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. Double Jeopardy
    In this inept thriller...the script is a coloring book, and the director's careful to stay within the lines.
  2. She Hate Me
    Spike Lee's fans have learned to take the bad with the good, but this is pretty damn bad.
  3. Larry Crowne
    There's some cute stuff involving Hanks and some teenagers who tool around campus on scooters, but an utter lack of chemistry between him and Roberts dooms the movie.
  4. Map of the Human Heart
    Unfocused, condescending, and corny.
  5. Sphere
    The film itself regresses, starting in the present and winding up with a cautionary ending that evokes the hokiest SF movies of the 50s.
  6. The Cookout
    This is one dull party.
  7. Vacancy
    80 minutes of formulaic unpleasantness isn't even close to my idea of a good time, and I doubt that Hitchcock himself could have done very much with Mark L. Smith's script.
  8. Lethal Weapon 3
    More of the same, though a lot coarser than its immediate predecessor, and the characters and situations have now calcified to the point where they're simply sitcom staples.
  9. I Can Do Bad All by Myself
    Contrived, sentimental, tonally bipolar, and as predictable as clockwork.
  10. Backstage
    People frequently cover the camera lens with their hands or refer to the "documentary" being filmed, as if to assure us that what we're seeing is real.
  11. Rebound
    The funny-looking kids steal every scene from Lawrence, simply by virtue of being funny-looking kids.
  12. Xanadu
    This big-budget bubble-gum musical is appalling but compulsively watchable; it's the perfect crystallization of a 13-year-old girl's taste, circa 1980, complete with roller discos, dreamy boys, fashion shows, and fantasy father figures. Director Robert Greenwald has a lot of ideas, all of them bad: his style could be described as rapid misfire.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bride Flight
    Smug and unconvincing.
  14. Godsend
    As in most bad thrillers, the number of pointless shocks increases in direct proportion to the drama's decreasing vitality, like defibrilator paddles jolting a dying man.
  15. Cars 2
    A rare dud from Pixar.
  16. The Last Song
    Years on the Hannah Montana TV series have not adequately prepared Miley Cyrus for screen acting.
  17. Dr. Dolittle 2
    Too much plot and too much faith in special effects and adolescent humor doom this "Babe" wannabe.
  18. When Will I Be Loved
    Slapdash plot, paper-thin characters, misogynist undertones, and mechanical crosscutting are all soft-core standbys.
  19. The Invisible Circus
    In nearly every scene of her dangerously underwritten role, Diaz has a mouthful of cliches.
  20. Delicatessen
    There are no characters to care about or remember afterward - just a lot of flashy technique involving decor, some glib allegorical flourishes, and the obligatory studied film-school weirdness.
  21. Man in the Chair
    This indie drama spends a lot of time mooning over classical Hollywood cinema, but its own visual style tends toward the pointless flash of music videos.
  22. Paul Blart: Mall Cop
    To call this Kevin James comedy fatuous might be misinterpreted as an attack on the star's girth--so how about inane, tepid, lazy, puerile, phony, and unfunny?
  23. Dead Man's Shoes
    A shocking revelation near the end explains the soldier's nihilistic rage but simultaneously tears a gigantic hole in the plot, leaving little to admire but Considine's typically penetrating performance.
  24. The Jewel of the Nile
    It's a rare sequel that fritters away the appeal of the original so completely: within minutes, this continuation of Romancing the Stone has reduced the Kathleen Turner-Michael Douglas couple to a nightmare pairing of the gushingly idiotic and the sourly venal.
  25. Airport '77
    First-rate schlock; overlong and incredibly stupid, but that's part of the formula by now.
  26. Just a Kiss
    Muddled attempt at edgy comedy.
  27. Captivity
    It's not scary because not one second is believable.
  28. Nobel Son
    The plot twists are mostly predicated on the characters' improbably shifting loyalties, the sort of thing you can get away with only when the people in your movie are drained of all compassion.
  29. I Know What You Did Last Summer
    Writer Kevin Williamson, who's also responsible for the overrated "Scream," sets cleverness above emotional impact in a poorly conceived 1997 thriller with plenty of empty references.
  30. The Killing Fields
    The low point is a New York sequence in which Waterston puts some Puccini on his stereo, pops his personal (custom-made?) videocassette of Cambodian atrocities into his video recorder, and goes into a heavy voice-over recounting the crimes of Amerika. Didacticism doesn't get much cruder than this, yet the emphasis of the sequence is on Waterston's exquisitely tortured conscience—it's there to demonstrate the profound, compassionate depths of his humanity.
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