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. Even though it’s fair to say that Pixels is on steadier ground than most of Sandler’s recent comedies, the film is nevertheless flat-footed and grows tedious after the first hour.
  2. Tangerine’s greatest accomplishment, however, lies with director Baker, who filmed the movie using an iPhone 5S. It’s an amazing achievement – the fluidity of the camerawork is exhilarating at times, the intimacy of the close-ups sometimes unsettling.
  3. It is a perfect instance of meta self-awareness that thankfully lets a little air out of this grand narrative pomposity. Ant-Man is infectious, silly entertainment, a popcorn flick that knows what it is and does what it does to an intoxicating degree.
  4. Provocative though it is, Felt literally wears its ideas on its sleeves.
  5. Oh, how I rued my failed foreign-language skills in the opening moments of Gemma Bovery. Who wants to read subtitles when a French baker is rolling out such pliant, such pokeable, such heavenly looking dough?
  6. Although it’s a pleasant and handsome endeavor, Mr. Holmes hasn’t the consuming drive and sense of inexorability that marks the award-winning "Gods and Monsters."
  7. Trainwreck can be furiously funny. It just goes down too easy. It’s scared of its own sharp edges. The sly raging against the machine of Inside Amy Schumer has gone missing. Here, the rage, curiously, is turned inward.
  8. Just as you begin settling into these science-fiction parameters and start pondering the wisdom of humanity’s vain quest for immortality, Self/less switches gears, much to its detriment, and becomes a frenzied chase thriller and shoot-‘em-up.
  9. Best yet, there’s a mid-film bedtime story, made to look like stop-motion, that’ll take your breath away.
  10. With Infinitely Polar Bear, Forbes has created a warm family portrait, even though it sugarcoats the specter that mental illness casts on this group’s well-being.
  11. The Gallows offers exactly none of the frisson or pleasure of a found-footage film done right.
  12. If only Cartel Land were as rigorous in its thinking as it is in its filmmaking methods, the film might strike an even deeper blow than it presently does.
  13. Amy
    The gut-wrenching Amy is, in the end, as much an indictment of our celebrity-obsessed (global) pop culture as it is of the perils of rampant success arriving unexpectedly fast, tires squealing and driving a hearse.
  14. Uncompromising and supremely controlled, it is a demanding film that will leave you shaken and shattered. How’s that for hyperbolic?
  15. It’s muddy, bloody, and studded with amputated limbs, yet still rather generic-feeling; it lacks the visceral impact of Joe Wright’s version of Western Front atrocities in "Atonement."
  16. When this stereotype masquerades as a storyline, it needs to have a unique spin or radical narrative disruption for it to stand out from all the other self-made movies about white male artists with girl problems and self-worth issues. In Stereo is not the movie that stands out from the rest.
  17. While Manglehorn eschews the traditional third-act redemption you’ve seen ad nauseam in films that neatly wrap things up right before the end credits roll, it’s nevertheless refreshingly optimistic about people’s ability to change. For any of us entering life’s third act, hope springs eternal.
  18. Magic Mike XXL isn’t really a movie. It’s a bachelorette party, or a book club, or any other safe space where women gather for some of that “you go, girl” good feeling. It’s an amusement-park ride. Fasten the safety belt, secure your purses, and get ready to scream.
  19. Terminator: Genisys is a catastrophic misfire on nearly all counts. It’s only saving grace? 2015 Oscar winner J.K. Simmons (Whiplash) as a Mulder-gone-to-pot-esque cop who believes in these “goddamn time-traveling robots.”
  20. This film is sweet and frequently very funny. It isn’t perfect. Some of those imperfections – or, more to the point, irritants, such as the twee chapter headings and college-essay framing device – are carryovers from the YA novel, written by Jesse Andrews, who also adapted the novel to screen.
  21. The outcome is no great surprise, and plenty of the gags feel as though they were meant to be throwaways, but Ted 2, exactly like its predecessor, has plenty of heart, which makes all the rest of the black-dick jokes marginally more tolerable.
  22. In the end, the preordained ménage à quatre that culminates the evening’s funny games titillates neither mentally nor erotically. Without any such catharsis, the whole thing feels like a big tease. No doubt what The Overnight could use at this point is another happy ending.
  23. Aloft’s characters exude a certain impregnability, and the story’s structure only further distances us from them.
  24. John Pirozzi purportedly spent nine years gathering material for the project, and the film spotlights musicians and performers who would have been completely forgotten if not for this enterprise.
  25. By the time this harmless but possibly harmed pack of pups is seen approaching the Atlantic Ocean at Coney Island for the very first time – “Look at that, there’s people all over the beach,” one brother nervously mutters – it’s clear that there are second acts, and more, in American lives, even ones so borderline freakish as the ones presented here.
  26. Messages about learning to be comfortable in one’s own skin and the hypocrisy of the ruling class are delivered with genial humor and mild pokes.
  27. The jokes fly in the college intramural football comedy Balls Out like a fourth-down Hail Mary thrown deep toward the end zone: unpredictable, risky, and just a little desperate. But when they hit their marks – and make no mistake, the number of completed passes here is high – they score big laughs in the most unconventionally funny, weirdly absurd movie of the year.
  28. Its audacity is entirely matched by its artistry.
  29. Sunshine Superman is at times a bit too reverent with the material, and there are distracting reenactments (à la The Jinx and Man on Wire), some of which seem extraneous, but overall, the film is a sun-kissed tribute to a singular individual.
  30. Size matters, too, in Live From New York!, a portrait of SNL at 40, but in inverse: 82 minutes isn’t nearly long enough to consider every angle – or even many angles – of a cultural institution.

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