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. The Two Jakes
    This is a worthy successor to Chinatown - full of ecological and geological insights into Los Angeles history that recall Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald and give a view of southern California that could have been conceived only by a native.
  2. Falling Down
    None of the characters ever rises beyond the level of his or her generic functions, and by the end the overall emptiness of the conception becomes fully apparent.
  3. Waterworld
    This movie feels like it was made by a bank rather than a person.
  4. Return to Paradise
    None of the moral ramifications of this dilemma is avoided, and to the film’s credit the behavior of the American press seems more questionable than the machinations of third-world justice.
  5. Posse
    As in New Jack City, Van Peebles displays a distinctive visual style of tilted angles and frequent camera movement, and the script by Sy Richardson and Dario Scardapane also keeps things moving, but perhaps the best sequence of all is the opening one, which features the great Woody Strode.
  6. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
    It's a slick, empty spectacle, with antipathetic stars and a director with no basic sympathy for the myths he's treating.
  7. Transporter 2
    The original movie's lean production complemented its pell-mell fights and car chases; here, third-rate CG effects make the strained action sequences look even more improbable.
  8. Mimic
    Even the melodramatic score can't ruin the essentially serious tenor of this old-style non-self-referential horror story, whose characterizations are unassailable--stereotypical shtick you buy because the performers are working so hard and their faces are so skillfully lit.
  9. American Violet
    Packed with dialogue and issues, and it’s most provocative when dealing with the dangers of plea bargaining.
  10. God Bless America
    As with the earlier movie, this one turns in on its own morality like a Möbius strip, endorsing kindness by practicing slaughter, and pulls us along for the ride. Detractors will call its reasoning ridiculous, and they'll be right - though I doubt that will bother Goldthwait, who makes a living being ridiculous.
  11. Religulous
    A major disappointment because here, unlike on "Real Time," Maher aims for laughs instead of insight--and aims low.
  12. Jumping the Broom
    Perceptive, faith-based romantic comedy.
  13. The Family Stone
    The potential for moral confusion in a liberal-minded family -- unpacked so ruthlessly in Noah Baumbach's "The Squid and the Whale" -- is scrutinized with more ambiguity in this good-natured comic subversion of the holiday get-together.
  14. The Crazies
    Poor distribution doomed the original movie, though Romero has stuck around long enough to serve as executive producer of this respectable update by Breck Eisner.
  15. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
    Harlin's arsenal of conceits and visual effects--pirouetting overhead angles, dancing trigonometry formulas, a pizza flavored with tiny human heads, a lot of fancy play with a water bed, and much, much more--keeps it consistently watchable and inventive.
  16. Adam
    As predictable as the alphabet but should hold particular appeal to women whose maternal impulses inflect their mating instincts.
  17. The Unknown Woman
    The melodrama form allows Tornatore to examine such current issues as human trafficking and black-market babies within a yarn that, for all its sentiment, is never less than gripping.
  18. Claire Dolan
    The characters--their motives at once obvious and obscure--are almost painfully fascinating.
  19. Cabin Fever
    Roth puts a sardonic spin on the puritanism of the 80s slasher.
  20. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    Upon closer inspection its story and characters grow more mysterious, ultimately bordering on the unfathomable.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eleven Minutes
    Aspiring fashion designer Jay McCarroll, who triumphed in season one of the Bravo reality show Project Runway, tries to "make that leap from reality-TV designer to real-life designer" in this irreverent documentary.
  22. The Indian Runner
    Sean Penn's first film as writer-director, steeped in sullen Method acting, pretentious symbolism, and mannered slow motion, is obviously a sincere and considered effort, but I found it insufferably tedious, self-indulgent, and reeking with self-pity.
  23. Boy Culture
    Director Q. Allan Brocka (Eating Out) keeps the tone downbeat for too long, but one can't fault his ambition in tackling the elusive connections between love, sex, and money.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Watchmen
    Director Zack Snyder races through the story, faithfully reproducing this bit of dialogue from Moore and that bit of imagery from Gibbons but never pausing to develop a vision of his own. The result is oddly hollow and disjointed; the actors moving stiffly from one overdetermined tableau to another.
  25. The Omega Man
    Not bad, but far from a classic.
  26. Saints and Soldiers
    There's an uplifting message about heroism, dispensed in dialogue so familiar you can practically lip=synch it.
  27. The Chorus
    The excellent cast in Christophe Barratier's loose remake of a 1945 Jean Dreville film ensures that the predictable, nostalgic ride remains enjoyable throughout.
  28. Lords of Dogtown
    Excruciatingly narcissistic.
  29. Diary of a Wimpy Kid
    It's eminently suitable for children, fully inhabiting their world and finding real laughs there without resorting to sentiment, condescension, or snarky in-jokes for the adults.
  30. Invaders from Mars
    Having made the mad mistake of selecting the project, screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby and director Tobe Hooper seem utterly baffled by it; they hesitate between camping it up (and thus destroying a film for which they have an obvious affection) and trying to recapture Menzies's sublimely naive presentation (which, 80s hipsters that they are, they can't sustain for long).
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