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. Used Cars
    For once a comedy in the Animal House school that knows what it's was about: the vulgarity of the gags matches the vulgarity of the subject, and this 1980 film becomes a fierce, cathartically funny celebration of the low, the cheap, the venal—in short, America. Most of the time, I didn't know whether to laugh or shudder, and I ended up doing a lot of both. It was Steve Martin who said, “Comedy isn't pretty,” but it's Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, the writer-directors here, who prove it; this is the Dawn of the Dead of slapstick.
  2. Séraphine
    Provost and cowriter Marc Abdelnour explore the mutable boundaries between spirituality, naivete, genius, and madness, showing how the two outsiders and polar opposites cultivated a mutual understanding.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Blue Angel
    Reeks with decay and sexuality.
  4. Such a Long Journey
    It's scary and hilarious, with a magical, nonrealist tone, and it emphasizes physical comedy as much as disturbing, beautifully integrated metaphors.
  5. Shrek
    A movie whose story may be even more innovative than the superreal solidity of the animated characters.
  6. Ran
    A stunning achievement in epic cinema.
  7. Diner
    Levinson's dialogue feels fresh and improvised, yet it hits its mark every time, and the performances he gets are complex and original (particularly from Mickey Rourke, who plays a lothario with a late-blooming conscience) - enough so that Levinson's occasional forced "cinematic" effects cause barely a ripple in the smooth, naturalistic surface.
  8. The Freshman
    Sweet and warm as well as manic, this is full of loopy surprises, and the supporting cast (including Penelope Ann Miller, Bruno Kirby, Steve Bushak, Maximilian Schell, and Bert Parks, playing himself in his film debut) is uniformly fine.
  9. Crimson Gold
    Kiarostami's brilliantly suggestive script, which is quite unlike anything else he's written and is marred only slightly by one of his obligatory sages turning up gratuitously near the beginning.
  10. The Taste of Tea
    "Weird but cool," as one character says -- yet the movie is also remarkably touching.
  11. Ballast
    Hammer overplays his indie hand with an abrupt and unsatisfactory ending, but his three leads are so credible that their aching, tongue-tied characters linger in the memory.
  12. Under Capricorn
    Shot in astonishingly elaborate long takes, this is the kind of film that finds the most brilliant poetry in the slightest movement of the camera—a paradigm of cinematic expression.
  13. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
    By placing so much emphasis on aspects of life and work that other films routinely omit, mystify, or skirt over, Akerman forges a major statement, not only in a feminist context but also in a way that tells us something about the lives we all live.
  14. Happy-Go-Lucky
    Leigh pushes the story in a more interesting direction, asking whether people find happiness or simply will it on themselves.
  15. Ruthless People
    Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, the directors of the smash Airplane! and the underrated Top Secret!, here turn their hands to a more traditional character comedy, yet this film's funniest effects still come through their imaginative, frequently astonishing manipulations of the narrative line. It's a rare kind of craftsmanship, and it produces a rare kind of pleasure.
  16. Face/Off
    Woo's third Hollywood movie, Face/Off, is the first to balance his visual imagination with the emotional intensity of his Hong Kong films.
  17. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
    The film is both wise and tender in its treatment of relationships -- between birds, between people, and between birds and people.
  18. Murderball
    Exhilarating.
  19. Solaris (1972)
    Tarkovsky's eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker's boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances by all the principals.
  20. Aberdeen
    Sumptuously hued in its emotional and visual tones, this drama is also a fairy tale, its plot contrivances beautifully justified by its minimalism.
    • Chicago Reader
  21. Take Shelter
    Writer-director Jeff Nichols maintains a cagey balancing act for much of the movie, refusing to specify whether his protagonist is a prophet or a madman, yet in the end this doesn't really matter: the storm inside him is plenty real.
  22. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
    In Ford’s superbly creative hands, it becomes perhaps the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition.
  23. The Sleepy Time Gal
    Months after seeing this, I still feel I know most of these people as if they were old friends.
  24. His Girl Friday
    Hawks’s great insight—taking the Hecht-MacArthur Front Page and making the Hildy Johnson character a woman—has been justly celebrated; it deepens the comedy in remarkable ways.
