Chicago Sun-Times' Scores

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For 8,159 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: 6,088 out of 8159
  2. Mixed: 1,243 out of 8159
  3. Negative: 828 out of 8159
8159 movie reviews
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  1. Eyes of Laura Mars
    Eyes of Laura Mars tries to say Serious Things about fashion photography, corruption in advertising, and the violence in our society. It does not succeed, but it tries. We would not, however, hold its Serious Things against it, if the movie also succeeded as a thriller. It doesn't, unless your idea of being thrilled is having people leap out of the shadows and then turn out to be friends.
  2. Bullet Train
    Unlike so many of the cookie-cutter, wisecracking-assassin movies in recent memory, Bullet Train acknowledges its outlandishness from the beginning and yet also manages to connect so many dots in creative, gotcha fashion.
  3. Four Brothers
    Four Brothers works as an urban thriller, if not precisely as a model of logic.
  4. Y2K
    Unfortunately, “Y2K” fizzles out somewhere around the halfway point, in part because the characters aren’t fleshed out much beyond familiar tropes, and the screenplay seems not quite finished. It’s as if the filmmakers ran out of fresh ideas at some point but just plowed ahead anyway.
  5. Sleuth
    Caine, who has never been much for the stage, is a superb screen actor, so good his master classes on acting for the camera are on DVD. Here, dry and clipped, biting and savage, he goes for the kill.
  6. 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.
  7. Inventing the Abbotts
    The picture is haunted by a story problem: It isn't about anything but itself. There's no sense of life going on in the corners of the frame.
  8. Kalifornia
    The suspense screws up tighter than a drum-head. The characters remain believable; we have a conflict of personalities, not stereotypes. The action coexists seamlessly with the message.
  9. Downhill
    Despite the invaluable comedic/dramatic gifts of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell, who do their best to inject some life and energy into the proceedings, Downhill is a pale, tame, broad and soft-edged remake of the far superior 2014 Swedish film “Force Majeure.”
  10. Bedazzled
    Walking out of the screening, I was thinking: Elizabeth Hurley for girlfriend, Courtney Love for Satan.
  11. Harvard Man
    How can one man juggle two women, possible expulsion, Mafia baseball bats and the meaning of life, while on acid? This is the kind of question only a Toback film thinks to ask, let alone answer.
  12. Harrison's Flowers
    The movie exhibits the usual indifference to the issues involved. Although it was written and directed by Elie Chouraqui, a Frenchman, it is comfortably xenophobic. Most Americans have never understood the differences among Croats, Serbs and Bosnians, and this film is no help.
  13. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
    I admired the scenes with De Niro so much I'm tempted to give Mary Shelley's Frankenstein a favorable verdict. But it's a near miss. The Creature is on target, but the rest of the film is so frantic, so manic, it doesn't pause to be sure its effects are registered.
  14. The Vanishing
    The Vanishing is a textbook exercise in the trashing of a nearly perfect film, conducted oddly enough under the auspices of the man who directed it.
  15. Hells Angels on Wheels
    The plot has holes big enough to drive a Harley-Davidson through. But the film is better than it might have been, and better than it had to be. Take it on its own terms and you might find it interesting.
  16. Tristan and Isolde
    By removing elements of magic and operatic excess from the story, the brothers Scott focus on what is, underneath, a story as tragic (and less contrived) as the one cited in the ads, "Romeo and Juliet."
  17. Spirit Untamed
    So many animated films are multi-layered efforts brimming with jokes only the adults will catch, but Spirit Untamed is pure and unbridled family fun, pardon the pun.
  18. Texasville
    The town seems to be as preoccupied as ever with its own personalities and memories, as if it were sitting for its portrait.
  19. Made in America
    This isn't a great movie, but it sure is a nice one.
  20. Lord of the Flies
    Hook's visual sense is not acute here; he doesn't show the spontaneous sense of time and place that made his first film, The Kitchen Toto (1988), so convincing. He seems more concerned with telling the story than showing it, and there are too many passages in which the boys are simply trading dialogue.
  21. Insidious: The Last Key
    Director Adam Robitel knows how to scare us with the classic, sudden-appearance-of-a-scary-thing-accompanied-by-a-loud-music-sting trick, which of course has been utilized a thousand times in hundreds of movies.
  22. Riddick
    It’s nothing new for sure, but writer/director David Twohy...throws in enough entertaining touches to maintain interest — despite an overlong two-hour running time.
  23. Dennis the Menace
    There's a lot to like in "Dennis the Menace." But Switchblade Sam prevents me from recommending it.
  24. Spenser Confidential
    It’s a fantastically over-the-top, drive-in B-movie for the streaming generation.
  25. 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.
  26. Around the World in 80 Days
    None of this amounts to anything more than goofy fun, but that's what the ads promise, and the movie delivers.
  27. Father of the Bride Part II
    Father of the Bride Part II is not a great movie and not even as good as its 1991 inspiration. But it is warm and fuzzy, and has some good laughs and a lot of sweetness.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Everybody Has a Plan
    Its chief virtue is its lead performance, in which twin brothers are played by a promising new Argentinian actor named Viggo Mortensen.
  29. Species
    I can imagine a film in which a creature like Sil struggles with her dual nature, and tries to find self-knowledge. Like Frankenstein's monster, she would be an object of pity. But that would be way too subtle for Species, which just adds a slick front end to the basic horror vocabulary of things jumping out from behind stuff.
  30. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
    This is a paint-by-numbers procedural that expects the audience to know the history of Watergate, hits the ground running—but then feels more like a steady jog through the past than a fast-paced thriller.
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