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
  1. Before I Fall puts all its excellent elements in service to a story that’s well-told and has a valuable lesson.
  2. In the end, Collide is a cheap genre product produced with an eye on foreign market box office. Wake me when Dominic Toretto torques his way into Havana.
  3. It honors this extraordinary couple’s defiant and unwavering love for each other, but it doesn’t celebrate it much beyond a cliched falling-in-love montage and a chaste wedding-night scene. You can look, but you better not touch.
  4. Although the plot is thin, Rock Dog nevertheless charms with its engaging central characters and unencumbered storyline.
  5. It’s a history lesson wrapped up in a romance, gallows grim but far too often unnecessarily heavy-handed in a way that drives home the factual historical horrors it portrays while somehow managing to feel like a sizably budgeted but no less maladroit television movie of the week.
  6. Not only does this genre exercise deliver the little jolts and inside laughs that keep modern horror fans pleased, Get Out is also one of the smartest, funniest, and most socially astute films to come around in a while.
  7. Whether it’s a case of miscasting is unclear, but without a willing hero to anchor this already dubious movie from start to finish, The Great Wall hits a brick wall.
  8. Fist Fight is not a complete dud, but it does grasp at the lowest hanging fruit for its humor.
  9. This pleasantly rambling absurdist father/daughter drama is also one of the most strikingly unusual films of the year, period.
  10. This is a strange and beguiling film to the end.
  11. Whatever your perspective, there’s one thing for sure: The Red Turtle is unlike anything else you’ve seen in a while.
  12. The horror that lies at the heart of the film is fairly obvious, and with no characters for whom we have a rooting interest, A Cure for Wellness is as difficult to swallow as castor oil.
  13. Apart from a few moments of fleeting suspense, Fifty Shades Darker resembles a Facebook feed of someone you kind of knew in high school who maybe went on to have a glamorous future, but everything seems a little bit off and contrived.
  14. It’s a rat-a-tat-tat animated comedy that rarely lets up, clever and silly and funny, and yes, a bit batty.
  15. There is a certain sweetness to this teen romance and Gardner’s naive fascination in the newly discovered wonders of Earth. But there is so much that is dopey, on both a scientific and emotional level, that The Space Between Us strikes with the impact of a crash landing.
  16. Rings is an unfortunate and often incomprehensible mess that kicks off with a neat premise and then never fully explores it.
  17. John Wick: Chapter 2 also has a very good humor about itself.
  18. Rana’s voice comes roaring back in the film’s held-breath third act, in which these amateur actors return to their old apartment to enact a drama with life-or-death stakes. This final 30 minutes are the film’s pièce de résistance.
  19. The film is drab and epileptic.
  20. Ideas and their visual illustrations come at the viewer in a cascading torrent. The editing by Alexandra Strauss deserves its own recognition for its painstaking exactness.
  21. The performances are uniformly good and Kelly’s effort to tell an unbiased story is admirable, but I Am Michael ultimately delivers more in the way of talking points than drama.
  22. While occasionally engaging, The Comedian isn’t very funny.
  23. Not only is it a film about a poet, Paterson transcends its story to become a work of poetry itself.
  24. Collette – usually a delight – sounds like she’s phonetically speaking a foreign language. Not even Judi Dench could sell these lines.
  25. One thing about this extremely talented artist: He never sees anything in just black-and-white.
  26. Often seen in his crummy underwear, and almost always with a cigarette and drink in hand, McConaughey brings a knowing fleshiness to the character. Yet the film’s uneven tone leaves us with lasting uncertainty about his character and the events we have witnessed.
  27. An actor most at home playing devilish, Keaton’s got the last-reel Machiavellian shrug down cold. But neither he nor the filmmakers do much to illuminate the neural pistons fired from brain to bodily shrug.
  28. A misguided and utterly tone-deaf Hallmark card to the canis lupus familiaris and the people who love them.
  29. As far as cinema’s long love affair with DID dramas goes, Split ain’t a half-bad contribution.
  30. The Resurrection of Gavin Stone isn’t as exploitive as some recent Christian-based films – for that, check out 2014’s truly offensive "Heaven Is for Real" – and while it’s got its charms, it’s far from likely to bring in any new converts.

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