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. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
    Americans desensitized to senseless violence may find the subject matter almost banal, and the interspersed news footage of armed conflict from around the world feels like a rhetorical device. But the coldly telegraphic structure--a series of 71 blackouts following the four strangers to their deaths--yields some striking moments.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fantastic Planet
    The film has a flat quality that cannot entirely be overcome by the sensational animation and the obvious good intentions of its creators.
  3. The Rage: Carrie 2
    Even as you're wincing at what you thought was misguided earnestness, it's being subverted by filmmakers who've turned many of the genre's weaknesses into tiny triumphs.
  4. Fifty-Fifty
    If one discounts the facile and unconvincing ending, this first feature by Guka Omarova, offers a convincingly bleak view of how a 15-year-old boy could get ahead in rural Kazakhstan in the early 90s.
  5. Color of Night
    Somewhat preposterous but fairly watchable mystery thriller. The plot gets so convoluted and farfetched that you still may be scratching your head after the denouement, but you probably won't be bored.
  6. Mad Dog and Glory
    This is stronger in terms of characters (male ones, that is) than in terms of story or mise en scene, but the actorskeep this pretty watchable.
  7. Who Is Cletis Tout?
    Writer-director Chris Ver Wiel stocks this diverting crime comedy with familar characters and formulas.
  8. Atlantis: The Lost Empire
    Visually imaginative and even persuasively spiritual.
  9. Army of Darkness
    Enjoyably campy hokum.
  10. It Came from Outer Space
    This scary black-and-white SF effort from 1953 was shot in 3-D, and on occasion it’s shown that way.
  11. The Weekend
    Rowlands and Unger deliver sensitive performances, Shields is surprisingly good.
  12. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    Clooney badly botches the spy plot by casting himself as Barris's agency contact... and a truly awful Julia Roberts as Barris's Mata Hari lover (she's soundly upstaged by Drew Barrymore as his devoted girlfriend). Yet the mounting delirium drives home Kaufman's basic point: that a shadow government rules by bread and circuses.
  13. Paper Clips
    It's a story worth telling, though once the participants and the filmmakers start basking in their virtue, the material begins to feel overextended.
  14. Roll Bounce
    Seriously uneven but often charming.
  15. The House of Yes
    Sex and JFK's assassination are intertwined in this puerile, pseudodark story about a wacky family--an adaptation of Wendy MacLeod's play that uses the medium of cinema mainly to exploit archival footage.
  16. Lethal Weapon 4
    Danny Glover and Mel Gibson make a gently contrasted (and nicely self-reflexive) odd couple in this action-comedy sequel.
  17. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
    For what it is, it's fine.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Melancholian 3 huonetta
    Honkasalo's bleak, meditative 2004 documentary, about children who have been orphaned or dispossessed as a result of the Russian-Chechen conflict, eschews any attempts to make sense out of this long-running war.
  19. Larger Than Life
    Not terribly funny, but the intimations of an older, saltier America in the picaresque plot make this watchable.
  20. Shadow Boxers
    Compensates with a sharp sense of rhythm, using hip-hop and turntablist sounds by Zoel to fuel Anthony Hardwick and Tony Wolberg's aggressive cinematography.
  21. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
    Pegg has some good obnoxious moments, but he's only a few movies away from becoming Dudley Moore.
  22. The Rite
    Horror fans may be disappointed by this handsome exorcism drama, which aspires to the serious religious feeling of William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" but delivers little of its shock or gore.
  23. Splendor
    Instructive comedy, which is marvelously neutral toward a type of sexual and domestic relationship that's often exploited or overblown.
  24. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles
    The running joke about coffee enemas will date this innocuous, crowd-pleasing adventure comedy.
  25. Your Friends & Neighbors
    The cast is OK, and LaBute still has an eye, but the uses they're put to seem contrived and arty.
  26. Mary Reilly
    Too bad the overreaching script has to go after effects recalling "Alien," but as a stylistic exercise this still has its chills.
  27. Return to Oz
    It's bleak, creepy, and occasionally terrifying. Studio pressure apparently forced Murch to back off from the full fury of his conception, but this is still strong stuff.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Charlotte's Web
    It preserves some of the form and language of White's original but fattens and sweetens his lean and pungent prose with songs by Richard and Robert Sherman (Mary Poppins).
  29. And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen...
    According to common usage, the French word stupide comes closer to silly than to dumb, which is how I might rationalize my affection for this harebrained, obvious, but euphoric tale.
  30. Pumpkin
    Broder's script makes the weird transition from satire to camp as if there were no distinction between the two. It's a bracing if at times bewildering experience.
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