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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    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    That Man: Peter Berlin
    Despite Berlin's frankness about his personal love life and his preference for being watched when he's not having sex, the Garbo of gay porn remains elusive, largely because Tushinski doesn't seem to see the ironies and contradictions in his subject's life. He's much better when exploring Berlin's aesthetic and working methods.
  2. Willard
    The chills are functional at best and the attempts at pathos negligible.
  3. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
    After a while it becomes apparent that this movie is too eager to please, too willing to sacrifice its point of view toward its targets to sustain itself for the length of a feature.
  4. National Treasure: Book of Secrets
    Leave it to coproducer Jerry Bruckheimer to revive the Indiana Jones cycle without the period setting, the camp elements, or Spielberg's efficiency; director Jon Turteltaub just plods along, and the script by Marianne and Cormac Wibberley is equally poker-faced.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Lucky One
    As long as Efron's shirt comes off, he could play an accountant and no one in the target audience would care.
  6. Sahara
    I'm still trying to wrap my head around the historical premise for this Indiana Jones knockoff.
  7. The Promotion
    Chicago native Steve Conrad, who scripted "The Weather Man" and "The Pursuit of Happyness," makes his feature directing debut with this low-budget comedy, which isn't as broad as its premise might suggest.
  8. Love in the Time of Cholera
    This romantic drama by director Mike Newell preserves the odd playfulness of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's international best seller but sacrifices its eroticism and intricate nonlinear plotting.
  9. She's the Man
    Fickman mostly soft-pedals the play's homosexual panic, generating a comedy that lacks both the verbal sophistication of its source and the sexual sophistication of its target audience.
  10. Fast Times at Ridgemont High
    Never all it was cracked up to be.
  11. Arctic Tale
    Watching these endangered species evolve new approaches to hunting and shelter is fascinating, but the movie is seriously marred by a cloying screenplay and such kid-pleasing touches as shots of walruses belching and farting.
  12. 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.
  13. Frozen
    A stuck chairlift just doesn't exert the same primal terror as a roiling sea, and to make up the difference, Green would need a better cast and sharper dialogue than he has here.
  14. Rapt
    This French kidnapping drama drags on for so long I'd have paid the ransom out of my own pocket just to wrap things up.
  15. Dead Man Walking
    Has its awkward and square moments directorially, but it's also uncommonly honest and serious.
  16. Jiminy Glick in Lalawood
    Isn't really a satire of Hollywood so much as a chance for Short's wealthy showbiz buddies (Steve Martin, Kurt Russell, Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg) to poke very gentle fun at themselves and stick it to the press.
  17. When Brendan Met Trudy
    Director Kieron J. Walsh never quite figures out what to do with the numerous film references (he quotes dialogue, they reenact scenes), and the resulting uncertainty in tone, which sometimes treats the characters as parodistic products of mass culture, undercuts his later attempts to suggest that their love is authentic.
  18. Malèna
    Somewhere in writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore's overstyled movie, about a 12-year-old boy (Sulfaro) during the Italian fascist period who has the hots for a mistreated war widow (Belluci), is a pretty good short story about the fickleness of community and the cruelty of gossip struggling to get out.
  19. What We Do Is Secret
    Entertaining if superficial.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Righteous Kill
    Watching these old pros play longtime buddies is a pleasure, especially since they're together in most scenes. But this thriller by Jon Avnet (88 Minutes) is mostly by the numbers, and its surprise ending, though effective, feels somewhat forced.
  21. Lost in Space
    Time-travel cliches, female characters who exert authority only so we'll laugh at the pussy-whipped males, dialogue that's neither self-mocking nor serious, and an ostentatious though not particularly exciting production design keep the movie from taking off.
  22. The Adjustment Bureau
    As in Christopher Nolan's Inception, the premise is so mind-boggling and fraught with implications that it tends to obviate the action mechanics of the last couple reels.
  23. The Red Violin
    The filmmakers have created a pretentious extended "Twilight Zone" episode with obscenely high production values.
  24. The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming
    More memorable for its title than for anything else.
  25. Surviving Christmas
    Another go-round for the premise of an overaged kid insinuating himself into a stranger's family.
  26. Thor
    This is eminently missable, though the mosaic design of Asgard, Thor's mythical realm, is pretty cool.
  27. What's Cooking?
    This concept comedy-drama would be even better if the intercutting among households had been timed to add dramatic content rather than simply advance the subplots.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Edmond
    Disappointing adaptation of Mamet's 1982 drama.
  29. Baby Mama
    The script favors routine "Odd Couple" gags over the sort of comic contemplation of motherhood a writer like Fey might have brought to the subject.
  30. Tiny Furniture
    A tolerably warm bath of postcollegiate self-pity, salted with irony and self-mockery.
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