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 Emperor's Club
    The film wobbles between impulses to be a simple feel-good story and a trickier, ultimately sadder tale about a man facing a moral and spiritual crisis.
  2. Ping Pong
    The main characters are a couple of revered high school table-tennis champs (one short and aggressive, the other tall and moody), and their efforts to win a big national tournament accommodate plenty of Zen aphorisms, glaring showdowns, and slow-motion paddle swinging.
  3. Civic Duty
    It's a subject that guarantees a certain amount of liberal tongue clucking, though director Jeff Renfroe wisely concentrates on suspense instead of sermons.
  4. The Deer Hunter
    While the results are far from unprofessional--the cast is uniformly good, including a characteristically slapped-around Meryl Streep...The male self-pity is so overwhelming that you'll probably stagger out of this mumbling something about Tolstoy (as many critics did when the film first came out in 1978) if you aren't as nauseated as I was.
  5. On the Ice
    Film noir has seldom been so blanc.
  6. Senseless
    Big laughs are few and far between in this 1998 movie, which is more successful as motivational anecdote than as comedy.
  7. 39 Pounds of Love
    A more honest film would have been a greater tribute to this brave and tenacious fighter.
  8. Climates
    The husband learns nothing, and his monstrous behavior makes the movie relentlessly downbeat. No one, including the viewer, achieves catharsis.
  9. Mister Lonely
    As in Korine's other movies, characterization is often just amplified weirdness.
  10. Elsa y Fred
    This begins to get interesting in the home stretch, as the woman's chronic deception begins to catch up with her, but for the most part it's an extended Geritol commercial.
  11. Strauss' Great Waltz
    A curiosity of the first order.
  12. Blade: Trinity
    The only one who seems to be having much fun is Parker Posey, camping it up as one of the vampires.
  13. The Komediant
    Goldfinger touch on many grand issues (theater rivalry, anti-Semitism, child labor, the generation gap, Israelis' hostility toward the Yiddish tongue) but stop short of exploring them, focusing instead on a family that personifies a dying tradition.
  14. The Beauty Academy of Kabul
    How ironic that one form of beauty would be returned to battle-scarred Afghanistan by ugly Americans, but that's just what director Liz Mermin caught in her slim 2004 documentary for the BBC.
  15. Kiss of the Dragon
    The new sexism -- the old sexism plus the idea that everything is ironic -- is getting old.
  16. Rails & Ties
    Alison Eastwood, whose good looks and last name have served her well as a Hollywood actress, makes her directing debut with this mediocre cancer drama.
  17. Persona
    Ingmar Bergman's best film, I suppose, though it's still fairly tedious and overloaded with avant-garde cliches.
  18. I Am Number Four
    Producers Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg deploy an arsenal of noisy special effects to demonstrate the invaders' high-tech superiority, which makes Olyphant's inability to breach an Internet firewall look pretty silly.
  19. Suddenly, Last Summer
    The cast packs enough sexual ambiguity to satisfy the most rabid Williams fan (not to mention a screenplay by Gore Vidal), but Mankiewicz leaves much of the innuendo unexplored—thankfully, perhaps.
  20. Agnes and His Brothers
    This scathing study of middle-class angst plays like a cross between Buñuel and Almodovar, but the satire never achieves liftoff despite the actors' best efforts.
  21. No Country for Old Men
    A very well-made genre exercise, but I can’t understand why it’s been accorded so much importance, unless it’s because it strokes some ideological impulse.
  22. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
    The elliptical narrative centers on the unspoken erotic attraction between Sakamoto and Bowie, and Oshima appears to be treating ideas of elegantly transmogrified, purified emotions, yet the context and frequent incontinence of the execution bring the film uncomfortably close to the pseudophilosophical bondage fantasies of Yukio Mishima.
  23. The Tale of Despereaux
    Many of the charms of Kate DiCamillo's best-selling children's book are lost in this British animation by Dreamworks alumni Sam Fell (Flushed Away) and Rob Stevenhagen.
  24. American Reunion
    Writer-directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg are content to trot out the familiar gags and characters, and the murmurs of recognition I heard in the preview audience indicate that the series has become some kind of sad generational touchstone.
  25. Water for Elephants
    Features a credible and sympathetic performance from Robert Pattinson as an orphaned veterinary student who joins a traveling circus. Yet the film otherwise suffers from a lack of showmanship.
  26. Shortbus
    It runs out of energy before the end.
  27. Becket (re-release)
    One hundred forty-nine minutes of pure, unadulterated culture.
  28. Self Medicated
    The scenes of his incarceration and escape from the place are gripping, thanks mainly to Michael Bowen as the hard-ass staffer who wants to break him. But the movie slides toward melodrama with some stale business about the hero spreading his late father's ashes.
  29. Bad Santa
    Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the story, using the ancient gag of the toxic Santa as a vehicle for their patented brand of misanthropy; Zwigoff and company wring some laughs out of it, though the tone is uniformly mean and vulgar.
  30. Tombstone
    This has plenty of designer gore to go with its periodic spurts of bloodletting, and a lot of care and attention were obviously devoted to selecting locations, designing sets, and grooming handlebar mustaches. Much less attention went to making one believe that any of the events took place circa 1879, but at least the bursts of action keep coming, and most survive Cosmatos's addiction to smoldering close-ups.
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