Chicago Sun-Times' Scores

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For 8,156 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 73% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 25% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 6 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 71
Highest review score: 100 Falling from Grace
Lowest review score: 0 Jupiter Ascending
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 6,085 out of 8156
  2. Mixed: 1,243 out of 8156
  3. Negative: 828 out of 8156
8156 movie reviews
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  1. Butterfly Tongues
    Because the film marches so inexorably toward its conclusion, it would be unfair to hint at what happens, except to say that it provides a heartbreaking insight into the way that fear creates cowards.
  2. Boys and Girls
    It's not that I don't like it. It's that I don't care.
  3. Groove
    I liked the music. I would rather have the movie's soundtrack than see Groove again--or at all.
  4. Sunshine
    This is a movie of substance and thrilling historical sweep, and its three hours allow Szabo to show the family's destiny forming and shifting under pressure.
  5. Love's Labour's Lost
    There's not a song I wouldn't hear again with pleasure, or a clip that might not make me smile, but as a whole, it's not much. Like cotton candy, it's better as a concept than as an experience.
  6. Gone in Sixty Seconds
    This is the kind of movie that ends up playing on the TV set over the bar in a better movie.
  7. Running Free
    I seem to be developing a rule about talking animals: They can talk if they're cartoons or Muppets, but not if they're real.
  8. Thirteen
    One of the truest films I've seen about the ebb and flow of a real relationship.
  9. Grass
    Grass is not much as a documentary. It's a cut-and-paste job, assembling clips from old and new anti-drug films and alternating them with pro-drug footage from the Beats, the flower power era and so on.
  10. Big Momma's House
    Any movie that employs an oven mitt and a plumber's friend in a childbirth scene cannot be all bad, and I laughed a lot.
  11. Shanghai Noon
    If you see only one martial arts Western this year (and there is probably an excellent chance of that), this is the one.
  12. Passion of Mind
    By the ending of the film, which is unconvincingly neat, I was distracted by too many questions to care about the answers.
  13. Kikujirô no natsu
    If the movie finally doesn't work as well as it should, it may be because the material isn't a good fit for Kitano's hard-edged underlying style.
  14. 8 ½ Women
    One possible approach to 8 1/2 Women, I think, is to view it as a slowed-down, mannered, tongue-in-cheek silent comedy, skewed by Greenaway's anger and desire to manipulate.
  15. Mission: Impossible II
    More evolved, more confident, more sure-footed in the way it marries minimal character development to seamless action.
  16. Dinosaur
    I was entertained, and yet I felt a little empty-handed at the end, as if an enormous effort had been spent on making these dinosaurs seem real, and then an even greater effort was spent on undermining the illusion.
  17. Small Time Crooks
    Dumb as they (allegedly) are, the characters in Small Time Crooks are smarter, edgier and more original than the dreary crowd in so many new comedies.
  18. Road Trip
    It's sweet when it should be raunchy, or vice versa, and the result is a movie that seems uneasy with itself.
  19. Kadosh
    A very angry film.
  20. Center Stage
    The movie uses the materials of melodrama, but is gentle with them; it's oriented more in the real world, and doesn't jack up every conflict and love story into an overwrought crisis.
  21. Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
    Awful in so many different ways.
  22. Hamlet
    Both a distraction and a revelation.
    • Chicago Sun-Times
  23. Human Traffic
    They are, in fact, likable. That's why their comedy is so sad.
  24. Up at the Villa
    This whole movie is about manners. There is sex and violence, but the movie is not about giving in to them; it's about carrying on as if they didn't exist.
  25. I Dreamed of Africa
    There is a lack of drama and telling detail. When events happen, they seem more like set pieces than part of the flow.
  26. Michael Jordan to the Max
    Essentially just a promotional film for Jordan as a product. It plays like a commercial for itself.
  27. Gladiator
    It employs depression as a substitute for personality, and believes that if the characters are bitter and morose enough, we won't notice how dull they are.
  28. The Big Kahuna
    Sharp-edged, perfectly timed, funny and thoughtful.
  29. Frequency
    Likely to appeal to the fans of "The Sixth Sense," "Ghost" and other movies where the characters find a loophole in reality. What it also has in common with those two movies is warmth and emotion.
