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. Shaun of the Dead
    Pegg and Wright are out of their depth in the second half, when they try to engage the more disturbing elements of Romero's movies, but their disaffected slacker take on the genre is a welcome alternative to the usual bloodbaths.
  2. Syriana
    This is intelligent, committed, and politically provocative, though its narrative puzzle box may prompt you to throw up your hands and let Exxon go on running the world.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Silent Souls
    Rife with earthy details and poetic associations, the movie often advances like a daydream.
  4. Stand by Me
    Without his comic underpinnings (there's only a crude pie-eating fantasy as comic security) Reiner seems lost in his own cinematic wilderness—button-down careful, almost afraid to move. His only storytelling strategy involves crosscutting from one talking head to another, and he leaves too many literary ends dangling from the Stephen King novella on which this 1989 film is based.
  5. Djomeh
    Hassan Yektapanah's first film attests to the deceptive simplicity of Iranian cinema, transforming the most minimal of props, scenes, and stories into a complex journey of discovery.
  6. Reds
    Warren Beatty's shapely 1981 epic, based on the life of radical journalist John Reed, is a stunningly successful application of a novelistic aesthetic—a film that makes full and thoughtful use of its three-and-a-half-hour length to develop characters, ideas, and motifs with a depth seldom seen in movies.
  7. The Baader Meinhof Complex
    An explosive but scrupulously journalistic drama about the radical group that terrorized Germany for nearly 30 years.
  8. The Snake Pit
    This grim drama packs a punch.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dreamgirls
    Elegant, unabashedly theatrical, and packed with lush concert scenes and period-perfect costumes.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dogtown and Z-Boys
    Propulsive and highly satisfying documentary.
  11. Peter Pan
    Postwar Disney (1953) and not quite up to snuff. Disney's depersonalizing habit of putting different teams in charge of different sections of the story really shows up here, with work ranging from the flat and cloying (the animation of Peter himself) to the full-bodied and funny (Captain Hook and his alligator).
  12. The Greatest Show on Earth
    Cecil B. De Mille in anachronistic decline, though a few critics insist it’s his most personal film.
  13. Escape from New York
    The movie is never less than entertaining, but it fails to satisfy—it gives us too little of too much. Oddly, much of its pleasure is in the acting, which up to this point hadn't been Carpenter's strong suit: Donald Pleasence, Adrienne Barbeau, and Harry Dean Stanton offer excellent turns.
  14. Tucker: The Man and His Dream
    Francis Coppola's stylish and heartfelt tribute to the innovative automobile designer Preston Thomas Tucker turns out to be one of his most personal and successful movies.
  15. Dave
    The movie remystifies as much as demystifies presidential politics, but an overall mood of sweetness may help one to forgive the archaic and childish aspects of the would-be analysis, which splits everyone between angels and devils.
  16. La Ciudad (The City)
    The bitterly beautiful black-and-white industrial and residential landscapes reflect the sense of anonymity felt by the characters.
  17. Menace II Society
    This shocking, violent, and unsentimental (albeit sensationalized) drama about a second-generation drug dealer (Turner) and the callous world he lives in, produced by "To Sleep With Anger's" Darin Scott, is terrifically acted.
  18. Blue Car
    The scenes of family squalor are memorably persuasive, but any filmmaker ending her movie with the heroine throwing a crumpled poem into the ocean needs a few more writing courses.
  19. This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss
    Fascinating and instructive throughout.
  20. A Very Long Engagement
    Sacrifices compelling drama for gratuitous whimsy and big-budget spectacle.
  21. The Sleepy Time Gal
    Months after seeing this, I still feel I know most of these people as if they were old friends.
  22. Chuck & Buck
    Possibly the most daring and honest drama about sexuality I've ever seen.
  23. Shine a Light
    Naturally, age and infirmity are a major subtext of Shine a Light (and, really, any movie featuring Keith Richards). No matter how cadaverous the Stones appear, they keep climbing onstage, and I’ll miss them when they’re finally gone.
  24. Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders
    Free of grandstanding and sentimentality, this powerful 2008 documentary follows missions to Liberia and the Congo undertaken by volunteers for Medecins Sans Frontieres.
  25. Hell Is for Heroes
    Siegel avoids the cliches of the butterflies-and-brotherhood school (cf All Quiet on the Western Front), opting instead for a study of the brutalizing power of sanctioned violence.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Father of the Bride
    One of the bleakest films of a bleak decade.
  27. The Cranes Are Flying
    It’s exactly what you’d expect: tepid, artsy, and grayish, though it has surprising bursts of sincere sentiment.
  28. Heat
    There's nothing really new...but it has craft, pacing, and an overall sense of proportion, three pretty rare classic virtues nowadays.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shotgun Stories
    At the center of the film is a keenly understated performance by Michael Shannon (Bug, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead) as the eldest of the cast-off sons.
  30. What's Love Got to Do with It
    As a truthful account of the life of Tina Turner or as a faithful adaptation of her as-told-to autobiography, I, Tina, this 1993 film can't be taken too seriously. But as a powerhouse showcase for the acting talents of Angela Bassett (who plays Turner) and Laurence Fishburne (who plays her abusive husband, Ike) and as a potent portrayal of wife beating and the emotions that surround it (in this case, Ike's professional envy and Tina's stoic acceptance of abuse), it's quite a show.
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