Chicago Sun-Times' Scores

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For 8,157 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 6.1 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: 6,086 out of 8157
  2. Mixed: 1,243 out of 8157
  3. Negative: 828 out of 8157
8157 movie reviews
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  1. Martian Child
    The movie leaves no heartstring untugged. It even has a beloved old dog, and you know what happens to beloved old dogs in movies like this. Or if you don't, I don't have the heart to tell you.
  2. The Elephant Man
    I kept asking myself what the film was really trying to say about the human condition as reflected by John Merrick, and I kept drawing blanks. The film's philosophy is this shallow: (1)Wow, the Elephant Man sure looked hideous, and (2)gosh, isn't it wonderful how he kept on in spite of everything?
  3. Dom Hemingway
    We’re just watching Jude Law, who gained some 30 pounds for this role, acting his rear end off but also spinning his wheels in a story that never amounts to more than a collection of vignettes about Dom’s life after prison.
  4. Paradise Road
    But what the movie lacks is a story arc to pull us through.
  5. Monte Carlo
    It's chirpy, it's bright, there are pretty locations and lots happens. This is the kind of movie that can briefly hold the attention of a cat.
  6. The Brothers Grimm
    A work of limitless invention, but it is invention without pattern, chasing itself around the screen without finding a plot.
  7. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
    It's not particularly funny to hear women described and valued exclusively in terms of their function as disposable sexual partners. A lot of Connor's dialogue is just plain sadistic and qualifies him as that part of an ass it shares with a doughnut.
  8. Kings
    The English-language debut from the brilliant talent behind best foreign film picture nominee “Mustang” is a terribly uneven, borderline absurdist jumble that undercuts its own message again and again.
  9. Max Keeble's Big Move
    It is the kind of movie one enjoys more at 8, or even 12, than at 16 and up.
  10. Wedding Crashers
    You know all those horror stories about a cigar-chomping producer who screens a movie and says they need to lose 15 minutes and shoot a new ending? Wedding Crashers needed a producer like that.
  11. The Fisher King
    A disorganized, rambling and eccentric movie that contains some moments of truth, some moments of humor, and many moments of digression.
  12. Class Act
    A good-looking movie with hard-working performances and a bubble-brained script, which nevertheless stumbles over a truth from time to time. Class Act could be a trial run for something really relevant.
  13. Hiding Out
    The most curious thing about Hiding Out is that the plot continued to intrigue me even after I'd more or less given up on the movie's ability to find anything interesting in its material. What would it really be like to be in high school again? To revisit your past, knowing what you know now? Hollywood ought to make a good movie about that idea. In fact, Hollywood has: Peggy Sue Got Married. This one fails by comparison.
  14. Book Club
    What a waste of some perfectly wonderful legends.
  15. Troop Beverly Hills
    If this movie had been a satire, it could have been deadly.
  16. The Glass Castle
    It’s a well-made film with strong performances, and it by no means shies away from some of the more shocking and tragic episodes from Jeannette’s upbringing. But when “The Glass Castle” reaches for late-movie moments of closure and self-revelations and forgiveness...it rings sour and false.
  17. Larry Crowne
    The screenplay carries blandness to a point beyond tedium.
  18. Glitter
    And above all, the film is lacking in joy. It never seems like it's fun to be Billie Frank.
  19. Mambo italiano
    There are laughs in the movie, and a lot of good feeling, but it seems more interested in its Italian stereotypes than its gay insights.
  20. The Star Chamber
    The Star Chamber works brilliantly until it locks into a plot. Then it stops dancing and starts marching.
  21. The Safety of Objects
    Troche's tone is so relentlessly, depressingly monotonous that the characters seem trapped in a narrow emotional range. They live out their miserable lives in one lachrymose sequence after another, and for us there is no relief.
  22. The Living Daylights
    Without a great Bond girl, a great villain or a hero with a sense of humor, The Living Daylights belongs somewhere on the lower rungs of the Bond ladder. But there are some nice stunts.
  23. Cassandra's Dream
    The identical premise is used in Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," which is like a master class in how Allen goes wrong.
  24. Dark Crimes
    This is a well-made, well-acted and sometimes intriguing but also coldly cynical and manipulative murder mystery.
  25. 1941
    It's not fair to say Steven Spielberg's 1941 lacks "pacing." It's got it, all right, but all at the same pace: The movie relentlessly throws gags at us until we're dizzy. It's an attempt at that most tricky of genres, the blockbuster comedy, and it tries so hard to dazzle us that we want a break.
