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. All About Eve
    The dialogue is sharp and justly famous, though writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz has trouble putting it into the mouths of his actors: nothing sounds remotely natural, and the film is pervaded by the out-of-sync sense of staircase wit—this is a movie about what people wished they'd said. The hoped-for tone of Restoration comedy never quite materializes, perhaps because Mankiewicz's cynicism is only skin-deep, but the film's tinny brilliance still pleases.
  2. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
    Wise, gentle, and simply constructed.
  3. The War Within
    A few plot details strain credibility, but the characters (particularly the friend's sister and little boy) are persuasively depicted.
  4. Dinner Rush
    A nicely shaped script by Chicagoans Rick Shaughnessy and Brian Kalata makes this independent comedy drama a pleasure to watch.
  5. Lovely & Amazing
    What keeps all this from being trite and self-indulgent is Holofcener's willingness to make her characters' neuroses unattractive and self-destructive instead of cute and endearing.
  6. Treasure Island
    With Bobby Driscoll and Robert Newton, in hog heaven as Long John Silver.
    • Chicago Reader
  7. Con Air
    Director Simon West hits just the right note between self-conscious silliness and real dramatic intensity in this 1997 action thriller, which uses typecast actors to make the characters' one-liners and predictable behavior resonate.
  8. Liar Liar
    Carrey's attempted self-immolation in a men's room, which weirdly recalls certain Fred Astaire routines, may be a small classic.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Day I Became a Woman
    Compelling collection of three loosely connected vignettes.
  10. As Tears Go By (1988)
    Some of the editing has a giddy, overeager quality, the natural excess of a young prodigy, but when the action and the tempo align, the results are exhilarating: an early brawl in a pool hall fairly leaps off the screen.
  11. Robin and Marian
    Deep down inside, a very good film.
  12. Babe
    The characters (both animal and human) are solidly conceived, and the storytelling and visuals are expertly fashioned.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Grizzly Man
    This is an engrossing look at obsessive behavior gone terribly awry.
  14. 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Baghead
    A raw, wickedly clever comedy that also includes moments of genuine terror.
  16. Anvil! The Story of Anvil
    Gervasi has tapped into a powerful if much-overlooked truth: humanity rocks.
  17. Total Recall
    A worthy entry in the dystopian cycle of SF movies launched by "Blade Runner" (including "The Terminator" and "Robocop"), this seems less derivative than most of its predecessors yet equally accomplished in its straight-ahead storytelling, with plenty of provocative satiric undertones and scenic details.
  18. Bukowski: Born into This
    This documentary profile of poet and novelist Charles Bukowski exploits the writer's counterculture persona but also works to dispel it, revealing a gifted and extremely complicated man.
  19. These Are the Damned
    More than an interesting curiosity, it's one of Losey's best English efforts, and Viveca Lindfors contributes a striking part as an eccentric sculptress.
  20. 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.
  21. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    Spirited, quintessential, and often hilarious.
  22. Up and Down
    Provocative and entertaining.
  23. Your Sister's Sister
    In some mumblecore movies the semi-improvised dialogue can be engulfed by hipster irony, but the acting here is so skilled, and the emotional terrain so rocky, that Shelton manages to break past the genre's narrow social parameters to a moving story of grief, betrayal, and devotion.
  24. The Straight Story
    The wonderful Richard Farnsworth plays the lead, and he was clearly born for the part...a highly affecting and suggestive spiritual odyssey.
  25. White Heat
    Raoul Walsh’s heroes had a knack for going too far, but none went further than James Cagney in this roaring 1949 gangster piece.
  26. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
    Herzog deserves the lion's share of the credit for the movie's quality, but Port of Call New Orleans is also a comeback for Cage.
  27. The Visitor
    Powerful second film by writer-director Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent).
  28. The Company Men
    This potent, entirely honorable drama by veteran TV dramatist John Wells actually delivers the goods, pondering the pain and dislocation of the new normal.
  29. Possession
    I was wooed by its sexy romanticism all the way through to the mysterious and beautiful coda.
  30. The Decline of Western Civilization
    The live sets by X, Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, the Germs, and Fear, recorded between December 1979 and May 1980, still thunder after all these years; unfortunately so do the scene's racism, queer baiting, and utter despair.
  31. An Affair to Remember
    Leo McCarey’s 1957 remake of his 1939 masterpiece Love Affair, coscripted with Delmer Daves and shot in color and ‘Scope, is his last great film—a tearjerker with comic interludes and cosmic undertones that fully earns both its tears and its laughs, despite some kitschy notions about art and a couple of truly dreadful sequences.
  32. Tangled
    The tale of Rapunzel gets a cheeky make-over in this gorgeous Disney animation, which combines the studio's traditional hand-drawn look with the sculptural qualities of digital 3D.
  33. Where the Day Takes You
    Aside from one slow-motion sequence, the film treats its subject with few commercial concessions, so one hopes that the horrible and decidedly unmemorable title won’t keep people away; this may be the best movie about disaffected youth since River’s Edge and Pump Up the Volume.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In America
    The result is a blend of kitchen-sink and magical realism: sentimental, but well acted and freshly observed.
