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. Big Trouble
    It still has several moments—most notably a completely offhanded kidnapping—when Cassavetes's inimitable off rhythms do strange and wonderful things to the conventionally written comedy. Big Trouble is just a footnote in the career of one of America's most innovative, unclassifiable filmmakers, but it's something to see.
  2. The Human Factor
    Graham Greene's impeccably plotted spy story serves Preminger's personal aims with a minimum of modification, as the film develops themes of loneliness, debilitation, and obsessive security—all centered on the tragic survival of moral feeling in a world drained by reason.
  3. End of the Century
    Genuinely sad: few bands have burst onto the scene with such a perfectly realized look, sound, and philosophy or been more trapped by their own meatheaded genius.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Meek's Cutoff
    Reichardt keeps this so hypnotic from shot to shot that you can easily get wrapped up in it as a sensory experience.
  5. The Animation Show 2005
    Over too soon.
  6. Tell Them Who You Are
    The elder Wexler keeps insisting that he won't sign a release for the film unless he approves of the finished product, so he must have been pleased with its brutally honest assessment of him as a gifted filmmaker who never realized his true potential.
  7. My Neighbors the Yamadas
    The movie is impressive for its even mix of snarky humor and sincere sentiment, and even more impressive when one considers that director Isao Takahata made his name with the harrowing antiwar drama Grave of the Fireflies (1988).
  8. The Honeymoon Killers
    Leonard Kastle, a composer who turned filmmaker for this single feature, brings a spare dignity and genuine depth of characterization to his exploitation subject—the series of murders committed by Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck in the late 40s.
  9. Head in the Clouds
    On paper the story may seem hopelessly contrived -- another nostalgia piece for art-house liberals -- but on-screen it's presented in purely emotional terms, which allows Duigan and his excellent leads to inhabit and ultimately transcend the period.
  10. Salaam Bombay!
    The film is unsparingly gritty, but with a woman's tenderness it also grants the characters an occasional moment of grace.
  11. Nobody's Fool
    For better and for worse, it's still a Hollywood movie (and a white boys' movie to boot), but one with a more alert eye and feeling for American life than most of its competitors.
  12. 12
    The tradition of Russian stage acting enriches this satisfying update of Reginald Rose's TV play "Twelve Angry Men."
  13. Raising Arizona
    The snickering humor that percolated through the Coens' debut, Blood Simple, is the whole show here, and it's damn near hysterical.
  14. The Last Seduction
    Unlike the classic noirs, this is grounded in neither a recognizable social reality nor a metaphysical sense of doom--just a lot of sexy attitude, humping, and heavy breathing.
  15. The Ground Truth
    It's become a critical cliche to say that everyone in the U.S. should see a particular war documentary, but even the most selfish citizen might want to check out The Ground Truth, because unlike the Iraqi victims of the war, the American ones are all around us.
  16. The Window
    This is almost as close to neorealism as to noir—the details of working-class city life are especially fine.
  17. My Winnipeg
    The movie is dominated by Maddin's usual black-and-white photography, silent-movie syntax, and deadpan melodrama.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Young Frankenstein
    More about the myth of Karloff than the monster, this Mel Brooks pastiche is probably his best early film: within limits, it has unity, pace, and even a dramatic interest of sorts.
  19. Orgazmo
    A consistently light yet derisive tone, modest production values, and masterful comic timing allow writer-director-star Trey Parker to expose cultural hypocrisies with precision. His performance--in both the movie and the movie within the movie--is dramatic and poker-faced, seamless and hilarious.
  20. Dragonslayer
    The film excels as a visual exercise, as a study in adolescent psychology, and even as astute political analysis (it's the dragon who holds the fiefdom together).
  21. Limitless
    Some might call this movie a step backward after Burger's previous feature, the painfully honest Iraq war drama "The Lucky Ones," but as a stylish intrigue it's hard to beat.
  22. The Sundowners
    A touching Fred Zinnemann movie (1960) about an Australian sheepherding family.
  23. Purple Butterfly
    Dark and challenging.
  24. To Die For
    Charting the ruthlessness of an ambitious bimbo telecaster in Little Hope, New Hampshire, this staccato black comedy sustains its brilliant exposition and narration until the plot turns to premeditated murder, complete with hapless and semicoherent teenage accomplices.
  25. The Day Silence Died
    Enchanting, multilayered fable.
  26. Bad Lieutenant
    There's an undeniable formal elegance in the way Ferrara, who coauthored the script with Zoe Lund, frames and holds certain shots, and Keitel certainly gives his all in this 1992 entry in the Raging Bull redemptive sweepstakes.
  27. A Nightmare on Elm Street
    Here the idea of sleep as the ultimate threat is still fresh and marvelously insidious, and Craven vitalizes the nightmare sequences with assorted surrealist novelties.
  28. Jane Eyre
    The new version of Jane Eyre is far and away the best I've seen, thanks largely to the skilled young actress Mia Wasikowska.
  29. Shanghai Ghetto
    Especially interesting are the complex relations among the residents of the ghetto.
  30. Manhattan Murder Mystery
    Woody Allen's welcome return to straight-ahead entertainment, after 15 years of slogging through art-house hand-me-downs, happily coincided with a return to Diane Keaton as his leading lady, and she deftly steals the show.
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