Chicago Reader's Scores

  • Movies
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:
6312 movie reviews
    • 1 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Revolting exploitation feature.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    More interested in standard thriller effects than in giving us human beings to contend with. The audience I saw this with seemed to want to feel insulted, and this piece of crap delivered.
  1. If you haven't lived until you've heard Geena Davis say "Suck my dick," New Line probably deserves your money.
  2. Away, away with all of you and your sorry master, director Alan Johnson, whose every prospect for future employment in this darkling realm of TV pilot failure must be waning by the hour.
  3. More than anything Chuck and Larry shows just how flaccid American movie comedy has become now that "Saturday Night Live" has replaced vaudeville as our comedy college.
  4. This derivative concept movie is tiresomely slick as well as shamefully sloppy, and someone should issue a restraining order requiring writer-director Darren Stein to stay at least 100 yards away from irony.
  5. Has exactly the same premise (Repo! The Genetic Opera).
  6. I can't remember when I last hated an art-house movie as much as this one...Other reviewers have praised the film's alleged quirky humor, but I was repelled by the two heartless creeps who set the story in motion and baffled by the protagonist's fascination with them.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Monstrously offensive movie.
  7. In what I saw, Madonna in the title role tries bravely not to buckle under the weight of Stone and Parker's sense of Stalinist monumentality and fails honorably, while the Lloyd Webber music goes on being nonmusical.
  8. Brain-dead adaptation of a popular video game.
  9. To judge from this agonizing documentary, sniveling man-child Joaquin Phoenix was put on earth to make us appreciate Crispin Glover for the level-headed fellow he is.
  10. The meanest and least inspired kids U know.
  11. The ethnic humor that gave May's movie its charge is replaced by crass mean-spiritedness. If I were in movie hell, I'd rather see "Good Luck Chuck" again than return to this atrocity.
  12. Soulless, hyperbolic actioner.
  13. Glowna presents this smoky German feature as an elegy for lost youth, but it's so tumescent with male self-pity that I couldn't wait for it to end.
  14. By now the hypocrisy of simultaneously condemning and exploiting the audience's sadism has become so commonplace in American movies it hardly seems noteworthy.
  15. This ends on an uplifting and philosophical note, equating moral blindness with the literal sort, which you'll probably appreciate if you haven't already slit your wrists.
  16. Van Sant's doomed and misguided experiment.
  17. Nothing's quite so painful as failed comedy, and this atrocity is equivalent to a compound fracture.
  18. With its pathetic characters, questionable logic, and wall-to-wall Beethoven, the movie is a serious contender for this year's Golden Turkey award.
  19. This comedy is a bilge pump of tacky jokes, fake sentiment, and hollow performances, accompanied on the soundtrack by lite rock and hokey music cues. It should never have been made, though it's probably guaranteed a long life at bad-film festivals.
  20. This putrid action flick crawls along for two and a half hours before expiring in a septic field of bad one-liners, halfhearted catchphrases, obliterated cars, vicious slow-motion bullet penetration, graphic corpse mutilations played for laughs, and shamefully hollow bonding scenes between its two dyspeptic megastars.
  21. Screenwriters David Johnson and Alex Mace deliver one of the stupidest "twist endings" in the history of storytelling.
  22. Repulsive 80s flashback.
  23. This might have had some potential as a German exercise in self-examination, but as a tony BBC Films production, with the actors all speaking British-accented English (including Jersey girl Farmiga), it reeks of self-righteousness.
  24. As romantic comedies go, this is the worst drivel I've seen since Nia Vardalos's "I Hate Valentine's Day."
  25. Horrendous dialogue and horrific directing dominate this thriller.
  26. A piece of mythmaking stupidity.
  27. A nauseating, stridently phony rom-com.

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