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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    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Million Dollar Mermaid
    Another audacious MGM aquacade, this 1952 Mervyn LeRoy extravaganza stars Esther Williams as the famed Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman and Victor Mature as the man who discovers first her and then Rin Tin Tin. But the real star is, as always, Busby Berkeley, who contributes more of his Ken Russell-ish wet dreams.
  2. I Heart Huckabees
    A philosophical comedy about man's place in a universe colonized by Targets and Wal-Marts.
  3. The Goodbye Girl
    Standard Neil Simon stuff, full of cute grotesques, snappy one-liners, and cheap plays at pathos.
  4. Scream 2
    The precredits sequence is exciting--it's the only part of the movie that even begins to use the idea of the vulnerability of a horror-movie audience reflexively. The rest of the story is a straightforward narrative that's threatening only to the ingenues in the cast.
  5. Crazy in Alabama
    Takes a while to arrive at what it has to say, but some of the performances kept me occupied in the meantime.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Transamerica
    An occasionally touching, more often clumsy variation on the formula of crusty oldster and problem child bonding on a road trip. The main reason to see it is "Desperate Housewives" star Felicity Huffman.
  7. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    After she's forced to confess, director Marc Rothemund doesn't have much to do but marvel at her heroic defiance, and the film is overtaken by its talkiness, claustrophobia, and polarized morality.
  8. The Transporter
    Entertaining but forgettable action flick.
  9. Decasia
    The film asks us to embrace not only the death of beauty but the beauty of death.
  10. Keeping the Faith
    The charm of the three leads makes it a movie worth seeing.
  11. The Dreamers
    Watchable if far-fetched movie is seriously marred by its three leads; only Garrel manages to suggest a person rather than a fashion model dutifully following instructions.
  12. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
    Carefully re-creates the first movie's lightweight romance and mildly cheeky gender comedy.
  13. Saving Silverman
    It's doubtful that the haste with which two actors of the same sex break away from a kiss in this comedy was in the script, but otherwise everybody stays in character, which is impressive given the manic range of some of the roles and the comic monotony of others.
  14. Charlotte Sometimes
    The screenplay becomes annoyingly vague--Byler tries to conjure heavy weather out of Charlotte's mysterious past, but the details are confusing and the ending bewilderingly abrupt.
  15. Microcosmos
    The footage is often fascinating, but when it comes to anthropomorphism I prefer the Disney live-action adventures.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mr. Woodcock
    There aren't that many laugh-out-loud jokes in this comedy, yet Billy Bob Thornton's portrayal of ass-kicking gym coach Mr. Woodcock is almost worth the price of admission.
  17. Suspiria
    Dario Argento's grossly overstated mise-en-scene adds some perverse interest to this routine (if unusually gory) horror film from 1976. Argento works so hard for his effects—throwing around shock cuts, colored lights, and peculiar camera angles—that it would be impolite not to be a little frightened
  18. Network
    Good campy fun from the combined talents of Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet; Chayefsky was apparently serious about much of this shrill, self-important 1976 satire about television, interlaced with bile about radicals and pushy career women,
  19. The Andromeda Strain
    Robert Wise brings his Academy Award-winning sobriety and meticulousness to a pulp tale that cries out for the slapdash vigor of a Roger Corman.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    X-Men: First Class
    Like Bryan Singer's X2 (2003), this fifth entry in the X-Men franchise is noteworthy for its gay-rights subtext and for its noted actors delivering comic book dialogue with Shakespearean portent. Otherwise it's indistinguishable from most other recent blockbusters.
  21. Confidence
    Paul Giamatti steals the picture as a sardonic grifter with a phobic terror of dirty toilet seats.
  22. Allah Made Me Funny: Live in Concert
    Mostly the three comics stick to the Bill Cosby formula, dispensing with racial anger in favor of good-natured and family- and relationship-based crossover material.
  23. Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie
    Though it's aimed at preschoolers, it's tuneful and funny enough to amuse any adult.
  24. A Woman Is a Woman
    While its slender plot (stripper Karina wants a baby and turns to Belmondo when her boyfriend Brialy won't oblige her) can irritate in spots, the film's high spirits may still win you over.
  25. The Quick and the Dead
    Sam Raimi tries to do a Sergio Leone, and though this 1995 feature is highly enjoyable in spots, it doesn't come across as very convincing, perhaps because nothing can turn Sharon Stone into Charles Bronson.
  26. The Tailor of Panama
    An Austin Powers movie for grown-ups.
  27. Curious George
    George is suitably adorable, wreaking the kind of havoc that gives tykes a guilty thrill. Yet the movie concludes with the specious moral that reading is inferior to experiencing life firsthand.
  28. Barenaked in America
    Includes extensive performance footage but never drags, and it isn't exposé or self-mockery.
  29. Drive Me Crazy
    Impressively nuanced.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Boiling Point
    Boiling Point essentially plays with and parodies the principle of symmetrically matching sound bites in order to create rhymes and continuities in its parallel plots.
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