  35. Get Shorty
    An entertaining comedy-thriller directed with bounce (if not much nuance) by Barry Sonnenfeld.
  36. Shallow Grave
    This is a fairly accomplished first feature -perky, visually inventive, and unusually nast
  37. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    Doesn't succeed in everything it sets out to do, which is a lot. But as a statement about the death rattle of 60s counterculture it's both thoughtful and affecting, and Daniel Day-Lewis is mesmerizing.
  38. The Piano
    "Sweetie" and "An Angel at My Table" have taught us to expect startling as well as beautiful things from Jane Campion, and this assured and provocative third feature offers yet another lush parable--albeit a bit more calculated and commercially minded--about the perils and paradoxes of female self-expression.
  39. Fast Food Nation
    Many reviews have suggested that this is as politically mild as a John Sayles movie, but Linklater clearly agrees with the frustrated kid who says, "Right now, I can't think of anything more patriotic than violating the Patriot Act."
  40. Into Great Silence
    This 2005 feature is demanding to say the least, but its pulse-slowing rhythms leave a real sense of peace.
  41. Thunder Soul
    A precious scrap of American history.
  42. Margot at the Wedding
    Hysterically hyperbolic and unpleasant if still witty dissection of family traumas.
  43. The Class
    Most impressive, Cantet tracks the racial and ethnic resentments that simmer beneath the classroom discussions but become harder to quell when the parents get involved.
  44. Incantato
    Writer-director Pupi Avati has a such a fine sense of narrative proportion that this Italian feature unspools like silk.
  45. The Princess Bride
    Not even the crude ethnic humor--Billy Crystal's Mel Brooks-ish Miracle Max--pricks the dream bubble, and the spirited cast has a field day.
  46. Tying the Knot
    The obviously authentic love these couples shared should settle the question for all but bigots.
  47. No Way Out
    This taut thriller adds so many twists of its own it might be more appropriately cross-referenced with The Manchurian Candidate, even though it isn't nearly as daffy or as mercurial.
  48. The Mill and the Cross
    It's an edifying art history lesson, but it lacks the showmanship of, for example, Peter Greenaway's "Nightwatching."
  49. Sweet and Lowdown
    Still about as good as Allen gets, a persuasive, nuanced, and relatively graceful portrait of an egotistical yet talented jazz guitarist of the swing era, astutely played by Sean Penn.
  50. The Illusionist
    The dialogue is multilingual but largely incidental to the action; the physical comedy is gracefully rendered and often magical.
  51. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire
    This is a deeply engaging portrait of a remarkable man and a brutally frank indictment of the West's moral cowardice in the face of a tragedy it could have prevented.
  52. Frequency
    Quaid's buoyant earnestness complements the stunning, low-key performance by Caviezel, whose close-ups give new meaning to the idea that still waters run deep.
  53. Lost in La Mancha
    The equation of Gilliam with Quixote is so obvious to everyone involved that Fulton and Pepe can hardly be blamed for adopting it.
  54. AKA
    Roy's story is fascinating in its own right, exploring the hero's mingled shame over his class background and homosexuality, and painting a vicious portrait of Britain's coke-snorting upper crust in the late 70s.
  55. Billy Elliot
    A delicate balance of fantasy and realism, caricature and character study that isn't driven primarily by its plot or even the development of its protagonist.
  56. Sullivan's Travels
    A dubious proposition, but in Sturges’s hands a charming one, filled out by his unparalleled sense of eccentric character.
  57. The Crying Game
    An adroit piece of storytelling from Irish writer-director Neil Jordan that's ultimately less challenging to conventional notions about race and sexuality than it may at first seem... The three leads are first-rate.
  58. Biggie and Tupac
    A wily and dogged inquisitor, Broomfield cajoles and confronts a variety of witnesses, charting a web of intrigue that also involved the LAPD, the FBI, and assorted gangbangers and rogue cops.
  59. The Savages
    Disappointment, delusion, dementia, death--did I mention this is a comedy?
  60. Laurel Canyon
    McDormand has never been better, but all the performances are interestingly nuanced, including Natascha McElhone's as one of Bale's fellow psychiatric interns.
  61. The Maid
    The Maid may turn mostly on issues of housework, but it never feels trivial, because Silva is so skillful in exposing the alliances and levers of power inside the household.
  62. Red Satin
    In short, I never quite believed the story, but this movie is more about feeling than thinking.
  63. Hotel Rwanda
    Cheadle's quiet, superbly modulated performance as an ordinary man driven to heroism by hellish events reminds us that the slogan "no justice, no peace" has a private as well as a public dimension.
  64. Sunset Story
    Friendship is portrayed here in its finest form.
  65. Cool and Crazy
    Jensen's use of the conventions of documentary making -- and his undermining of them in ways both bold and subtle -- seems too canny and consistent for the form. Yet the harder I try to decide whether this is a documentary or a parody, the more I wonder why it matters.
  66. Cool Hand Luke
    Paul Newman tells 'em where to get off in this slick, popular antiestablishment drama set in a prison camp. Stuart Rosenberg's direction is a horror, but the cast teems with so many familiar faces that this film can't help but entertain.
