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 5.1 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. Oliver!
    Carol Reed's careful if passionless adaptation of the musical was mounted handsomely enough to win the best-picture Oscar back in 1969. In retrospect, it seems emblematic of the triviality Reed descended to in the last years of his career.
  2. The Sea Inside
    A film about freedom as well as death, this won't suit every taste, but it rewards close attention and has moments of saving humor.
  3. The Others
    The payoff matters at least as much as the setup, and this story's secret is way too easy to guess.
  4. Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
    In the interview, a charmingly self-effacing Basquiat displays a winning smile; perhaps no one could explain what drove him, or his 1988 death from a heroin overdose at 27, but we do learn of his alienation from his family.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fake It So Real
    One of the more admirable qualities of Robert Greene's Fake It So Real, is how it creates such a rich sense of place with such a mundane setting.
  6. Flushed Away
    This delightful computer animation is less twee than Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, with more action and a broader American sensibility.
  7. Awakenings
    But the material is still powerful, and the offbeat story of the patients remains both engrossing and moving even after all this abridgment.
  8. Western
    A rambling but ultimately rather affecting comedy-drama by a talented filmmaker who's almost completely unknown here, this has a deft feel for lower-middle-class life in rural France that registered strongly on its home front.
  9. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
    This 1996 cartoon feature, based on Hugo's 1831 Notre Dame de Paris, is surely one of Disney's ugliest and least imaginative efforts. It's especially unattractive in its fast editing and zooms.
  10. Duck Season
    The characters' behavior isn't always believable, and the jerky rhythm takes some getting used to (there may be more attitude here than observation). But the defiant absence of any conventional plot has a cumulative charm.
  11. Inception
    Inception delivers dazzling special effects and a boatload of stars, but it sags and eventually buckles under the weight of its complicated premise.
  12. Serenity
    Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things) is the sinister operative dispatched to retrieve the ship's psychic passenger, who as played by Summer Glau kickboxes better than Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi combined.
  13. Mysterious Object at Noon
    Experimental films are frequently criticized for being boring because they say and do too little, but the best of them put us in exhilarating overdrive because they offer too much.
  14. The Life of Jesus
    Despite its title, Bruno Dumont's extraordinary first feature is not about Christ, at least not on any literal level. The Life of Jesus may not be about religion, but like the films of Bresson, it is about redemption.
  15. The Last King of Scotland
    Of course no Western director can make a movie about Africa without being accused of colonialism himself, and some critics have faulted The Last King of Scotland for focusing on its white hero as black corpses pile up around him. But although the movie takes place on an international political stage, it's still a drama of individual allegiance.
  16. Cast Away
    Too full of its own heavy breathing to work as the primordial storytelling it's aiming for--a so-so adventure story is closer to the mark.
  17. Gun Crazy
    Lewis's long takes and sure command of film noir staples (shadows, fog, rain-soaked streets) make this a stunning technical achievement, but it's something more--a gangster film that explores the limits of the form with feeling and responsibility.
  18. Nostalghia
    It aims for a hushed, hypnotic, incantatory effect, and it does succeed in inducing some kind of trance.
  19. Tomboy
    Writer-director Celine Sciamma breaks little ground here, but her story is nicely scaled to the gender-rigid world of childhood, where boys playing soccer together take as much pride in their spitting skills as any scored goal.
  20. Farewell
    Carion might have found a more artful way to dramatize the case's geopolitical impact, but this is still pretty interesting stuff.
  21. The Orphanage
    Despite a few bloodcurdling shocks, this handsome Spanish ghost story from producer Guillermo del Toro follows in the suggestive, richly romantic tradition of the old Val Lewton chillers.
  22. Joe Gould's Secret
    A movie to savor.
  23. Ocean's Eleven
    A pretty good caper comedy for 11-year-old boys -- "heist thriller" would make it sound too ambitious.
  24. 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.
  25. Red Lights
    Director Cedric Kahn, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, and Gilles Marchand collaborated on the well-honed script, derived from a Georges Simenon novel. The film works well with quiet tensions, but becomes less convincing and interesting once it moves beyond them.
  26. Wonder Boys
    The casting of Michael Douglas against type as an over-the-hill novelist and writing professor is the sort of clever move that wins undeserved Oscars.
  27. Mysterious Skin
    The result is flawed but frequently haunting.
  28. Smooth Talk
    Joyce Chopra's independent feature plays uncomfortably like two movies jammed into one: the first is a slow, exaggeratedly naturalistic portrait of teenage alienation in the shopping mall culture of California, the second is a violent, stylized gothic shocker. Both films have their modest qualities; it's just that Chopra hasn't found an intelligible transition between the two very different approaches.
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