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. At best, Goosebumps is a who’s who in the Stine literary oeuvre, featuring characters who were terrifying on paper but rendered toothless here.
  2. Sorkin smashes the cradle-to-grave biopic mold with Steve Jobs. R.I.P., I guess. It’s called a mold for a reason.
  3. The parade has now moved on and Freeheld seems more like a footnote than a groundswell.
  4. For sheer, sepulchral eye candy at this most horror-ific time of year, del Toro’s Crimson Peak leaves Tim Burton – reigning misfit king of hyper-stylized, goth-y weirdness – in the dust and well-nigh forgotten.
  5. For the most part, Spielberg appears content to allow the story (admittedly, a tad bit long) to do the talking, though he goes badly off-track in the sappy ending reminiscent of a Fifties sitcom’s notions of hierarchy within the American family. Given the Spielberg film canon, it was inevitable. The guy just can’t help himself.
  6. The film is as thin as a picture postcard.
  7. The atrocities against children begin to acquire an unwelcome redundancy in their relentlessness and threaten to inure the viewer.
  8. Yakuza Apocalypse is Miike at the top of his game, breaking cinematic rules at every chance while crafting seriously subversive cinema that defangs both the real-world Yakuza, the Japanese government, and, heaven help us, Sanrio, too. Knitting, I tell you! Knitting!
  9. Dependably fascinating.
  10. Pan
    Ill-conceived from any number of angles, this Peter Pan origin story, scripted by Jason Fuchs (Ice Age: Continental Drift), plays topsy-turvy with J.M. Barrie’s beloved characters.
  11. Iwish I could say 99 Homes delivers a shockingly good sucker punch to the American electorate and a stand-up-and-cheer piece of socially conscious filmmaking, but it’s not. It lacks the satisfactory denouement of, for instance, Michael Mann’s The Insider (and Garfield is no Russell Crowe), in part because the events it depicts are still happening across the country (albeit to a lesser extent).
  12. Much more a comedy than a heist film (think Ocean’s 11 rather than Casino or Rififi), Ladrones moves at a pretty entertaining pace and maintains a good sense of humor about itself.
  13. Knock Knock is a nasty bit of business, and fans of Roth are not likely to be disappointed. But for everyone else, the joke's on them.
  14. Don’t come to this documentary expecting to learn more about the girl named Malala.
  15. Both Farmiga and Akerman emotionally connect in the film, which culminates in an ultimate act of maternal sacrifice more moving than you might imagine. Finally! A slasher movie with both brains and heart, both intact.
  16. Peppered with clever, self-referential one-liners that whip by almost too fast to catch them, Deathgasm is – like most metalheads/punks/Morrissey fans – a helluva lot smarter than one might at first suspect.
  17. That Peace Officer cannot provide a complete picture of the myriad of problems that come with the increased militarization of police isn’t an indictment of the film. This trouble is too big for one film to contain.
  18. While there are a few loose ends in Drew Goddard’s screenplay, which is faithful to but necessarily less detailed than its source, the film is a triumph of storytelling, a tribute to the power of the crowd-pleaser.
  19. Still, you find yourself rooting for these women, even if their adventures aren’t always up to snuff.
  20. Set against the gray backdrop of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, this is old-school melodrama writ big from a director who’s probably better known to mainstream American audiences as the man behind the spectacular Wushu action epics Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Curse of the Golden Flower.
  21. A ruthlessly satisfying thriller, The Keeping Room will linger with the viewer long after the credits roll.
  22. A slick but slight film that unfortunately resurrects everything that was problematically self-indulgent about so many New York rom-com indie films that have come before. This is irrelevant navel-gazing at its most tepid. Nothing (new) to see here, folks.
  23. Filmmakers Boden and Fleck don’t appear interested in eliciting your full-out sympathy for these low-rollers, though the happyish ending seems somewhat a sellout (albeit a satisfactory one). Who’s to blame them? After all, everybody loves a winner.
  24. Sicario is at its best when its borderlines are fluid and indistinct.
  25. It’s a shrewd last move in a movie that’s uncommonly smart about when to buck convention and when to conform to the warm feels we all want.
  26. By now, we’ve grown accustomed to the signature touch of Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump), who is one of the best creative minds to see the innovative narrative potential lying dormant in technical cinematographic advances. This does not always provide the underpinnings for great stories, but bien sûr his movies are almost always quite something to see.
  27. Duris and Demoustier are excellent in a pair of exceedingly complex and emotionally fractious roles, and Ozon’s supremely confident directorial hand and clear affection for these characters transforms The New Girlfriend from a could’ve-been psycho-thriller into a smart, humanistic examination of identity reshaped in the shadow of grief.
  28. Channeling your inner child, you may find solace in Hotel Transylvania 2, but in the end it has no bite, doing continued disservice to the Universal monsters it scabs out, and adding another soiled feather to Sandler’s cap of mediocrity.
  29. A life-affirming documentary if ever there was one, A Brave Heart is a litmus test for gauging compassion, one I would recommend everyone take immediately.
  30. Maybe Stonewall will have more value to younger viewers for whom the riots and gay marginalization in general are distant history and might be vivified by watching the film. Yet even though the film’s heart seems genuine, its structure is buttressed by falsies.

Top Trailers