Chicago Reader's Scores

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For 6,312 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 42% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 56% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 60
Highest review score: 100 I Stand Alone
Lowest review score: 0 Old Dogs
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,983 out of 6312
  2. Mixed: 2,456 out of 6312
  3. Negative: 873 out of 6312
6312 movie reviews
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  1. Kicking and Screaming
    There's plenty of wit on the surface, but the pain of paralysis comes through loud and clear.
  2. Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser
    The musical value of this footage is so powerful that nothing can deface it, despite the best efforts of Zwerin to do so: all the worst habits of jazz documentaries in treating the music, from cutting off numbers midstream to burying them with voice-overs (which also happens on the sound track album), are routinely employed.
  3. The Ister
    Unprecedented in its intellectual ambition, this is endlessly stimulating; it probably tries for too much, but it shames many other contemporary essays that try for too little.
  4. Harry Is Here to Help
    Almost too clever for its own good.
  5. Startup.com
    Deep and textured drama.
  6. Liberty Heights
    Told from too many perspectives, the narrative puts suspense above substance, and its social consciousness seems contrived.
  7. The Full Monty
    This wonderful 1997 comedy--about an unlikely group of men who are determined to strip to music rather than get day jobs--is genuinely effective at inverting gender stereotypes and other assumptions, and it's not the slightest bit heavy-handed.
  8. Roger Dodger
    Kidd has a great ear for dialogue, and he throws in a few unexpected twists. But the real fun is watching an established pro and a newcomer run with the script.
  9. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    If you ever suspected that assholes are running the world, this documentary adapting producer and former actor Robert Evans's autobiography, narrated with relish by Evans himself--the cinematic equivalent of a Vanity Fair article, complete with tuxes and swimming pools--offers all the confirmation you'll ever need.
  10. Kitchen Stories
    The humor is a bit dry for my taste, but director Bent Hamer and his actors know what they're doing every step of the way.
  11. The Deserted Station
    The film's relaxed pace, unassuming tone, and respect for its characters all recall the films of Abbas Kiarostami, who provided the story idea, but director Ali Reza Raisian adds a slightly more dramatic and emotional edge.
  12. Beauty in Trouble
    Writer Petr Jarchovsky and director Jan Hrebejk collaborated on the formidable "Up and Down" (2004), and this 2006 feature, which takes its title from a Robert Graves poem, is equally impressive for its mastery, intelligence, and ambition in juggling intricate plot strands and memorable characters.
  13. The Square
    Some have called this neo-noir, but aside from the setting there’s nothing "neo" about it; as in classic noir, the characters are slowly but surely ensnared by their own baser impulses.
  14. Les amitiés maléfiques
    A biting academic fable about the importance of aggression over intellect.
  15. Born on the Fourth of July
    Worst of all, the movie's conventional showbiz finale, brimming with false uplift, implies that the traumas of other mutilated and disillusioned Vietnam veterans can easily be overcome if they write books and turn themselves into celebrities.
  16. Funny Face
    The film’s sophistication is compromised by the rather dumb plot, but some of the numbers—especially “Think Pink” and “Bonjour Paris”—are standouts.
  17. Dial M for Murder
    The screenplay tends to constrain rather than liberate Hitchcock's thematic thrust, but there is much of technical value in his geometric survey of the scene and the elaborate strategies employed to transfer audience sympathy among the four main characters.
  18. Catch Me If You Can
    Based on the real-life exploits of Frank W. Abagnale but played more for myth than believability.
  19. Peggy Sue Got Married
    It's grave, lumbering, arrhythmic, and bloated, an emotional hogwallow of catchpenny insights and easy sentimentality...In short, a real bagful.
  20. A Prairie Home Companion
    Good-humored and enormously entertaining but also sentimental and a little dishonest.
  21. House
    This incredibly odd Japanese horror feature (1977) is like a Hello Kitty backpack stuffed with bloody human viscera.
  22. Baadasssss!
    Its mix of personal reminiscence (Mario made his screen debut playing Sweetback as a boy) and cultural history is fascinating. This engages in a fair amount of mythmaking itself, but its lesson in self-empowerment is both vivid and sincere.
