’s coup de grâce is never showing any activity within Auschwitz itself, allowing only the sounds of the camp to be a constant, nerve-racking presence.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
    Hooper's vision is horrid yet engrossing... But the worst part about this vision is that despite its sensational aspects, it never seems too far from what could be the truth.
  21. Quiz Show
    Although the stellar contributions to this supremely intelligent film are many, there's no mistake that the presence of director Redford dominates the film.
  22. Leviathan
    Vladimir Putin’s Russia – brutal, carnivorous, delusional, but monstrously well-evolved for crushing both spirits and lives large and small – is taken to task in this excoriating portrait of the state’s omnivorous hunger for control in a far-flung northern fishing community on the Barents Sea.
  23. Toy Story 3
    I laughed more (sincerely, full-throatedly) at Toy Story 3’s smart comedy than at any other film of the still-young summer movie slate.
  24. The Souvenir
    That Swinton Byrne's performance is so open, so immediate, so caught up in emotional truths rather than performative beats, makes this one of the year's most unique and memorable roles.
  25. The Look of Silence
    Harrowing and important documentary.
  26. Tower
    Director Keith Maitland’s film is one of the finest documentaries ever made, and it’s also one of the most unusual.
  27. The Secret Agent
    Anchoring all the wild plot machinations and shocking, garish violence is Wagner Moura’s focused and forceful lead performance.
  28. Burning
    With Burning Lee has molded a psychological masterpiece that will leave you full of doubt, dread, and searing questions about morality.
  29. Drive My Car
    Hamaguchi’s films, from Happy Hour to Asako I & II, are all explorations of love, the complex, overwhelming emotion that has the power to break your heart. Drive My Car dissects that heartbreak, what it means to love someone and how to come to terms with that love once they are no longer around to fix what was broken.
  30. It Was Just an Accident
    The air of fear that still pervades every frame of It Was Just an Accident is undeniable and institutionalized, to the point that cops take cash or cards for bakhshish, the customary bribes required just to live in public.
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