Chicago Sun-Times' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
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:
8157 movie reviews
  1. For the first hour or so, The Mountain Between Us is a tedious and corny survival story, but at least it’s bearable, thanks mainly to the all-in performances from Kate Winslet and Idris Elba.
  2. The Immortals is without doubt the best-looking awful movie you will ever see.
  3. Scream, Blacula, Scream is just an interim exploitation effort, and a warm-up for the better vampires in Marshall's future.
  4. Mad Money is astonishingly casual for a movie about three service workers who steal millions from a Federal Reserve Bank. There is little suspense, no true danger; their plan is simple, the complications are few, and they don't get excited much beyond some high-fives and hugs and giggles.
  5. The standards for comic book superhero movies have been established by "Superman," "The Dark Knight," "Spider-Man 2" and "Iron Man." In that company "Thor" is pitiful. Consider even the comparable villains (Lex Luthor, the Joker, Doc Ock and Obadiah Stane). Memories of all four come instantly to mind. Will you be thinking of Loki six minutes after this movie is over?
  6. Kick-Ass 2 is an uninspired retread. All too often it plays like a Comic-Con gone insane, with costumed do-gooders taking on costumed criminals in gratuitously vicious battles.
  7. It’s always a shame when a group of talented humans get together and deliver something that comes across as a halfhearted effort, even if they poured their blood, sweat and tears into it.
  8. This plays like a live-action cartoon where you root for nobody. Everyone seems to think that yelling their lines will make the dialogue funnier. It doesn’t.
  9. It's a shaky-cam meander through an unconvincing relationship, with detours considering the process of making the film. At 91 minutes, it seems very long.
  10. Big Daddy should be reported to the child welfare office.
  11. The first All Talking Killer picture. After the setup, it consists mostly of characters explaining their actions to one another.
  12. The kind of movie Mad magazine prays for. It is so earnest, so overwrought and so wildly implausible that it begs to be parodied.
  13. Sasquatch Sunset is the kind of film that seems almost pre-ordained to reach some level of cult status. Godspeed to those who will embrace its epic-level gross-out factor. I guess I’m just more of a Bucky Badger guy.
  14. The characters are bitter and hateful, the images are nauseating, and the ending is bleak enough that when the screen fades to black it's a relief.. Videodrome, whatever its qualities, has got to be one of the least entertaining films of all time.
    • Chicago Sun-Times
  15. That Awkward Moment strives to straddle the line between breezy, bromantic comedy and “Hangover”-esque guy humor. It fails miserably on both counts.
  16. Stroker Ace is another in a series of essentially identical movies he has made with director Hal Needham, and although it's allegedly based on a novel, it's really based on their previous box-office hits like Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run.
  17. 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.
  18. It’s a memorable performance in a film that wants to dazzle us with its trick bag of visuals but is rotten at its core.
  19. Grudge Match does not work on any level. The story is unconvincing. The comedy elements are weak... And, worst of all, the acting in most scenes — particularly those involving Sylvester Stallone and Kim Basinger — is atrocious.
  20. 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.
  21. Central Intelligence is one of those slick, gunplay-riddled, stupidly plotted, aggressively loud buddy movies — so formulaic and dumb, even if you see it you’ll probably forget you’ve seen it by the end of the year...And if that’s the case, consider yourself fortunate.
  22. How could director Lawrence Kasdan and writer William Goldman be responsible for a film that goes so awesomely wrong?
  23. You want to see guys with muscles shooting machineguns at guys without muscles? These are the movies for you. You have more than muscles between your ears? Try something else.
  24. A forgettable movie with a forgettable title about forgettable characters I’d just as soon as forget.
  25. Wildcats is clearly an attempt by Hawn to repeat a formula that was wonderfully successful in "Private Benjamin": Wide-eyed Goldie copes with the real world. It was less successful in "Protocol," and now it's worn out altogether.
  26. Here is a film so dreary and conventional that it took an act of the will to keep me in the theater.
  27. Caveman seems more in the tradition of Alley Oop, crossed with Mel Brooks's Two Thousand Year Old Man. But the only artistic cross-reference it can manage is from the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's 2000.
  28. There's nothing wrong with Fast Food Fast Women that a casting director and a rewrite couldn't have fixed.
  29. Gina Rodriguez: You deserve much better than this.
  30. Why, oh, why, was this movie necessary?

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