  30. The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
    An ideal first movie for infants, who can enjoy the bright colors on the screen and wave their tiny hands to the music.
  31. Timecode
    I'm glad I saw the film. It challenged me.
  32. Where the Heart Is
    So heavy on incident, contrivance, coincidence, improbability, sudden reversals and dizzying flash-forwards (sometimes years at a time) that it seems a wonder the characters don't crash into each other in the confusion.
  33. Croupier
    The point of the movie is not the plot, but the character and the atmosphere.
  34. Gossip
    Chop off the last two or three minutes, fade to black, and you have a decent film.
  35. The Last September
    I'm not sure the movie should have pumped up the melodrama to get us more interested, but something might have helped.
  36. U-571
    You can enjoy U-571 as a big, dumb war movie without a brain in its head.
  37. The Virgin Suicides
    [Coppola] has the courage to play it in a minor key.
  38. Love & Basketball
    Not as taut as it could have been, but I prefer its emotional perception to the pumped-up sports cliches I was sort of expecting.
  39. Keeping the Faith
    We're swept up in the story's need to find a happy ending.
    • Chicago Sun-Times
  40. Set Me Free
    The movie gets a little confused toward the end, I think, as its writer and director, Lea Pool, tries to settle things that could have been left unresolved.
  41. American Psycho
    Christian Bale is heroic in the way he allows the character to leap joyfully into despicability.
  42. 28 Days
    Bullock brings a kind of ground-level vulnerability to 28 Days that doesn't make her into a victim but simply into one more suitable case for treatment.
  43. Where the Money Is
    A preposterous plot, but it's not about a plot, it's about acting.
  44. East Is East
    If there is a weakness in East Is East, it's that Om Puri's character is a little too serious for the comedy surrounding him.
  45. Est - Ouest
    The movie as a whole lacks the conviction of a real story. It is more like a lush morality play, too leisurely in its storytelling, too sure of its morality.
  46. The Filth and the Fury
    To see this film's footage from the '70s is to see the beginning of much of pop and fashion iconography for the next two decades.
  47. Joe Gould's Secret
    There is anguish here that makes "American Beauty" pale by comparison.
  48. Rules of Engagement
    Works splendidly as a courtroom thriller about military values as long as you don't expect it to seriously consider those values.
  49. Return to Me
    It is what it is, without apology or compromise. It made me smile a lot.
  50. Ready to Rumble
    The plot is easily summarized: "Dumb and Dumber Meet Dumbbell."
  51. Me Myself I
    Griffiths is one of the most intensely interesting actresses at work today.
  52. Black and White
    The agony of invention is there on the screen.
  53. Price of Glory
    Made me feel like I was sitting in McDonald's watching some guy shout at his kids. Price of Glory gives us two hours of that behavior, and it's a miscalculation so basic that it makes the movie painful when it wants, I guess, to be touching.
  54. The Road to El Dorado
    Bright and zesty.
  55. The Skulls
    So ludicrous in so many different ways it achieves a kind of forlorn grandeur.
  56. High Fidelity
    Causes us to leave the theater quite unreasonably happy.
  57. Here on Earth
    Slides too easily into its sentimentality; the characters should have put up more of a struggle.
  58. Waking the Dead
    Has a good heart and some fine performances, but is too muddled at the story level to involve us emotionally.
  59. The Color of Paradise
    A family film that shames the facile commercialism of a product like "Pokemon" and its value system based on power and greed.It is made with delicacy and beauty.
  60. Such a Long Journey
    So rich in atmosphere it makes Western films look pale and underpopulated.
  61. Whatever It Takes
    It involves teenagers who have never existed, doing things no teenager has ever done, for reasons no teenager would understand. Of course, it's aimed at the teenage market.
  62. Romeo Must Die
    (Li)'s scenes are so clearly computer-aided that his moves are about as impressive as Bugs Bunny doing the same.
  63. Erin Brockovich
    A screenplay with the depth and insight of a cable-TV docudrama.
  64. Beyond the Mat
    Isn't a slick documentary; some of it feels like Blaustein's home movie about being a wrestling fan. But it has a hypnotic quality.
