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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    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Strawberry Blonde
    A delicious bit of Americana (1941) by Raoul Walsh, capturing superbly the 1890s ambience of Walsh’s own early years.
  2. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
    The screenplay is by Norman Krasna, a hack of the lowest degree, but Hitchcock shapes it smoothly to his personal ends.
  3. Kitty Foyle
    Sam Wood, the El Supremo of Hollywood hackdom, squired this one to glory.
  4. The Philadelphia Story
    George Cukor gives it the royal treatment with a splendid supporting cast.
    • Chicago Reader
  5. The Letter
    A better-than-average Bette Davis vehicle (1940), well constructed by that shrewd old hack, William Wyler, from a Somerset Maugham play.
  6. Fantasia
    A masterpiece of the art of animation. The concept and some of the episodes are tainted with kitsch, but there's no other animated film with its scope and ambition—it is, in Otis Ferguson's words, “one of the strange and beautiful things that have happened in the world.”
  7. Foreign Correspondent
    This film contains one of Hitchcock's most famous set pieces—an assassination in the rain—but otherwise remains a second-rate effort, as immensely enjoyable as it is.
  8. They Drive by Night
    Walsh may not have been directly responsible for the structure (the second half is a remake of an earlier Warners melodrama, Bordertown), but his personal response to the material puts it across.
  9. Pride and Prejudice
    Typically overstuffed MGM prestige product (1940), but one that came out surprisingly well, with a minimum of Eng. Lit. posturing and some elegance of design.
  10. My Favorite Wife
    Garson Kanin directed this late, trivial screwball comedy (1940), and while it’s pleasant enough, the freshness is definitely off the bloom.
  11. Rebecca
    Through its first two-thirds it is as perfect a myth of adolescence as any of the Disney films, documenting the childlike, nameless heroine's initiation into the adult mysteries of sex, death, and identity, and the impossibility of reconciling these forces with family strictures.
  12. The Grapes of Wrath
    Ford's admirers have rightly tended to play this down in favor of his later and more personal westerns, but there's much to admire here in Gregg Toland's sun-beaten photography and Henry Fonda's meticulous performance as Steinbeck's dashboard saint, Tom Joad.
  13. Pinocchio
    Along with Dumbo, which immediately followed it, this 1940 classic, the second of the Disney animated features, is probably the best in terms of visual detail and overall imagination as well as narrative sweep.
  14. Remember the Night
    The loose, graceful script is by Preston Sturges (one of his last before he turned to directing), and it partakes of a softness and nostalgia that seldom surfaced in his own films. Mitchell Leisen, the director, serves the material very well with his slightly distanced, glowing style.
  15. 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.
  16. Gone with the Wind
    A critic-proof movie if there ever was one: it isn't all that good, but somehow it's great.
  17. 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.
  18. Destry Rides Again
    The material makes no demands on the talents of James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, but they enter gamely into the farcical tone set by director George Marshall.
  19. Another Thin Man
    This 1939 release is still watchable, though the spirit is now sitcom.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
    This is classic Capracorn, with the greatest girl cynic of the 30s, Jean Arthur.
  21. Jamaica Inn
    By common consent, this is 1939 drama is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s poorest and least personal works, though it has some compensations.
  22. The Wizard of Oz
    I don't find the film light or joyful in the least—an air of primal menace hangs about it, which may be why I love it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Midnight
    Funny and forgettable.
  24. Stagecoach
    Certainly it's the weakest of Ford's major westerns, burdened with a schematic and pretentious Dudley Nichols script (the "cross section of society" on board the stagecoach), but its virtues remain intact.
  25. Intermezzo: A Love Story
    The picture is amazingly compact (70 minutes), and the swift pacing helps temper the goo. The film is no classic, but it's a good example of its type.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Lady Vanishes
    This is vintage Hitchcock, with the pacing and superb editing that marked not only his 30s style but eventually every film that had any aspirations whatever to achieving suspense and rhythm.
  27. Bringing Up Baby
    Time has revealed its brilliance, as well as the apparent impossibility of its like ever being seen again.
  28. Young and Innocent
    Made in 1937 by a relatively young and innocent Alfred Hitchcock, this British feature tends to be overshadowed by The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, but actually it’s only the uncharismatic casting that holds it back from being one of the most entertaining of Hitchcock’s English films.
  29. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
    Though the film isn't as psychologically penetrating as some of Disney's later work, it retains the Freudian ferocity of the Grimm brothers fairy tale, as well as a fair measure of the scatological humor of the Disney shorts. David Hand was the supervising director, but Uncle Walt passed on every frame.
  30. Nothing Sacred
    The definitive Ben Hecht screenplay.
  31. The Awful Truth
    The issues deepen in a subtle, natural way: the film begins as a trifle and ends as something beautiful and affirmative. A classic.
  32. Kid Galahad
    It’s pretty much all genre and no nuance, though Michael Curtiz’s direction is surprisingly soft and light.