  67. Ten Canoes
    Inspired by anthropologist Donald Thomson's early-20th-century photographs, this collaboration between a Western filmmaker and the native people of Ramingining is an impressive achievement of ethnographic cinema.
  68. 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.
  69. Incident at Loch Ness
    Turns out to be surprisingly layered.
  70. Unbreakable
    Mesmerizing dark fable, which also contains moments of comedy and action that don't disrupt its oddly earnest tone
  71. Space Cowboys
    The special effects are beautifully handled and the reflections on death attractively peaceful.
  72. Henry V
    The cast - including Derek Jacobi as the modern-dress chorus, Paul Scofield, Judi Dench, Ian Holm, Emma Thompson, and Robbie Coltrane in an effective cameo as Falstaff - is uniformly fine without any grandstanding.
  73. Brotherhood of the Wolf
    Provides glorious escapism without asking you to turn your brain off.
  74. Mars Attacks!
    I'm not sure what it all means, but, as in Ed Wood, Burton's visual flair and affection for the characters make it fun.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cat People
    More a film about unreasoning fear than the supernatural, this work demonstrates what a filmmaker can accomplish when he substitutes taste and intelligence for special effects.
  76. Aliens
    Director James Cameron dumps the decorative effects of Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien in favor of some daring narrative strategies and a tight thematic focus.
  77. Extreme Prejudice
    The character interactions are strong, especially for this depleted genre, and Hill's tight, efficient styling recovers a lot of lost formal ground: his framing and crosscutting are as sharp as ever, and the bloodbath finale is, improbably, a model of intelligent restraint, the classicist's answer to Peckinpah baroque.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Secret World of Arrietty
    Pulses with feeling for childhood and nature and develops a surprising amount of suspense considering it takes place around a single suburban home.
  79. Harry Brown
    Sitting in the theater, you're liable to buy all this simply for the pleasure of watching Caine work. Like Eastwood and other actors of his vintage, Caine brings to the project not only his own formidable skills but more than half a century of movie history.
  80. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
    No simple tabloid recap. Gibney applies himself to two mysteries, neither of which he unravels but both of which make for gripping cinema.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Safe Conduct
    The conduct of the French intelligentsia under Nazi occupation remains a tender topic, and the 2002 release of Bertrand Tavernier's film about two filmmakers who follow divergent paths through the Vichy years stirred intense controversy.
  82. Fracture
    The main interest here is the juxtaposing of Gosling's Method acting with Hopkins's more classical style, a spectacle even more mesmerizing than the settings.
  83. Two-Lane Blacktop
    The movie starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstract—it's unsettling but also beautiful.
  84. 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.
  85. The Beat That My Heart Skipped
    It's more than a simple improvement, inverting some of the original's qualities so that the impersonal, well-crafted filmmaking remains lucid throughout.
  86. United 93
    Greengrass takes pains to keep events believable and relatively unrhetorical, rejecting entertainment for the sake of sober reflection, though one has to ask how edifying this is apart from its reduction of the standard myths.
  87. Sex and Lucia
    This film by Julio Medem has dreamlike visuals, lush sensuality, a gorgeous cast, and a plot built on elaborate, self-conscious coincidences.
  88. The Crucible
    The virtue of this play and the film of this play is that many readings and meanings are possible. The same can’t be said for the propositions of its detractors, who merely want to sweep an enduring and potent form of liberal protest under the carpet.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hamlet
    Almereyda's respect for his audience and his queasiness about the present register with equal weight, reinventing the poetry in the most relevant ways possible.
  90. 3-Iron
    The illicit lovers in this eerie South Korean drama communicate whole worlds without ever speaking.
  91. The Commitments
    This is probably Alan Parker's best film, in part because it's one of his most modest.
  92. The Guys
    Since the virtues of heroism and decency it celebrates are universal, I hope it doesn't get absorbed into the dubious agitprop of American exceptionalism.
  93. Vengeance Is Mine
    Imamura’s detached, almost scientific style forestalls any pat sympathy for the central character—he is not a sentimental “victim of society,” but the embodiment of its darkest Darwinian forces.
  94. Neil Young: Heart of Gold
    Given what Young charges for concert tickets, all his organs could be gold. So I was even more grateful for this documentary of his August 2005 shows at the fabled Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, expertly directed by Jonathan Demme.
  95. 4
    Puzzling, intriguing, and often compelling, apparently set in the present but magical and futuristic in tone.
  96. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    Durkin reveals how the sisters have been pulled in opposite directions by the death of their parents. But the story structure also nurtures a creeping, finally unbearable dread that may have you looking over your shoulder all the way home.
  97. Sign 'o' the Times
    Prince himself, passing through a spectrum of costumes and sexual roles, is never less than commanding, as performer, composer, and director.
  98. A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate
    It is a moving and entertaining work, executed with high finesse by a master cineast.
  99. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
    If you can accept the flouting of logic and credibility that usually goes with this kind of horror picture, this scary and suspenseful genre exercise, chock-full of false alarms and brutal shocks, really delivers.
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