Chicago Sun-Times' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
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:
8159 movie reviews
  1. I am so very tired of this movie. I see it at least once a month. The title changes, the actors change, and the superficial details of the story change, but it is always about exactly the same thing: heavily armed men shooting at one another.
  2. The ending is an explanation, but not a solution. For a solution we have to think back through the whole film, and now the visual style becomes a guide. It is an illustration of the way the materials of life can be shaped for the purposes of the moment.
  3. Cruz is a deadpan treasure, never cracking the hint of a smile even as he delivers some well-timed one-liners. Wish we could have had an entire movie about this guy. Instead, we were cursed with the annoying and shrieking but not even close to terrifying La Llorona.
  4. A quirky and entertaining deadpan comedy/drama.
  5. The movie is like the low-rent, road show version of those serious drug movies where everybody is macho and deadly.
  6. If there's anything worse than a punch line that doesn't work, it's a movie that doesn't even bother to put the punch lines in.
  7. The plot is lame, but that doesn't matter, because Dumb and Dumber is essentially pitched at the level of an "Airplane!"-style movie, with rapid-fire sight gags.
  8. The Woman in the Window is filled with dramatic touches such as a dizzying overhead shot of a staircase, a skylight just begging for someone to come crashing through, pieces of evidence conveniently left lying about and visual references to far superior noir thrillers, including the aforementioned “Rear Window.” It’s also filled with cheap scares, false alarms, dumb cops, loud storms and tricky camera angles designed to make us feel as disoriented as Anna. The only thing those elements really succeed in doing is giving us a headache.
  9. It’s interesting that When the Game Stands Tall is essentially a movie about losing.
  10. Jiminy Glick needs definition if he's to work as a character. We have to sense a consistent comic personality, and we don't; Short changes gears and redefines the character whenever he needs a laugh.
  11. I enjoyed this movie on its own dumb level.
  12. A relatively breezy and slick slice of entertainment, with a fast-pace style befitting the material and expertly calibrated performances from the ensemble cast.
  13. Corny? Absolutely. Sincere and spiritual? Yes.
  14. A fitfully funny, aimless, unnecessary thriller.
  15. Jarmusch is making some kind of a point. I think the point is that if you strip a story down to its bare essentials, you will have very little left. I wonder how he pitched this idea to his investors.
  16. The putatively provocative and wannabe-controversial erotic thriller “Miller’s Girl” is a sordid little tale that isn’t nearly as clever and literary as it tries to be, nor is it as deliberately campy as 20th century entries in the genre such as “Wild Things” or even “Poison Ivy.”
  17. Here is the most uncomfortable movie of the new year, an exercise in feel-good smut.
  18. The gift of Christopher Reeve, in his best scenes and when the filmmakers allow it, is to play Superman without laughing, to take him seriously so that we can have some innocent escapist fun. Helen Slater has the same gift, but is given even less chance to exercise it in Supergirl, and the result is an unhappy, unfunny, unexciting movie.
  19. This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time.
  20. At the end, I know, Trevor has come unhinged. I accept that and believe it. But it feels like the movie lost the nerve of its original story impulse and sought safety in elements borrowed from thrillers. Its destination doesn't have much to do with how it got there.
  21. This is a well-designed, initially intriguing, visually interesting sci-fi romance torpedoed by a premise — and a payoff — so creepy and misogynistic, it’s amazing nobody who read the script or green-lit the film (or chose to star in it) raised concerns about how it would play with an audience of, you know, people with working minds.
  22. It contains one element of startling originality: its bad guy, nicknamed Pooh-Bear and played by Vincent D'Onofrio in a great weird demented giggle of a performance; imagine a Batman villain cycled through the hallucinations of "Requiem for a Dream."
    • Chicago Sun-Times
  23. This project is dead in the water. Read the book. Better still, read "Victory."
  24. Not a successful thriller, but with some nice dramatic scenes along with the dumb mystery and contrived conclusion.
  25. One of the unique things about the original “House Party” from 1990 is while there was an abundance of energetic and exhilarating dancing, the party itself was almost secondary to all the action that took place OUTSIDE the party...Not so much with the massive, bloated, epic, over-the-top bash in the “House Party” reboot, which marks the second time LeBron James has put his enormous clout behind a new take on a beloved 1990s film (after the “Space Jam” reboot) — and the second time the results were underwhelming.
  26. Goes so far over the top, it circumnavigates the top and doubles back on itself; it's the Mobius Strip of over-the-topness. I am in awe. It throws in everything but the kitchen sink. Then it throws in the kitchen sink, too, and the combo washer-dryer in the laundry room, while the hero and his wife are having sex on top of it.
  27. This brutal, bloody, dark and at times gruesomely funny thriller isn’t some David Fincher-esque mood piece where all the clues come together at the end. It’s more like a modern-day, Georgia version of a spaghetti Western.
  28. A pleasant, inoffensive 3-D animated farce about a team of superspy gophers.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Ice-T's streetwise humor saves this from an exercise in silliness. [16 Apr 1994, p.24]
    • Chicago Sun-Times
  29. A horrible mess of a movie, without shape, trajectory or purpose--a one joke movie, if it had one joke.

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