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. All About Eve
    The dialogue is sharp and justly famous, though writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz has trouble putting it into the mouths of his actors: nothing sounds remotely natural, and the film is pervaded by the out-of-sync sense of staircase wit—this is a movie about what people wished they'd said. The hoped-for tone of Restoration comedy never quite materializes, perhaps because Mankiewicz's cynicism is only skin-deep, but the film's tinny brilliance still pleases.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sunset Boulevard
    A tour de force for Swanson and one of Wilder’s better efforts.
  3. Treasure Island
    With Bobby Driscoll and Robert Newton, in hog heaven as Long John Silver.
    • Chicago Reader
  4. Winchester '73
    The final shoot-out remains a classic study in mise-en-scene, as Mann transforms a jagged landscape into a highly charged psychological battleground.
  5. The Gunfighter
    One of the earliest and best antiwesterns, made before the subgenre became self-conscious about critiquing the standard myths. Some that followed are merely contrary; this has the ring of truth.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Father of the Bride
    One of the bleakest films of a bleak decade.
  7. The Asphalt Jungle
    One of the first big caper films, this 1950 feature contributed much to the essence of the genre in its meticulous observation of planning and execution.
  8. Stage Fright
    This 1950 Hitchcock film came between Under Capricorn and Strangers on a Train, and if it isn’t the equal of those two sterling achievements, it’s still an intriguing experiment.
  9. The Rules of the Game
    Its Paris opening in 1939 was a disaster: the film was withdrawn, recut, and eventually banned by the occupying forces for its “demoralizing” effects. It was not shown again in its complete form until 1965, when it became clear that here, perhaps, was the greatest film ever made.
  10. Cinderella
    This 1950 effort shows Disney at the tail end of his best period, when his backgrounds were still luminous with depth and detail and his incidental characters still had range and bite.
  11. 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.
  12. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
    Engaging and lively.
  13. On the Town
    A fine, freewheeling musical.
  14. Adam's Rib
    The film is a classic, and deservedly so: the conjunction of Tracy's sly listlessness and Hepburn's stridency defines "chemistry" in the movies.
  15. They Live by Night
    A key film noir of the 40s, this was Nicholas Ray's first film as a director, and the freshness of his expressionist-documentary style is still apparent and gripping.
  16. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
    In Ford’s superbly creative hands, it becomes perhaps the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition.
  17. Under Capricorn
    Shot in astonishingly elaborate long takes, this is the kind of film that finds the most brilliant poetry in the slightest movement of the camera—a paradigm of cinematic expression.
  18. The Third Man
    It isn't easy when you're up against the likes of Reed, writer Graham Greene, and producer David O. Selznick, but Welles still manages to dominate this 1949 film, both as an actor and as a stylistic influence. What's missing is the Welles content.
  19. White Heat
    Raoul Walsh’s heroes had a knack for going too far, but none went further than James Cagney in this roaring 1949 gangster piece.
  20. The Window
    This is almost as close to neorealism as to noir—the details of working-class city life are especially fine.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Take Me Out to the Ball Game
    The plot is typical fluff—Kelly and Sinatra join Esther Williams's baseball team at the turn of the century—but the production values are, as always, worth the price of admission.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Force of Evil
    A poetic, terse, beautifully exact, and highly personal re-creation of the American underworld, with an unpunctuated Joycean screenplay by Polonsky that is perhaps unique in the American cinema. This is film noir at its best.
  23. A Canterbury Tale
    Strange and wonderful.
  24. The Snake Pit
    This grim drama packs a punch.
  25. Hamlet
    Laurence Olivier's famous 1948 interpretation of Shakespeare's play suffers slightly from his pop-Freud approach to the character and from some excessively flashy, wrongheaded camera work—including the notorious moment when Hamlet begins the soliloquy and the camera begins to track back.
  26. Rope
    Hitchcock liked to pretend that the film was an empty technical exercise, but it introduces the principal themes and motifs of the major period that would begin with Rear Window.
  27. Red River
    John Wayne and Montgomery Clift star in Howard Hawks’s epic 1948 western—one of the few such projects in which the human element takes its rightful precedence over spectacle.
  28. A Foreign Affair
    Wilder's strategy is to play a bubbly romantic comedy in a mise-en-scene of destruction and despair. As usual, it's more clever than meaningful, but this 1948 film is one of his most satisfactory in wit and pace.
  29. Key Largo
    A little windy and rhetorical for my taste, but still one of John Huston’s best efforts (1948), a melodrama of ethics that soundly represses the Maxwell Anderson play it was based on (the ending is actually a lift from To Have and Have Not).
  30. The Paradine Case
    Ultimately unsuccessful, the film is nevertheless a fascinating first draft for Vertigo.
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