  23. The Specialist
    What's most conspicuously missing is the kind of background information needed to assess many of Eichmann's statements.
  24. About a Boy
    Illuminating with their energy and wit.
  25. The Believer
    Persuasive, intelligent, and provocative.
  26. In This World
    Winterbottom and screenwriter Tony Grisoni were clearly motivated by conscience, but I can't help thinking that Stephen Frears's "Dirty Pretty Things," a much more conventional and contrived movie about third-world refugees, will have a greater social impact than this murky art-house item.
  27. Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
    Provocative documentary.
  28. The Jaundiced Eye
    The force of the social criticism is diminished by contrivance and the inclusion of peripheral material.
  29. Secret Ballot
    A finely crafted entertainment that works better than most current Hollywood movies.
  30. This Film Is Not Yet Rated
    The main activity charted in the documentary is a kind of adolescent mischief, as Dick and a private investigator seek to uncover and expose the anonymous MPAA employees.
  31. A Foreign Affair
    Wilder's strategy is to play a bubbly romantic comedy in a mise-en-scene of destruction and despair. As usual, it's more clever than meaningful, but this 1948 film is one of his most satisfactory in wit and pace.
  32. Point Blank
    Finely calibrated French neonoir.
  33. Blast of Silence
    With its finger-popping jazz score and beat-inspired interior monologue (in second person, no less), this might seem comical if it weren’t so rooted in existential dread.
  34. Maurice
    The dissection of Edwardian repression never gets beyond the dutiful, tasteful obviousness of a BBC miniseries.
  35. Manhunter
    I'm rather intrigued with what Mann does with his stylistic envelope: it's simultaneously hypnotic and enervating, meditative and empty, like a white-noise background or a field of electronic snow on the tube.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
    The cutting of more than 40 minutes from the original film hurts its initial continuity, but once the action begins, this takes on a magical quality that makes it one of Wilder’s best efforts.
  37. The Purple Rose of Cairo
    Woody Allen's naive notions of art--he thinks it means a story with a moral--might have some primitive charm if he didn't put them forward so self-importantly.
  38. They Died with Their Boots On
    It may be questionable history (though the film is anything but jingoistic), but it is superb filmmaking, personal and vigorous.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
    Aldrich's direction and dynamite performances from the two old troupers make this film an experience.
  40. Solas
    Despite a melodramatic score that at times seems almost facetious, the movie's tone is sober and sincere, its unlikely ending persuasive.
  41. On the Run
    Behind the camera Belvaux builds suspense with an austere tone and clever false alarms; in front of it he plays Bruno as chivalrous yet ruthless.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine
    The efforts of victims and victimizers to come to terms with historical trauma are admirable, but the film is too tough-minded to espouse a facile discourse of "healing" in the face of genocide driven by ideology run amok.
  43. Waitress
    The film isn't averse to reaching for Hollywood fantasies, but there's a lot of what seems to be hard-earned wisdom here about women in bad marriages.
  44. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
    Mike Nichols had the Burtons for his first film (1966), but he felt compelled to drag in so many jazzy camera tricks that Richard and Elizabeth seem largely superfluous for the first couple of reels. When Nichols finally settles down, it's almost too late.
  45. Terribly Happy
    Lurid and stylish, this 2008 Danish feature plays like a cross between "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and "High Noon," with a dash of Gothic thriller.
  46. The Bridesmaid
    This 2004 French feature seems concerned not so much with the psychopathology of everyday life as with psychopaths who lurk behind the everyday.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Big House
    The prototype for every saga of the slammer to come, starring Chester Morris, Wallace Beery, and Robert Montgomery. Beery is particularly good in his toughest tough-guy role.
  48. Sicko
    There are fewer jokes this time around, and Moore makes a point of not even appearing on-screen for a good 40 minutes, putting more emphasis on his arguments and less on his comic persona.
  49. Monster
    Honest curiosity and observation are what make this work, and in this respect Christina Ricci (as Wuornos's lover, Selby Wall) is almost as good as Theron.