  33. 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.
  34. After the Thin Man
    The most elegant title for a sequel in film history belongs, happily, to one of the most elegant sequels.
  35. My Man Godfrey
    Gregory La Cava's improvisational style received its highest critical acclaim for this 1936 film, a marginally Marxist exercise in class confusion during the Depression.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Swing Time
    Arlene Croce has called it a movie about the myth of Astaire and Rogers and the world they lived in, and that's about as good a description as any.
  37. Show Boat
    James Whale’s brilliant and surprisingly delicate 1936 rendition of the Kern and Hammerstein musical, which was based on an Edna Ferber novel, is infinitely superior to the dull 1951 MGM Technicolor remake and, interestingly enough, less racist.
  38. The Great Ziegfeld
    It’s amazingly dull, even with William Powell in the lead and guest appearances by the likes of Ray Bolger and Fanny Brice, so of course it won the Best Picture Oscar for 1936.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Captain Blood
    Michael Curtiz, the most polished of Warner's studio technicians, starts Flynn off royally.
  40. Mutiny on the Bounty
    As with most Thalberg projects (the director of record was Frank Lloyd, but he barely matters), it's tainted by a fair amount of middlebrow stuffiness, but it's a fleet piece of storytelling and serves to enshrine one of the great ham performances of all time, Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Top Hat
    This 1935 musical finds Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers at the top of their form.
  42. The 39 Steps
    As an artist, Alfred Hitchcock surpassed this early achievement many times in his career, but for sheer entertainment value it still stands in the forefront of his work.
  43. The Raven
    The direction of this clammy 1935 horror item is credited to Louis Friedlander, which is actually Lew Landers in hiding—perhaps understandably.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Bride of Frankenstein
    Whale added an element of playful sexuality to this version, casting the proceedings in a bizarre visual framework that makes this film a good deal more surreal than the original.
  45. The Man Who Knew Too Much
    Although the film is fast and consistently clever, it is more deeply flawed than any other Hitchcock film of the period, failing to find a thematic connection between its imaginative set pieces.
  46. Strauss' Great Waltz
    A curiosity of the first order.
  47. Roberta
    William A. Seiter directed this 1935 release, with a light touch but not enough style to transcend the machinations of the trifling plot.
  48. Imitation of Life
    Douglas Sirk's famous 1959 remake was pure metaphysics; this version emphasizes the social content, particularly in its Depression-era attention to class nuances.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Gay Divorcee
    Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were first teamed in Flying Down to Rio, but this 1934 feature was their first effort together as stars—and it worked beautifully, with great Cole Porter songs like "Night and Day," and Con Conrad and Herb Magidson's "The Continental."
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Thin Man
    As Nick and Nora Charles, William Powell and Myrna Loy function as the most sophisticated, insolent, and healthy married couple on-screen.
  51. Death Takes a Holiday
    Mitchell Leisen, the director, hadn't yet developed the light touch with actors he would display memorably later in the decade, though some of his trademark pictorial effects are in evidence.
  52. It Happened One Night
    This is Capra at his best, very funny and very light, with a minimum of populist posturing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Flying Down to Rio
    The first screen pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Pretty jerky, and not enough of Fred and Ginger; still, it has the “Carioca.”
  54. The Son of Kong
    Ernest Schoedsack's sequel to his monster hit of 1933, rushed out the same year. The slapdash production shows in a wavering tone and a paucity of special effects. With Robert Armstrong and Helen Mack; the animation, what there is of it, is by the legendary Willis O'Brien.
  55. 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.
  56. The Invisible Man
    James Whale's 1933 film plays more like a British folk comedy than a horror movie; it's full of the same deft character twists that made his Bride of Frankenstein a classic.
  57. The Blood of a Poet
    Despite its flaws, the film remains a fascinating souvenir of a vanished avant-garde.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Footlight Parade
    One of the best of the Warner Brothers showbiz musicals (1933), with James Cagney turning in a dynamite performance as an enterprising producer, and Busby Berkeley contributing some of his most engaging and bizarre production numbers.
  59. Bombshell
    One of Jean Harlow's best pictures, this 1933 feature is a merciless satire of Hollywood, with Harlow as a movie star and Lee Tracy as her publicity agent.
  60. King Kong
    Willis O'Brien did the stop-action animation for this 1933 feature, which is richer in character than most of the human cast.
  61. 42nd Street
    This 1933 film is the best known of the Warner Brothers Depression-era musicals, though it doesn't compare in dash and extravagance to later entries in the cycle.
  62. No Man of Her Own
    The dialogue slackens after the first half hour, but the stars have some fine comic moments together, and the intimate precode encounters are pretty sexy.
  63. Three on a Match
    Intimations of dope addiction drive the compact plot, which resorts to some stiff exposition early on but careens toward a slam-bang ending.
  64. One Way Passage
    Unaccountably, it works.
