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. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, this 1932 screen adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic is a remarkable achievement that deserves to be much better known.
  2. Safe in Hell
    Wellman’s splendid direction animates an otherwise static script, deftly blending comedic moments with surprisingly dark undertones. This 1931 drama may lack the punch of Wellman’s The Public Enemy, released the same year, but it’s still a fine display of his talents.
  3. East of Shanghai
    This early Hitchcock film shows more signs of the artist to come than any of his other British movies, pointing forward in particular to the deep sexual themes of Marnie and the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Frankenstein
    One of the most deservedly famous and chilling horror films of all time.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Monkey Business
    A bit disorganized, it carries hints of surrealism (especially in Harpo's extraordinary performance) that later flowered in Duck Soup.
  6. The Skin Game
    A rather stagy and creaky early talkie (1931) by Alfred Hitchcock, adapted from a John Galsworthy play.
  7. The Public Enemy
    Time hasn’t been terribly kind to this 1931 gangster drama, which suffers more than it should from the glitches of early sound. But James Cagney’s portrayal of a bootlegging runt is truly electrifying (he’d already made three films, but this one made him a star), and Jean Harlow makes the tartiest tart imaginable.
  8. The Front Page
    Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's perennial stage comedy about yellow journalism in Chicago hasn't much to offer in the way of action, but in this 1931 adaptation director Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front) manages to inject a fair amount of visual energy to complement the firecracker dialogue.
  9. City Lights
    A beautiful example of Chaplin's ability to turn narrative fragments into emotional wholes. The two halves of the film are sentiment and slapstick. They are not blended but woven into a pattern as eccentric as it is sublime.
  10. Dracula
    Universal's classic from 1931, directed by Tod Browning. The opening scenes, set in Dracula's castle, are magnificent—grave, stately, and severe. But the film becomes unbearably static once the action moves to England, and much of the morbid sexual tension is dissipated.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Blue Angel
    Reeks with decay and sexuality.
  12. Murder!
    Hitchcock was still marking out his territory at this point, and the film is heavy and vague around the edges. But it remains a crucial insight into the development of one of the cinema’s greatest artists, and so, essential viewing.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Animal Crackers
    This is second-level Marx Brothers, which means it's funny but not hysterical.
  14. All Quiet on the Western Front
    Lewis Milestone's powerful 1930 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's antiwar novel, starring Lew Ayres and Louis Wolheim, deserves its reputation as a classic.
  15. Juno and the Paycock
    Though praised when it came out (1930), Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Sean O’Casey’s play, with some of the original Dublin cast (including Sara Allgood as Juno), is a fairly deadly case of canned theater that’s pretty close to what Hitchcock many years later would refer to as “photographs of people talking.”
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Big House
    The prototype for every saga of the slammer to come, starring Chester Morris, Wallace Beery, and Robert Montgomery. Beery is particularly good in his toughest tough-guy role.
  17. The Farmer's Wife
    Hitchcock disliked the film, but it offers an unusual glimpse of the master before he settled into thrillers.
  18. The Manxman
    It’s no masterpiece, but it’s certainly something to see.
  19. Blackmail
    Like most of his British films, Blackmail is a sign of things to come rather than Hitchcock at his height, but it shouldn’t be missed.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Cocoanuts
    An eminently watchable antique, this was the Marx Brothers' first film — a literal recording of their Broadway smash hit.
  21. The Broadway Melody
    The staging is wooden, the story insipid, and the dialogue sequences mostly painful, but the film’s integration of song, dance, and story (“100% All Talking! 100% All Singing! 100% All Dancing!”) was a clear narrative advance over the music pictures being released by Warner Brothers and Fox, and the score is great.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Man with a Movie Camera
    Just a little over an hour, it nevertheless towers over film history as an example par excellence of cinema’s ability to communicate in unique and transgressive ways.
  23. The Passion of Joan of Arc
    Dreyer’s radical approach to constructing space and the slow intensity of his mobile style make this “difficult” in the sense that, like all the greatest films, it reinvents the world from the ground up. It’s also painful in a way that all Dreyer’s tragedies are, but it will continue to live long after most commercial movies have vanished from memory.
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