  50. The Lady and the Duke
    This is absorbing throughout--not just a history lesson but, as always with Rohmer, a story about individuals
  51. Daddy Longlegs
    Ronald Bronstein, who wrote and directed the disquieting indie Frownland, steps in front of the cameras for this similarly lo-fi drama, and his loose-limbed performance as the brash, irresponsible father of two young boys establishes him as a genuine triple threat.
  52. Tabloid
    Morris's trademark device of superimposing giant type over his talking heads - Willing! Manacled Mormon! - often made me wonder if Morris were exposing the world of tabloid journalism or participating in it.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Monkey Business
    A bit disorganized, it carries hints of surrealism (especially in Harpo's extraordinary performance) that later flowered in Duck Soup.
  54. Key Largo
    A little windy and rhetorical for my taste, but still one of John Huston’s best efforts (1948), a melodrama of ethics that soundly represses the Maxwell Anderson play it was based on (the ending is actually a lift from To Have and Have Not).
  55. Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys
    I couldn't always keep up with what was happening, but I was never bored, and the questions raised reflect the mysteries of everyday life.
  56. Black Hawk Down
    Though passionate, doesn't pity or flatter the rank and file.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Divine Intervention
    Slight film of mostly comic tableaux.
  58. For a Few Dollars More
    Leone's artful editing of close-ups to communicate the characters' spatial relationships is always a pleasure, and here he unveils his stylistic signature—extreme close-ups of the characters' eyes—as Van Cleef surveys the villain's wanted poster.
  59. Woman of the Year
    George Stevens’s plodding, straitlaced direction takes much of the edge off this 1941 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle.
  60. Black God, White Devil
    The fusion of European and Afro-Brazilian elements–dialogue, exquisite black-and-white images, and music by Villa-Lobos–is startlingly original and poetical in conveying the hope and despair of the oppressed.
  61. Rize
    Emotionally charged but not entirely honest documentary.
  62. The Ground Truth
    It's become a critical cliche to say that everyone in the U.S. should see a particular war documentary, but even the most selfish citizen might want to check out The Ground Truth, because unlike the Iraqi victims of the war, the American ones are all around us.
  63. The Decay of Fiction
    O'Neill showed in his 1989 "Water and Power" a poetic feeling for human evanescence in relation to southern California locales; here he proves equally astute at showing how our sense of history becomes tainted by and entangled with Hollywood myths.
  64. Iron Island
    A fascinating allegory of modern-day Iran.
  65. Salt of the Earth
    Leftist propaganda of a very high order, powerful and intelligent even when the film registers in spots as naive or dated.
  66. My Favorite Blonde
    One of the better Bob Hope vehicles.
  67. Humpday
    The scenes between husband and wife are spectacularly awkward and arresting, though the movie grows more dubious the nearer the guys get to their shooting session in a local hotel room.
  68. Shakespeare Behind Bars
    This fascinating video documentary covers a nine-month rehearsal of Shakespeare's final play by inmates at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in La Grange, Kentucky.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Heartbreak Kid
    A failure of resolution mars it, but it is diverting enough for the first couple of reels to make it worth seeing.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Mother's Smile
    In his best film in years, Marco Bellocchio crafts a stringently moral tale that carries a hint of horror.
  71. Oliver!
    Carol Reed's careful if passionless adaptation of the musical was mounted handsomely enough to win the best-picture Oscar back in 1969. In retrospect, it seems emblematic of the triviality Reed descended to in the last years of his career.
  72. The Sea Inside
    A film about freedom as well as death, this won't suit every taste, but it rewards close attention and has moments of saving humor.
  73. The Others
    The payoff matters at least as much as the setup, and this story's secret is way too easy to guess.
  74. Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
    In the interview, a charmingly self-effacing Basquiat displays a winning smile; perhaps no one could explain what drove him, or his 1988 death from a heroin overdose at 27, but we do learn of his alienation from his family.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fake It So Real
    One of the more admirable qualities of Robert Greene's Fake It So Real, is how it creates such a rich sense of place with such a mundane setting.