  65. Grand Hotel
    In some ways this 1932 item is the definitive MGM film, in which the direction (Edmund Goulding), screenplay (William A. Drake), and cinematography (William Daniels) all seem deliberately pale, the better to set off the glitter of the stars; they’re like jewels mounted in a deliberately neutral display case.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Horse Feathers
    This 1932 release was the first Marx film to take on the Depression, and the brothers manage to satirize everything from education to prostitution and bootlegging.
  67. Number 17
    Most of the film is set in an abandoned house, where enjoyably murky intrigues abound, and the last ten minutes feature a chase sequence with miniatures that is almost as much fun.
  68. Scarface
    A dark, brutal, exhilaratingly violent film, blending comedy and horror in a manner that suggests Chico Marx let loose with a live machine gun.
  69. Freaks
    If the heart of the horror movie is the annihilating Other, the Other has never appeared with more vividness, teasing sympathy, and terror than in this 1932 film by Tod Browning.
  70. Shanghai Express
    More action oriented than the other Dietrich-Sternberg films, this 1932 production is nevertheless one of the most elegantly styled.
  71. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, this 1932 screen adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic is a remarkable achievement that deserves to be much better known.
  72. Safe in Hell
    Wellman’s splendid direction animates an otherwise static script, deftly blending comedic moments with surprisingly dark undertones. This 1931 drama may lack the punch of Wellman’s The Public Enemy, released the same year, but it’s still a fine display of his talents.
  73. East of Shanghai
    This early Hitchcock film shows more signs of the artist to come than any of his other British movies, pointing forward in particular to the deep sexual themes of Marnie and the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Frankenstein
    One of the most deservedly famous and chilling horror films of all time.
    • 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.
  76. The Skin Game
    A rather stagy and creaky early talkie (1931) by Alfred Hitchcock, adapted from a John Galsworthy play.
  77. The Public Enemy
    Time hasn’t been terribly kind to this 1931 gangster drama, which suffers more than it should from the glitches of early sound. But James Cagney’s portrayal of a bootlegging runt is truly electrifying (he’d already made three films, but this one made him a star), and Jean Harlow makes the tartiest tart imaginable.
  78. The Front Page
    Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's perennial stage comedy about yellow journalism in Chicago hasn't much to offer in the way of action, but in this 1931 adaptation director Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front) manages to inject a fair amount of visual energy to complement the firecracker dialogue.
  79. City Lights
    A beautiful example of Chaplin's ability to turn narrative fragments into emotional wholes. The two halves of the film are sentiment and slapstick. They are not blended but woven into a pattern as eccentric as it is sublime.
  80. Dracula
    Universal's classic from 1931, directed by Tod Browning. The opening scenes, set in Dracula's castle, are magnificent—grave, stately, and severe. But the film becomes unbearably static once the action moves to England, and much of the morbid sexual tension is dissipated.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Blue Angel
    Reeks with decay and sexuality.
  82. Murder!
    Hitchcock was still marking out his territory at this point, and the film is heavy and vague around the edges. But it remains a crucial insight into the development of one of the cinema’s greatest artists, and so, essential viewing.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Animal Crackers
    This is second-level Marx Brothers, which means it's funny but not hysterical.
  84. All Quiet on the Western Front
    Lewis Milestone's powerful 1930 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's antiwar novel, starring Lew Ayres and Louis Wolheim, deserves its reputation as a classic.
  85. Juno and the Paycock
    Though praised when it came out (1930), Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Sean O’Casey’s play, with some of the original Dublin cast (including Sara Allgood as Juno), is a fairly deadly case of canned theater that’s pretty close to what Hitchcock many years later would refer to as “photographs of people talking.”
    • 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.
  87. The Farmer's Wife
    Hitchcock disliked the film, but it offers an unusual glimpse of the master before he settled into thrillers.
  88. The Manxman
    It’s no masterpiece, but it’s certainly something to see.
  89. Blackmail
    Like most of his British films, Blackmail is a sign of things to come rather than Hitchcock at his height, but it shouldn’t be missed.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Cocoanuts
    An eminently watchable antique, this was the Marx Brothers' first film — a literal recording of their Broadway smash hit.
  91. The Broadway Melody
    The staging is wooden, the story insipid, and the dialogue sequences mostly painful, but the film’s integration of song, dance, and story (“100% All Talking! 100% All Singing! 100% All Dancing!”) was a clear narrative advance over the music pictures being released by Warner Brothers and Fox, and the score is great.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Man with a Movie Camera
    Just a little over an hour, it nevertheless towers over film history as an example par excellence of cinema’s ability to communicate in unique and transgressive ways.
  93. The Passion of Joan of Arc
    Dreyer’s radical approach to constructing space and the slow intensity of his mobile style make this “difficult” in the sense that, like all the greatest films, it reinvents the world from the ground up. It’s also painful in a way that all Dreyer’s tragedies are, but it will continue to live long after most commercial movies have vanished from memory.
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