  26. Splash
    There is a funny movie lurking at the edges of Splash, and sometimes it even sneaks on screen and makes us smile. It's too bad the relentlessly conventional minds that made this movie couldn't have made the leap from sitcom to comedy.
  27. Levity
    An earnest but hopeless attempt to tell a parable about a man's search for redemption. By the end of his journey, we don't care if he finds redemption, if only he finds wakefulness.
  28. Cop Out
    A lot of the dialogue is intended as funny, but man, is it lame.
  29. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    Painfully long, exceedingly tedious, consistently unimaginative and quite dopey.
  30. Empire Records
    If the movie is a lost cause, it may at least showcase actors who have better things ahead of them.
  31. The Clan of the Cave Bear
    The filmmakers made no effort to empathize with their prehistoric characters, to imagine what it might have really been like back then.
  32. Rampage
    Rampage might not be the worst movie of the year so far, but it’s a contender for most pointless.
  33. Day of the Dead
    In the earlier films, we really identified with the small cadre of surviving humans. They were seen as positive characters, and we cared about them. This time, the humans are mostly unpleasant, violent, insane or so noble that we can predict with utter certainty that they will survive.
  34. Fatal Instinct
    Armand Assante, on the other hand, is one of the best movie actors of his generation. But he isn't very funny in Fatal Instinct.
  35. Underwater
    Underwater breaks no new ground as a sci-fi horror flick — other than as a possible contender for the murkiest movie ever made.
  36. Romeo Must Die
    (Li)'s scenes are so clearly computer-aided that his moves are about as impressive as Bugs Bunny doing the same.
  37. Hoot
    Hoot has its heart in the right place, but I have been unable to locate its brain.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Crush
    In a world already corrupted with Amy and Joey, and Woody Allen and Soon Yi, the last thing we need is a movie like "The Crush" masquerading as entertainment. [6 Apr 1993, p.29]
    • Chicago Sun-Times
  39. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
    It's slick, it has impressive production values and the acting is appropriate to the material. So why did I find myself so indifferent to the movie? Maybe because it never generated any sympathy for its characters. This is filmmaking by the numbers, without soul.
  40. Johnny English
    Plays like a tired exercise, a spy spoof with no burning desire to be that, or anything else.
  41. The Postman
    There are those who will no doubt call The Postman the worst film of the year, but it's too good-hearted for that.
  42. An Innocent Man
    An Innocent Man has all the elements to put us through an emotional wringer, but the movie never works up any enthusiasm for them. It's the most relaxed crime movie of the year.
  43. Behind Enemy Lines
    This is not the story of a fugitive trying to sneak through enemy terrain and be rescued, but of a movie character magically transported from one photo opportunity to another.
  44. The Pink Panther
    At every moment in the movie, I was aware that Peter Sellers was Clouseau, and Steve Martin was not. I hadn't realized how thoroughly Sellers and Edwards had colonized my memory.
  45. The Time Machine
    A witless recycling of the H.G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing.
  46. The Strangers
    The movie deserves more stars for its bottom-line craft, but all the craft in the world can't redeem its story.
  47. The Hollars
    The Hollars is an uneven, ineffective and self-conscious dysfunctional family comedy/drama with a Sundance-y vibe, and scene after scene in which the greatly talented and usually quite likable cast members keep stepping in big piles of wrong choices.
  48. Taken 3
    ​I’ll tell you what got Taken. A hundred and twelve minutes of my life got Taken.
  49. Zoolander 2
    Stiller the director does a fine job of making Zoolander 2 look like an actual spy movie, but we’ve seen far better takeoffs, including “Spy” and “Kingsman: The Secret Service” in just the last couple of years. As for the jabs at the transient nature of popular culture and the ridiculousness of high fashion world — easy, tired targets.
  50. The Runner
    In the lurid and cheesy and sometimes unintentionally funny political thriller Runner, one of the most intriguing and eclectic casts of the year is wasted in a murky cesspool that comes across as a third-rate version of “House of Cards” with a little bit of “Scandal” thrown in for bad measure.
  51. Sleeping with the Enemy
    Because the opening scenes of Sleeping with the Enemy are so powerful, the rest of the movie is all the more disappointing. The film begins as an unyielding look at a battered wife, and ends as another one of those thrillers where the villain toys with his victim and the audience.
  52. Enough
    It's surprising to see a director like Michael Apted and an actress like Jennifer Lopez associated with such tacky material.
  53. Zipper
    Zipper might be entertaining enough in a campy way for you to watch it on demand as long as you’ve got a really big bowl of popcorn and an even bigger glass of wine (or the non-alcoholic elixir of your choice) to get you through. Might. Be.