  65. Final Destination
    Will no doubt be a hit and inspire the obligatory sequels.
  66. Mission to Mars
    I can't recommend Mission to Mars.
  67. Deterrence
    The kind of movie that leaves you with fundamental objections. But that's after it's over. While it's playing, it's surprisingly good.
  68. What Planet Are You From?
    Here is the most uncomfortable movie of the new year, an exercise in feel-good smut.
  69. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    Weirdly intriguing.
  70. Drowning Mona
    My problem was that I didn't care who killed Mona Dearly, or why, and didn't want to know anyone in town except for Chief Rash and his daughter.
  71. The Next Best Thing
    A garage sale of gay issues, harnessed to a plot as exhausted as a junkman's horse.
  72. Theeviravaathi: The Terrorist
    If you have ever wondered what kind of person volunteers to become a human bomb, and what they think about in the days before their death, this film wonders, too.
  73. The Closer You Get
    A sweet film, mildly pleasant to watch, but it's not worth the trip or even a detour.
  74. Claire Dolan
    If a movie like this had a neat ending, the ending would be a lie. We do not want answers, but questions and observations.
  75. Mifune's Last Song
    If the story is immensely satisfying in a traditional way, the style has its own delights.
  76. Wonder Boys
    The most accurate movie about campus life that I can remember.
  77. Reindeer Games
    The first All Talking Killer picture. After the setup, it consists mostly of characters explaining their actions to one another.
  78. Pitch Black
    Clever, done with skill, yet lacking in the cerebral imagination of the best science fiction.
  79. Beautiful People
    It is fairly lighthearted, under the circumstances; like "Catch-22," it enjoys the paradoxes that occur when you try to apply logic to war.
  80. Hanging Up
    More about continuing the legend of the irascible but lovable old man into the grave, if necessary.
  81. The Whole Nine Yards
    A subtle but unmistakable aura of jolliness sneaks from the screen.
  82. Not One Less
    His story is simple, unadorned, direct. Only the margins are complicated.
  83. Boiler Room
    Has the high-octane feel of real life, closely observed.
  84. Cotton Mary
    Wants to make larger points, but succeeds only in being a story of derangement.
  85. Snow Day
    An uninspired assembly of characters and story lines that interrupt one another.
  86. The Beach
    A seriously confused film that makes three or four passes at being a better one and doesn't complete any of them.
  87. Scream 3
    Essentially an interlacing of irony and gotcha! Scenes.
  88. The Big Tease
    Never quite attains takeoff velocity.
  89. The Cup
    A delightful demonstration of how spirituality can coexist quite happily with an intense desire for France to defeat Brazil.
  90. Isn't She Great
    A flat and peculiar film.
  91. My Dog Skip
    A movie like this falls outside ordinary critical language. Is it good or bad? Is there too much melodrama? I don't have any idea. It triggered too many thoughts of my own for me to have much attention left over for footnotes.
  92. Fantasia 2000
    Movies like this renew my faith that the future of the cinema lies not in the compromises of digital projection, but by leaping over the limitations of digital into the next generation of film technology.
  93. The Hurricane
    This is one of Denzel Washington's great performances, on a par with his work in "Malcolm X."
  94. The Third Miracle
    Here is a rarity, a film about religion that is neither pious nor sensational, simply curious. No satanic possessions, no angelic choirs, no evil spirits, no lovers joined beyond the grave. Just a man doing his job.
  95. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
    More reverie and meditation than reportage.
  96. Play It to the Bone
    The movie doesn't know how odd it seems to cut from the bloodshed in the ring to the dialogue of the supporting players, who still think they're in a comedy.
  97. Titus
    A brilliant and absurd film of "Titus Andronicus" that goes over the top, doubles back and goes over the top again.
  98. Galaxy Quest
    The movie's humor works best when the illogic of the TV show gets in the way.
  99. The Talented Mr. Ripley
    The movie is as intelligent a thriller as you'll see this year.
  100. Any Given Sunday
    It's a close call here. I guess I recommend the movie because the dramatic scenes are worth it. But if some studio executive came along and made Stone cut his movie down to two hours, I have the strangest feeling it wouldn't lose much of substance and might even play better.
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