  76. Flushed Away
    This delightful computer animation is less twee than Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, with more action and a broader American sensibility.
  77. Awakenings
    But the material is still powerful, and the offbeat story of the patients remains both engrossing and moving even after all this abridgment.
  78. Western
    A rambling but ultimately rather affecting comedy-drama by a talented filmmaker who's almost completely unknown here, this has a deft feel for lower-middle-class life in rural France that registered strongly on its home front.
  79. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
    This 1996 cartoon feature, based on Hugo's 1831 Notre Dame de Paris, is surely one of Disney's ugliest and least imaginative efforts. It's especially unattractive in its fast editing and zooms.
  80. Duck Season
    The characters' behavior isn't always believable, and the jerky rhythm takes some getting used to (there may be more attitude here than observation). But the defiant absence of any conventional plot has a cumulative charm.
  81. Inception
    Inception delivers dazzling special effects and a boatload of stars, but it sags and eventually buckles under the weight of its complicated premise.
  82. Serenity
    Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things) is the sinister operative dispatched to retrieve the ship's psychic passenger, who as played by Summer Glau kickboxes better than Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi combined.
  83. Mysterious Object at Noon
    Experimental films are frequently criticized for being boring because they say and do too little, but the best of them put us in exhilarating overdrive because they offer too much.
  84. The Life of Jesus
    Despite its title, Bruno Dumont's extraordinary first feature is not about Christ, at least not on any literal level. The Life of Jesus may not be about religion, but like the films of Bresson, it is about redemption.
  85. The Last King of Scotland
    Of course no Western director can make a movie about Africa without being accused of colonialism himself, and some critics have faulted The Last King of Scotland for focusing on its white hero as black corpses pile up around him. But although the movie takes place on an international political stage, it's still a drama of individual allegiance.
  86. Cast Away
    Too full of its own heavy breathing to work as the primordial storytelling it's aiming for--a so-so adventure story is closer to the mark.
  87. Gun Crazy
    Lewis's long takes and sure command of film noir staples (shadows, fog, rain-soaked streets) make this a stunning technical achievement, but it's something more--a gangster film that explores the limits of the form with feeling and responsibility.
  88. Nostalghia
    It aims for a hushed, hypnotic, incantatory effect, and it does succeed in inducing some kind of trance.
  89. Tomboy
    Writer-director Celine Sciamma breaks little ground here, but her story is nicely scaled to the gender-rigid world of childhood, where boys playing soccer together take as much pride in their spitting skills as any scored goal.
  90. Farewell
    Carion might have found a more artful way to dramatize the case's geopolitical impact, but this is still pretty interesting stuff.
  91. The Orphanage
    Despite a few bloodcurdling shocks, this handsome Spanish ghost story from producer Guillermo del Toro follows in the suggestive, richly romantic tradition of the old Val Lewton chillers.
  92. Joe Gould's Secret
    A movie to savor.
  93. Ocean's Eleven
    A pretty good caper comedy for 11-year-old boys -- "heist thriller" would make it sound too ambitious.
  94. End of the Century
    Genuinely sad: few bands have burst onto the scene with such a perfectly realized look, sound, and philosophy or been more trapped by their own meatheaded genius.
  95. Red Lights
    Director Cedric Kahn, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, and Gilles Marchand collaborated on the well-honed script, derived from a Georges Simenon novel. The film works well with quiet tensions, but becomes less convincing and interesting once it moves beyond them.
  96. Wonder Boys
    The casting of Michael Douglas against type as an over-the-hill novelist and writing professor is the sort of clever move that wins undeserved Oscars.
  97. Mysterious Skin
    The result is flawed but frequently haunting.
  98. Smooth Talk
    Joyce Chopra's independent feature plays uncomfortably like two movies jammed into one: the first is a slow, exaggeratedly naturalistic portrait of teenage alienation in the shopping mall culture of California, the second is a violent, stylized gothic shocker. Both films have their modest qualities; it's just that Chopra hasn't found an intelligible transition between the two very different approaches.
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