  54. Four Lovers
    You know there's something wrong with a sex movie when the good parts are the dialogue.
  55. BASEketball
    Starts promisingly as an attack on modern commercialized sports, and then turns into just one more wheezy assembly-line story about slacker dudes vs. rich old guys.
  56. Joe Somebody
    It's a simple, wholesome parable, crashingly obvious, and we sit patiently while the characters and the screenplay slowly arrive at the inevitable conclusion. It needs to take some chances and surprise us.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Island of Dr. Moreau
    It's ironic that a movie taking aim at the dangers of science run amok would invest so strongly in the science of its slick filmmaking and special makeup effects and so little toward the development of a cohesive screenplay, but such is the case with The Island of Dr. Moreau.
    • Chicago Sun-Times
  58. Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
    Maybe this is unreasonable, but I can’t help thinking that if you’re going to make a movie with “Oz” in the title, you’d better be prepared to kick in at least a little inspiration. Yet that’s precisely what’s missing — so utterly absent it’s almost impressive in a way — in the painfully uninspired Legends of Oz.
  59. Step Brothers
    In Step Brothers, the language is simply showing off by talking dirty. It serves no comic function, and just sort of sits there in the air, making me cringe.
  60. Footloose
    Footloose is a seriously confused movie that tries to do three things, and does all of them badly. It wants to tell the story of a conflict in a town, it wants to introduce some flashy teenage characters, and part of the time it wants to be a music video. It's possible that no movie with this many agendas can be good; maybe somebody should have decided, early on, exactly what the movie was supposed to be about.
  61. The Last Face
    This is an astonishingly uninvolving and at times almost laughably melodramatic effort, marred by overwrought voice-over narration from Theron, a relentless barrage of scenes depicting horrific human suffering and a love story featuring one-dimensional characters we don’t particularly care about.
  62. Men in Black II
    The astonishing success of the original "MiB" was partly because it was fun, partly because it was unexpected. We'd never seen anything like it, while with MiBII, we've seen something exactly like it.
  63. Conan the Barbarian
    A brutal, crude, witless high-tech CGI contrivance, in which no artificial technique has been overlooked, including 3-D.
  64. Patch Adams
    Made me want to spray the screen with Lysol. This movie is shameless. It's not merely a tearjerker. It extracts tears individually by liposuction, without anesthesia.
  65. Venom
    Tom Hardy is one of the best actors in the world, but as he flounders his way through Venom, we’re reminded even the finest talents can sink under the weight of a terrible movie.
  66. Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town
    The only thing less satisfying than the build-up is the finale, which goes from mind-boggling to you’ve got to be kidding me.
  67. Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise
    As screenplays go, this is as idiotic as it gets. There are a couple of marginally funny moments in the movie, like the belching contest, but they don't go anywhere.
  68. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    I am just about ready to write off movies in which people make bets about whether they will, or will not, fall in love.
  69. Dangerous Minds
    The movie pretends to show poor black kids being bribed into literacy by Dylan and candy bars, but actually it is the crossover white audience that is being bribed with mind-candy in the form of safe words by the two Dylans.
  70. The Tuxedo
    The movie is silly beyond comprehension, and even if it weren't silly, it would still be beyond comprehension.
  71. Evening
    There are few things more depressing than a weeper that doesn't make you weep.
  72. Burnt Offerings
    Burnt Offerings is a mystery, all right. What's mysterious is that the filmmakers were able to sell such a weary collection of ancient cliches for cold hard cash.
  73. Amsterdam
    In the case of David O. Russell’s jaw-droppingly terrible, aggressively tasteless, profoundly unfunny and interminably dull conspiracy thriller and would-be comedy “Amsterdam,” the all-star ensemble has less chemistry than a high school freshman on the first day of class.
  74. Intrusion
    Intrusion is a derivative, manipulative, convoluted and dopey story that dishes up one scary movie cliché after another before careening out of control with a late plot development so insanely implausible, so far out of left field, it’s as if someone accidentally deleted 20 pages of the script during production and nobody noticed.
  75. Nowhere to Run
    This is the kind of movie that is so witlessly generic that the plot and title disappear into a mist of other recycled plots and interchangeable titles.
  76. Did You Hear About the Morgans?
    What possible reason was there for anyone to make Did You Hear About the Morgans? Or should I say "remake," because this movie has been made and over and over again, and oh, so much better.
  77. I Am Number Four
    What we have here is a witless attempt to merge the "Twilight" formula with the Michael Bay formula.
  78. The Commuter
    Virtually every big twist and every major reveal in The Commuter is telegraphed well in advance, and from the moment the train leaves the station and the story really begins to kick into gear, we find ourselves rolling our eyes about every 10 minutes.