  25. Cinderella
    This 1950 effort shows Disney at the tail end of his best period, when his backgrounds were still luminous with depth and detail and his incidental characters still had range and bite.
  26. Mona Lisa
    Director Neil Jordan (Danny Boy, The Company of Wolves) does a good job of re-creating the dark romanticism of American film noir, and if the project does feel a little like a hand-me-down, it is graced by Jordan's fine, contemporary feel for bright, artificial colors and creatively mangled space.
  27. 'Round Midnight
    Gordon’s remarkable as the emotionally disarranged, psychologically disintegrating jazzman, and when the little Frenchman calls him a genius, you suddenly realize what that overused term implies: not moral worthiness or superior personhood but a giftedness beyond accounting that hardly belongs to character at all.
  28. Love and Death on Long Island
    A witty, canny meditation on the power of pop culture in general and the rationalizations of cinephilia and film criticism in particular.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Serpico
    A virtuoso performance by Al Pacino and some expert location work by Sidney Lumet add up to a tour de force genre piece. (Review of Original Release)
  30. Tony Takitani
    The hues are so muted you may remember this as a black-and-white film, but its emotions are as vivid as primary colors.
  31. The Mothman Prophecies
    This is the scariest movie I've ever seen.
  32. Night of the Living Dead
    Made for pennies in Pittsburgh. Its premise—the unburied dead arise and eat the living—is a powerful combination of the fantastic and the dumbly literal. Over its short, furious course, the picture violates so many strong taboos—cannibalism, incest, necrophilia—that it leaves audiences giddy and hysterical.
  33. Eight Legged Freaks
    A cunning and hilarious update of the giant-insect movies of the 1950s.
  34. A Bug's Life
    Full of adventure, spectacle, light romance, and the kind of suspense that doesn't require an unpredictable outcome to make your spine tingle.
  35. The Quiet American
    Caine has already been cited as a likely Oscar nominee for his performance, which is clearly one of the most nuanced to date from this first-rate actor, and Fraser is funny and effective as a foil to the old pro.
  36. Mikey and Nicky
    One of the most innovative, engaging, and insightful films of that turbulent era of American moviemaking.
  37. Riding Giants
    This is vicarious cinema at its best.
  38. Up
    Writer-directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson present hilarious insights into bird brains and canine psychology and treat thornier human emotions deftly.
  39. Duck Soup
    The Marx Brothers' best movie (1933) and, not coincidentally, the one with the strongest director—Leo McCarey, who had the flexibility to give the boys their head and the discipline to make some formal sense of it.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Gleaners & I
    Beautiful, absorbing, and touching, this film is a mind-expanding experience not to be missed.
  41. Beyond the Gates
    Critics have faulted this 2005 British feature about the Rwandan genocide for focusing on a couple of white characters instead of the 800,000 Tutsis who were slaughtered, but such easy judgments miss the point entirely: this is a spiritual drama, not a political one, drawing a thick line between our good intentions and the selfish choices we ultimately make.
  42. Piccadilly [re-release]
    This remarkable British silent (1929) is special in many ways.
  43. I Am Love
    The grand architecture of Milan and the icy rhythms of composer John Adams set the tone for this elegant Italian drama about the suffocating power of family, wealth, and tradition.
  44. Titanic
    One hell of a movie.
  45. Marwencol
    This moving documentary sidesteps the usual art-world debates over the authenticity and legitimacy of outsider work; instead director Jeff Malmberg simply immerses us in Hogancamp's world, just as Hogancamp immerses himself in the title town and its horrors.
  46. Late Spring (1949)
    Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 film inaugurated his majestic late period: it’s here that he decisively renounces melodrama (and, indeed, most surface action of any kind) and lets his camera settle into the still, long-take contemplation of his gently drawn characters.
  47. Telling Lies in America
    Under the thoughtful direction of Guy Ferland - what emerges is solid and affecting.
  48. Message in a Bottle
    It may not be “The Bridges of Madison County,” but the latest Kevin Costner romance is nearly as good as they get.
  49. Jing Ke ci Qin Wang
    This is a powerful story and a splendid spectacle.
  50. Gosford Park
    There are even more characters of interest here than in "Nashville."
