Chicago Sun-Times' Scores

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For 8,158 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: 6,087 out of 8158
  2. Mixed: 1,243 out of 8158
  3. Negative: 828 out of 8158
8158 movie reviews
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  1. The Star Chamber
    The Star Chamber works brilliantly until it locks into a plot. Then it stops dancing and starts marching.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Dark Crimes
    This is a well-made, well-acted and sometimes intriguing but also coldly cynical and manipulative murder mystery.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. Cop Out
    A lot of the dialogue is intended as funny, but man, is it lame.
  10. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    Painfully long, exceedingly tedious, consistently unimaginative and quite dopey.
  11. Empire Records
    If the movie is a lost cause, it may at least showcase actors who have better things ahead of them.
  12. 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.
  13. Rampage
    Rampage might not be the worst movie of the year so far, but it’s a contender for most pointless.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Underwater
    Underwater breaks no new ground as a sci-fi horror flick — other than as a possible contender for the murkiest movie ever made.
  17. Romeo Must Die
    (Li)'s scenes are so clearly computer-aided that his moves are about as impressive as Bugs Bunny doing the same.
  18. 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
  20. 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.
  21. Johnny English
    Plays like a tired exercise, a spy spoof with no burning desire to be that, or anything else.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
  26. The Time Machine
    A witless recycling of the H.G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing.
  27. The Strangers
    The movie deserves more stars for its bottom-line craft, but all the craft in the world can't redeem its story.
  28. 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.
  29. Taken 3
    ​I’ll tell you what got Taken. A hundred and twelve minutes of my life got Taken.
  30. 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.
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