  79. Alita: Battle Angel
    All the cutting-edge pyrotechnics in the universe can’t overcome the uneven (and ultimately unsatisfying) screenplay.
  80. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    How bad is “Fallen Kingdom”? How terrible is a movie that pounds us with a pretentious, nearly operatic score while indulging in B-movie clichés and calling for the main characters to make idiotic decisions just to keep the story rolling? I have to dig deep into the Awful Sequel Playbook to draw parallels to this exercise in wretched excess.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Split Second
    It's too unfunny to be comedy, too ordinary to be sci-fi and too flat to be action. But give the cinematographers credit: All that dark mood lighting does make it much easier for moviegoers to snooze. [5 May 1992, p.31]
    • Chicago Sun-Times
  82. Narrow Margin
    Narrow Margin is a clumsy version of the Idiot Plot, dressed up as a high-gloss chase thriller. The Idiot Plot, of course, is any plot that would be resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were not an idiot. And rarely has there been a film in which more idiots make more mistakes than in this one.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Thinner
    Unfortunately, there's otherwise not much meat to King's Thinner.
    • Chicago Sun-Times
  84. Heaven's Gate
    This movie is a study in wretched excess. It is so smoky, so dusty, so foggy, so unfocused and so brownish yellow that you want to try Windex on the screen. A director is in deep trouble when we do not even enjoy the primary act of looking at his picture.
  85. Space Jam: A New Legacy
    Throughout the game, during the action sequences and especially during the timeouts and strategy sessions, the “celebrity” fans are a huge distraction — and making things even more bizarre, their numbers include Pennywise the Clown from “It” and the murderous, rapist gang known as the Droogs from “A Clockwork Orange.” Who in the name of Bugs Bunny thought this was a good idea?
  86. Irene in Time
    It offers certain pleasures, but suffers from an inability to structure events or know when to end a shot. And it has an ending that is simply, perhaps ridiculously, incomprehensible.
  87. The Hunger
    The Hunger is an agonizingly bad vampire movie, circling around an exquisitely effective sex scene.
  88. Jawbreaker
    A slick production of a lame script, which kills time for most of its middle half-hour. If anyone in the plot had the slightest intelligence, the story would implode.
  89. Tuff Turf
    Tuff Turf is the worst teenage exploitation movie since "Where the Boys Are".
  90. Grizzly II: Revenge (1983)
    It’s just an awful and ridiculous and clumsily edited B-movie mostly of interest because of the name cast, an insanely horrible concert within the film — and the incredible back story about the making of “Grizzly II,” which could be great material for a fictional adaptation a la “Argo” or “The Big Short” or “American Hustle.”
  91. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
    The whole thing is just so sloppy and dumb and overflowing with clichés.
  92. Coneheads
    This is a dismal, dreary and fairly desperate movie, in which the actors try very hard but are unable to overcome an uninspired screenplay.
  93. A Good Day to Die Hard
    Like the Bond movies, the "Die Hard" films thrive on brilliantly wicked villains. In this edition, we barely know which bad guy is the main bad guy. The script is filled with heavy-handed dialogue about parents and their children, framed by well choreographed but generic action sequences.
  94. 21 and Over
    This is one of those 93-minute movies that seem about 88 minutes too long. Or not worth making in the first place.
  95. Sphere
    A watered-down take on the sci-fi classic "Solaris," by Stanislaw Lem, which was made into an immeasurably better film by Andrei Tarkovsky.
  96. Basic Instinct 2
    It's a lot of things, but boring is not one of them. I cannot recommend the movie, but ... why the hell can't I? Just because it's godawful? What kind of reason is that for staying away from a movie? Godawful and boring, that would be a reason.
  97. The Believers
    An awesomely silly, tasteless and half-witted movie.
  98. 3000 Miles to Graceland
    Here's a movie without an ounce of human kindness, a sour and mean-spirited enterprise so desperate to please, it tries to be a yukky comedy and a hard-boiled action picture at the same time.
  99. My Zoe
    A clumsy, off-putting, uninvolving hybrid of domestic tragedy and sci-fi drama with zero payoffs and one of the most infuriating codas of any movie this century.
  100. Capone
    It’s potentially fresh and unique material, but from the first scenes through the tone-deaf conclusion, Capone is a noxious film about a noxious man — a gruesome and grotesque viewing experience that tells us nothing new about Capone while rubbing our noses in one detestable scene after another. By the time we get to a typically overblown scene in which a diaper-wearing Capone wields a gold-plated Tommy Gun while on a shooting spree, we surrender.
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