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. Paranoid Park shows the Portland-based director to be working at the pinnacle of his art in every frame, in every composition. It's breathtaking, heartbreaking, tragic, gorgeous, and true all at the same time.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Few filmmakers these days are as capable and assured with the fumbling ambivalence of human conversation as Green is; his ear for the half-truths, misapprehensions, and long-simmering defensiveness of everyday dialogue is a wonder to behold.
  2. CJ7
    Chow's loyal fans are sure to be disappointed by CJ7, and the film faces one other significant problem in traveling to these shores: Any kid who is the right age to appreciate this pap is going to be too young to read subtitles.
  3. Counselors and campers' moms tend to tear up when they talk about the lessons these girls are learning, lessons that go way beyond how to tune a bass, but this isn't exactly a "rah-rah" film.
  4. Intriguing.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Equal parts tragedy and comedy, high drama and low farce.
  5. Works both as an engagingly sordid meditation on protofeminism and contemporized sisterhood set in a time and a place where either/or were grounds for, at the very least, defenestration.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    It’s as if Caveny had so many ideas that she simply couldn’t bear to leave any of them crumpled up on her office floor.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    But basketball … basketball doesn’t deserve the Ferrell treatment. Basketball is a sport of kings, a thing of beauty and elegance, America’s game. Which doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be mocked but that if it must be mocked it deserves to be mocked well, and Semi-Pro, unfortunately, isn’t up to the challenge.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The result is an expansive and ambivalent testament to human ingenuity, human intransigence, and nature’s endangered yet enduring power to move.
  6. Sequences like the silly montage of Charlie on Ritalin (which just looks like the precious doodles of a former editor), grievously underdeveloped characters, and heavy heapings of sap instead of snark keep Charlie Bartlett from making the dean’s list.
  7. Both apocalyptic and suitably vague, The Signal's only serious weakness comes from some borderline histrionic performances; then again, it's tough to call hysteria anything other than a sane response to a world gone mad. Crazy, man.
  8. Gondry’s well-meaning but too soft, too structure-less picture.
  9. The Counterfeiters differs from most Holocaust movies in that the emphasis is on the personal moral choices that are made rather than the overall horror and despair.
  10. If you can work your way past Vantage Point's goofy casting that places a bland, blank-eyed Hurt in the White House, then I suppose you can manage to forgive this "Rashomon" rip-off's other glaring idiosyncrasies, of which there are many.
  11. Balibar and Depardieu make a compelling duo who exude an animal magnetism that's undeniable.
  12. Though the history and the palace intrigue are not at all difficult for Westerners to grasp, a tighter running time would probably help this epic reach more eyes in America, where it has received the biggest release ever for a Bollywood
  13. Diary of the Dead is meant to scare your pants off, blow your mind out the back of your skull, and then deposit you ungently back into reality, quaking a little, maybe, but still alive and, unlike the undead, thinking.
  14. A curiously unaffecting amalgam of the archetypal coming-of-age tale, here twinned to "outsider" religious overtones (in this case São Paulo's Orthodox Jewish community) and a small but deadly dose of uneasy political melodrama.
  15. There’s a surprising – and truthful – melancholic undercurrent to Definitely, Maybe – the one commonality between the three women is the heartbreak they induce – but Brooks undermines that truthfulness with a dogmatic insistence upon romantic mythologizing. No maybes about it: The reality is far darker, and more interesting.
  16. The whole production does reek a bit of origin story filminess, but even so, it's light sabers beyond Christensen's sad, revengeful fate in "Episode III" and does offer a nice view of the top of the Sphinx's head no less than three times.
  17. Starts off promisingly by empathetically depicting the fear and anger children feel when their parents separate, but ultimately its human emotions are dominated by goblins, trolls, and other CGI-generated creatures running amok on the screen.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    If we don’t stop these public dance-offs here and now, before too long we’re going to have an entire generation of kids seeking salvation as back-up dancers for Justin Timberlake
    • 80 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    By the time Tawfiq, Dina, and the band’s boy Lothario, Haled (Bakri), commiserate over “My Funny Valentine” in the film’s sublime third act, writer/director Kolirin has created a remarkable world where no struggle is too severe to overcome with a little empathy and the Great American Songbook on your side.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Fool’s Gold is the latest romantic comedy from Tennant, who is very possibly the worst director working in Hollywood today. "Fools Rush In." "Ever After." "Sweet Home Alabama." Hitch: I ask you, has anyone done more in the last 10 years to make love seem totally unappetizing?
  18. The film's light comedy and dark morality make for an unsettling mix.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Onscreen it all plays out like some sort of self-coronation, a celebration of the boy Vaughn’s rise to the heights of superstardom.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    At its best, Roscoe Jenkins is about the crushing influence of the past and one man’s attempts to free himself – by hook, crook, or Hollywood – from underneath it. At its worst, however, the movie is content to just explore the apparently infinite comic potential of dogs having sex, people getting sprayed by skunks, and men getting beaten up by overweight women.
  19. The first-time feature director, co-writer, and star of Caramel, Labaki, can be forgiven the commonness of her dramatic setting because of the gracefulness of her storytelling and the strength of her vision.
  20. Most unforgivably, this Eye culminates not with the mounting dread and spectacular tragedy of the original film's decidedly downbeat vision, but with the trademark LASIK laziness of Hollywood's stylistically blank remake factory.

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