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. Scary Movie 4
    The fourth installment in the horror-parody franchise combines plot elements from "The Grudge," "The Village," and "War of the Worlds," with abbreviated spoofs of "Saw," "Brokeback Mountain," and "Million Dollar Baby." The amount of screen time allotted to each movie is roughly proportional to its box office take, suggesting that the first draft of the screenplay was written on a calculator.
  2. Terror Train
    This 1979 teenage horror film has no redeeming style: it's a straight, pedestrian cop of Halloween, from the opening shock to the climactic battle against the psycho.
  3. Picture Perfect
    Olympia Dukakis and Illeana Douglas come off poorly in silly supporting roles that make Aniston seem to have screen presence by default. Her character's habit of compulsively adjusting her bodice ensures our attention has the proper focus.
  4. BUtterfield 8
    It's just about as awful as you'd expect, despite the presence of two first-class screenwriters.
  5. What Planet Are You From?
    The buildup to social criticism in what at first appears to be pointless and partly misogynist exploitation is subtly impressive.
  6. Heartbreak Ridge
    The whole film seems ideologically forced and out of place, an attempt to resurrect the retentive virtues of Ford and Hawks without the cultural context that gave them expressive strength.
  7. Are We There Yet?
    Ice Cube tries his hand at family comedy in this phony story.
  8. Superhero Movie
    The gags are consistently weak, though actor Miles Fisher turns in a hair-raising impression of Tom Cruise.
  9. The Debut
    A hackneyed coming-of-age drama.
  10. The Mission
    Bolt's moralizing ironies (as leaden here as in A Man for All Seasons and assorted David Lean scenarios) are enough to sink a thousand war canoes, and Joffe doesn't help things along with his patronizing vision of native innocence: the Indians only exist to be sentimentalized—as angels, victims, and amiable rehab projects for enterprising Christians.
  11. Guinevere
    Partly because the seducer's technique is methodical--as a former conquest explains to the naive heroine--the movie's answers are too easy.
  12. Provoked: A True Story
    No one breaks into song, but this fact-based legal drama about a battered Anglo-Indian wife on trial for murdering her husband is infected with a fatal strain of heaving Bollywood melodrama.
  13. Raging Bull
    As LaMotta, Robert De Niro gives a blank, soulless performance; there's so little of depth or urgency coming from him that he's impossible to despise, or forgive, in any but the most superficial way.
  14. Barb Wire
    Its main source is a comic book, but it might as well be a computer.
  15. Wes Craven's New Nightmare
    Unfortunately, without even the most cursory effort to establish some notion of normality, the movie progressively gets duller and duller as its mechanical horror fancies spin themselves out.
  16. Hoodwinked!
    Too archly scripted to appeal to kids and too crudely executed to win over older aficionados. The cheap-looking CGI makes the animals creepy rather than engaging, and a plot thread about a series of thefts does little more than spin the tale to feature length.
  17. The Private Archives of Pablo Escovar
    The sanitized content clashes with the narrative style, which mimics true-crime TV like “American Justice.”
  18. Stolen Summer
    There are many plot complications, most designed to get us to applaud our tolerance of religious differences.
  19. RV
    This miserable comedy is enlivened occasionally by Jeff Daniels and Kristin Chenoweth as a cheerfully tacky couple who keep crossing paths with the dysfunctional clan.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hate Crime
    This melodrama by writer-director Tommy Stovall has a good premise, but he undercuts it with contrived plot twists, pedestrian pacing, and mostly two-dimensional characters.
  21. The Abyss
    The attempt to extract the essences of several genres (cold-war submarine thriller, love story, Disney fantasy, pseudomystical SF in the Spielberg mode) and mix them together ultimately leads to giddy incoherence.
  22. Crooklyn
    Despite very good performances, this is anemic and uninspired filmmaking: shapeless as narrative, awkward and drifting as drama.
  23. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    Blends extremes of violence and humor to create an irreverent tone that nullifies everything; the plot is so clever it crushes the characterization, making all the action seem perfunctory.
  24. Due Date
    This odd-couple comedy reunites Galifianakis with Todd Phillips, who directed "The Hangover," but don't expect anything like the other movie's novel plotting or wild slapstick.
  25. The Karate Kid Part III
    Unfortunately, the pattern has so calcified that Gene Autry westerns seem like models of moral complexity by comparison.
  26. Dot the I
    Its trickery might seem cute or clever to viewers who don't take either movies or people very seriously, but to me it recalled cynical "puzzle" films like "Memento" and "Irreversible," with no reason to exist apart from its gimmick.
  27. Grazia's Island
    I found it warm, humane, pretty, and dull enough to anesthetize patients awaiting massively invasive surgery.
  28. Life as We Know It
    The movie relies on the notion that postponing sex heightens arousal, but its lovers aren't any better matched post-coitus than they were before.
  29. Taking Lives
    On the plus side, it isn't boring, and Jolie and Ethan Hawke, who plays an art dealer and key witness, generate a certain amount of edgy chemistry. But eventually the filmmakers' desire to shock and tease overtakes any feeling for character or common sense.
  30. The Shining
    Kubrick is after a cool, sunlit vision of hell, born in the bosom of the nuclear family, but his imagery--with its compulsive symmetry and brightness--is too banal to sustain interest, while the incredibly slack narrative line forestalls suspense.
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