  51. The War of the Roses
    A compellingly watchable, suspenseful, and often funny treatment of a grim subject--the hatred that can build up in a long-term marriage--that also becomes an indirect commentary on yuppie materialism.
  52. Hairspray
    Not only Waters's best movie, but a crossover gesture that expands his appeal without compromising his vision one iota; Ricki Lake as the hefty young heroine is especially delightful.
  53. Inside Man
    A superior nail-biter.
  54. Waking Life
    Exciting and innovative feature.
  55. The Insider
    Almost cagily creating understated drama from high-stakes reality.
  56. Man on the Train
    Their calm assurance -- Hallyday as a grizzled icon, Rochefort as a melancholy mensch -- is a pleasure to behold.
  57. Sound and Fury
    Most fascinating about this PBS documentary is the unflinching look at the dynamics of the three generations involved.
  58. Mad Max
    Miller's work has been compared to Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, but where the Leone films are about amorality, the Mad Max movies are purely and simply amoral—some of the most determinedly formalist filmmaking this side of Michael Snow.
  59. Thirteen
    With the devout collaboration of the cast, Williams blurs the boundary between experience and storytelling as if the distinction were not only irrelevant but presumptuous.
  60. Nurse Betty
    This offbeat and unpredictable comedy-thriller throws so many curveballs, one right after another, that I doubt I've had more fun at an American movie this year.
  61. Project X
    Plenty of strikes against this--moronic story line, obligatory animal mugging, more "awwwww" opportunities than any film since 3 Men and a Cradle--but it's still one of the most accomplished pulp fantasies in a while...When everything finally comes together, it works wonderfully well.
  62. The Shop Around the Corner
    Interwoven with subplots centered on the other members of the shop's little family, the romance proceeds through Lubitsch's brilliant deployment of point of view, allowing the audience to enter the perceptions of each individual character at exactly the right moment to develop maximum sympathy and suspense.
  63. The Hustler
    A postnoir melodrama with metaphysical trimmings, it does remarkable things with mood and pacing, and the two matches with Gleason as Minnesota Fats are indelible.
  64. Time Out
    Powerful.
  65. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    This installment delivers more of the pleasures that made Tarantino the wunderkind of 90s cinema: offbeat scumbag characters, narrative sleight of hand, an extraordinary visual sense, and affectionate genre pillaging.
  66. Goldfinger
    This 1964 entry is the most enjoyable of the James Bond thrillers starring Sean Connery—perhaps because it's the most comic and cartoony in look as well as conception. Still, it's every bit as imperialist and misogynistic as the other screen adventures based on Ian Fleming's books.
  67. Road to Nowhere
    His first feature in 21 years, this is also Monte Hellman's finest work, a hall-of-mirrors masterpiece about moviemaking with diversions more complex, and more enticing, than in the director's previous efforts (Ride in the Whirlwind, Two-Lane Blacktop).
  68. Band of Outsiders
    This remains one of Godard's most appealing and underrated films, relatively relaxed and strangely optimistic.
  69. The Wrong Man
    This is a highly personal and even religious expression of Hitchcock concerning the vicissitudes of fate, predicated on his lifelong fear that anyone can be wrongly accused of a crime and placed behind bars.
  70. Of Gods and Men
    Alternately harrowing and humbling, this is a story of ordinary men whose compassion is tested in the cruelest, most profound fashion.
  71. The House of Mirth
    The cast as a whole is astonishing--especially Gillian Anderson as Lily and Dan Aykroyd in his finest role to date.
  72. Heaven
    It's Tykwer's most assured picture to date, and like much of Kieslowski's best work it qualifies simultaneously as engrossing narrative and philosophical parable.
  73. The Triplets of Belleville
    Sly, inventively drawn, brilliantly executed cartoon.
  74. Marion Bridge
    It has all the virtues of fine stage drama: narrative economy, honest emotion, and characters so closely defined that the most pedestrian encounters between them are revelatory.
  75. Fear(s) of the Dark
    Sinister and beautiful, this mostly black-and-white animation from France culls the talents of six artists and designers.
  76. When We Were Kings
    Gast does a nice job of building the suspense leading up to the fight, fleshing out the story with some good color commentary by a handful of people (filmed by director Taylor Hackford, who wisely convinced Gast that these reminiscences and remarks would fill in some historical gaps).
