Austin Chronicle's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 4,774 out of 8778
  2. Mixed: 2,557 out of 8778
  3. Negative: 1,447 out of 8778
8778 movie reviews
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  1. The Wedding Ringer
    The film is so flat and tired it really doesn’t deserve the vehemence of this review. It’s like chastising a completely airless tire for not rolling.
  2. Spare Parts
    Call it humanism, call it advocacy, call it old-fashioned entertainment – there’s little difference in the end. Whatever you call it, Spare Parts stands and delivers on its own intriguing merits.
  3. American Sniper
    To its credit, the film shows no interest in creating blind heroics but instead uphold the nickname Kyle earned in Iraq: the Legend.
  4. Paddington
    There are so many terrific things going on in the film – rapid-fire wordplay, split-second visual gags, and some veddy, veddy British punning – that, frankly, Paddington deserves more than one viewing. Huzzah Paddington, and marmalade forever!
  5. Blackhat
    Blackhat plays a surprisingly flat and ever-flatter cinema texture against the careful roll-out of an elaborate plot. Not only is the pacing deliberate, but Mann often supplies only about 80% of the information needed to understand what is going on in a scene.
  6. Selma
    Although Selma is dramatically uneven overall, the film is a commendable historical drama that sidesteps the pitfalls of adulatory biopics and great-man approaches to encapsulating bygone events.
  7. Inherent Vice
    My advice? Relinquish yourself to this hazy tapestry, and let the film take over. Squares need not apply.
  8. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    What’s missing from The Woman in Black 2, and what it needs most and has least of all, is suspense.
  9. The Interview
    Every once in a while, a movie is more than a movie, but it’s surprising when that becomes the case with a punk-ass comedy, one that’s more puerile than pointed yet not without some good laughs.
  10. Unbroken
    As Zamperini, Jack O’Connell is the film’s strongest asset. The actor holds our attention from beginning to end, making us care deeply about the man’s fate instead of becoming an empty icon of stoicism.
  11. Into the Woods
    As the ugly and bitter witch who yearns for stolen life, Streep’s performance, for the most part, is strangely joyless. Once upon a time, this actress knew how to keep it fresh when going over the top ("Death Becomes Her," anyone?), but here she’s hardly bewitching.
  12. The Imitation Game
    What lingers is the feeling that the filmmakers may pay lip service to Turing’s sexuality, but they prefer to keep his sex life strictly theoretical. Careful, there: No tracking dirt on the nice clean prestige picture.
  13. The Gambler
    Wahlberg brings an intense, often internalized performance to a wickedly written role, and while he’s no James Caan, he’s certainly able to infuse this mesmerizing character study with enough rancid brio to make this self-flagellating hustler believably doomstruck.
  14. Big Eyes
    This is Burton’s most mainstream film to date, which isn’t to say it’s not an eccentrically entertaining ride. It is, but minus the kooky occult élan you expect from the man who made "Edward Scissorhands." It’s a Lifetime movie, as directed by, well, you know who.
  15. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb
    Surprisingly well-crafted for something as aggressively dumb as this, the real surprise is the cast.
  16. Foxcatcher
    Whatever the case, Foxcatcher provides little insight. Art can shape the truth in ways that resonate beyond the obvious. Regrettably, the truth-shaping here grapples for significance, without any apparent aim. Catch as catch can.
  17. Annie
    Little girls will love it. I used to be a little girl once, too. I didn’t care much for the Top 40 glossy coat slathered over every song, but this heart will never harden to a spunky kid who’s certain the sun’ll come out tomorrow.
  18. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    The performances have remained continuously excellent throughout The Hobbit trilogy, and they remain so here; likewise Howard Shore’s score, which is particularly righteous – bloodthirsty when it needs to be, keening when a particularly major character is cut down.
  19. Exodus: Gods and Kings
    Exodus is an entertainment of the first order. I’m not so sure about the filmmaker’s decision to render the Metatron archangel as a 9-year-old boy, but what the hell? You get hit on the head with a boulder, who knows what you’ll see?
  20. Wild
    Wild lands some hard punches, but it can’t sustain the impact. Some of that lies in its inherited arc: Strayed found some peace – the whole point of the trek – but arriving-at-peace is less provocative than the struggle, at least in a movie.
  21. The Great Invisible
    To the filmmakers’ credit, the points of view in The Great Invisible are comprehensive and varied, though it’s clear who they view as the good guys and bad guys here.
  22. Top Five
    Everywhere in America these days, people pay lip service to the idea of conducting open and honest conversations about race. Due to a fluke of timing and its entertaining quality, Top Five should help get the ball rolling.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Pyramid
    The Pyramid is a mere matinee meat-grinder, neither terribly original nor all that tense. The real pyramids have been remembered for millennia. This one will be lucky if it lasts a week.
  24. Uzumasa Limelight
    It’s Fukumoto’s wonderfully weathered countenance that makes Ochiai’s film such an elegiac delight. On it, you can see the entire history of samurai cinema, or at least that essential part of it that died often, and beautifully so.
  25. The Babadook
    The crisp imagery (by Radek Ładczuk) creates a true sense of menace amid the household banality. Tales about mothers who fear their offspring also strike at a very primal level of mythic storytelling. Vigilance is the only means of protection against creatures from the id.
  26. Pelican Dreams
    Irving again delivers personal observations about curious creatures in a manner that’s part nature doc and part meditative exploration. The result is as mixed as the process.
  27. Listen Up Philip
    The antithesis of a feel-good movie, Listen Up Philip is a challenging experience, largely because it refuses to compromise its protagonist’s dogged preoccupation with himself.
  28. The Homesman
    The Homesman gives us a West devoid of gunslingers and heroes and hearth vs. hunt dynamics, and instead shows us people trying to get through their days alive and sane.
  29. Penguins of Madagascar
    A merry entertainment that never pretends to greatness, Penguins of Madagascar is all about antics, verbal and visual.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Horrible Bosses 2
    The humor ranges from situational gags to wordplay both clever and juvenile. Despite routine lapses into gay panic and the kind of dick-stroking shadowplay that was exhausted a decade ago by the Austin Powers franchise, there are strong laughs sprinkled throughout, culminating in an unexpectedly inspired climactic car chase.
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