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Duck, You Sucker
    A marvelous sense of detail and spectacular effects--good fun all the way.
  78. Separate Lies
    At 85 minutes the movie is beautifully focused, reaching deep into its characters as they confront terrible secrets but never sacrificing momentum as the mystery unravels.
  79. Domestic Violence
    Devastating.
  80. American Beauty
    A brilliant satirical diagnosis of what's most screwed up about life in this country, especially when it comes to sexual frustration and kiddie porn.
  81. From Russia with Love
    For my money, still the best Bond, with a screwball plotline that keeps the locales changing and the surprises coming—even when reason dictates that the picture should be over. Lotte Lenya and Robert Shaw make a creepy pair, and Daniela Bianchi embodies the essence of centerfold sex, circa 1964.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Son's Room
    With tender skill, Moretti illuminates Samuel Beckett's phrase "I can't go on -- I'll go on."
  83. Three Kings
    The visuals are wild, the sound track has the audacity to underscore the subtext instead of just echoing the obvious, the comedy is irreverent and occasionally slapstick, and the metaphorical details are consistently strong.
  84. The Shawshank Redemption
    Gripping...compelling.
  85. Sabotage
    Freely adapted from Conrad's The Secret Agent, this 1936 study of murderous intimacy is ripe for reevaluation as the masterpiece of Alfred Hitchcock's British period.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Lust for Life
    In a compositional sense, the film has a realistic feel, but Minnelli’s graphic mise-en-scene and poetic transitions give the impression of moving paintings, and when the film is at its most dazzling, there’s a sense that the director is reshaping the very nature of existence.
  87. Top Secret!
    This is the least well-known of the madcap satirical comedies of Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker (Airplane!, The Naked Gun), and by all counts the weirdest. But the richness of its ideas makes it my favorite. The plot combines the rock musical with the spy thriller (not to mention assorted other genres), and the comic invention is fairly constant.
  88. A Streetcar Named Desire
    They are also great performances, and Hawks could have taken heart from Kim Hunter's work, which provides superb, understated balance to the famous fireworks of Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. Kazan's direction is often questionably, distractingly baroque, swelling up the considerable subtlety of the Tennessee Williams play, but if the hothouse style was ever justified, this is the occasion.
  89. Food, Inc.
    Smart, gripping, and untainted by the influence of Michael Moore, this muckraking 2008 documentary transcends anticorporate demonology to build a visceral but reasoned case against modern agribusiness.
  90. Eyes Without a Face [re-release]
    As absurd and as beautiful as a fairy tale, this chilling, nocturnal black-and-white masterpiece was originally released in this country dubbed and under the title "The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus," but it's much too elegant to warrant the usual "psychotronic" treatment.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tropical Malady
    A spellbinding, beautiful, enigmatic film with a mysterious, allusive two-part structure.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Sting
    The Chicago locations are well used by veteran director George Roy Hill, and the wonderful 30s movie style (lots of horizontal and vertical wipes, flipping screens, irises in and out) enhances the sense of good, harmless, nostalgic fun.
  93. 35 Shots of Rum
    It's a beautiful picture but very quietly so, and definitely not for the ADHD set.
  94. Sweet Sixteen
    I'm not prone to like socially deterministic films of this kind, yet Loach is so masterful at squeezing nuance and truth out of the form that I was completely won over.
  95. The Artist
    This effort often manages to duplicate the magical pantomime of the era; a lovely scene in which Bejo drapes herself in the arms of a hung jacket as if it were a human lover could have come straight out of a Marion Davies picture.
  96. Yi Yi
    Yang seems to miss nothing as he interweaves shifting viewpoints and poignant emotional refrains.
  97. Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
    Despite all the horror and anguish, the film ends on a note of serene acceptance, deep gratitude toward the dead, and wonder at the unlikely miracle of life.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Finding Nemo
    Aquatic joyride.
  99. High and Low
    I would nominate this authoritative 1962 adaptation of Ed McBain’s novel The King’s Ransom as Akira Kurosawa’s best nonperiod picture, though Ikiru and Rhapsody in August are tough competitors.
  100. Set Me Free
    Nicely acted and inflected, this is a very fresh piece of work.
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