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. The Grudge
    Sarah Michelle Gellar, the nominal star, has been in her share of horror movies, and all by herself could have written and directed a better one than this.
  2. High Tension
    The philosopher Thomas Hobbes tells us life can be "poor, nasty, brutish and short." So is this movie.
  3. Buddy Games
    You wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with these insufferably juvenile jerks, let alone an entire movie.
  4. Godzilla 1985
    The fatal flaw in Godzilla 1985 is that it is a bad movie with aspirations of being a good bad movie.
  5. The Bag Man
    What it looks like is warmed-over Tarantino mixed with a third-rate tribute to the Coen brothers with a dose of David Lynch-ian madness, two decades late to the party.
  6. Armageddon
    An assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained.
  7. Good Boy!
    Sometimes it works to show their lips moving (it certainly did in "Babe"), but in Good Boy! the jaw movements are so mechanical it doesn't look like speech, it looks like a film loop.
  8. The Perfect Man
    The Perfect Man crawls hand over bloody hand up the stony face of this plot, while we in the audience do not laugh because it is not nice to laugh at those less fortunate than ourselves, and the people in this movie are less fortunate than the people in just about any other movie I can think of, simply because they are in it.
  9. The Getaway
    A particularly nasty and mean-spirited action picture, with the dramatic depth of an arcade game.
  10. Flubber
    Although the movie may appeal to kids in the lower grades, it's pretty slow, flat and dumb.
  11. The Other Sister
    Shameless in its use of mental retardation as a gimmick, a prop and a plot device. Anyone with any knowledge of retardation is likely to find the film offensive.
  12. Jeepers Creepers II
    Supplies us with a first-class creature, a fourth-rate story, and dialogue possibly created by feeding the screenplay into a pasta maker.
  13. The Money Pit
    A movie that contains one funny scene and 91 minutes of running time to kill.
  14. Trade
    Anything that holds our interest can be entertaining, in a way, but the movie seems to have an unwholesome determination to show us the victims being terrified and threatened. When I left the screening, I just didn't feel right.
  15. Pirates
    There hasn't been a pirate movie in a long time, and after Roman Polanski's "Pirates," there may not be another one for a very long time. This movie represents some kind of low point for the genre that gave us Captain Blood. It also gives us a new pirate image to ponder.
  16. The Skulls
    So ludicrous in so many different ways it achieves a kind of forlorn grandeur.
  17. The Substitute
    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.
  18. Your Highness
    Your Highness is a juvenile excrescence that feels like the work of 11-year-old boys in love with dungeons, dragons, warrior women, pot, boobs and four-letter words.
  19. Phantoms
    A movie, based on the popular Dean Koontz novel, that seems to have been made by grinding up other films and feeding them to this one.
  20. I'm Gonna Git You Sucka
    I'm Gonna Git You Sucka is a comedy that feeds off the blaxploitation movies, and although, like all good satires, it is cheerfully willing to be offensive, it is almost completely incapable of being funny.
  21. Toy Soldiers
    Toy Soldiers, a film with earnest performances and professional production values, is constructed out of characters, situations and gimmicks that will be instantly recognized by the weary viewer. There is nothing new here.
  22. Criminal
    Given the lurid, stupid, loony and unintentionally laughable nature of this espionage thriller, I found some measure of entertainment studying the vastly different approaches taken by Costner, Jones and Oldman — three of our finest actors over the last 30 years.
  23. A Lot Like Love
    To call A Lot like Love dead in the water is an insult to water.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
    The only true horror about Clive Barker's Hellraiser III is that this movie was ever made. It is the worst of the series, offering nothing but cheap scare scenes, a weird message about healing the wounds of the Vietnam War and sex scenes too explicit for kids. The acting is soap-opera shallow. [22 Sep 1992, p.33]
    • Chicago Sun-Times
  25. Spring Break
    The lockstep mentalities who made this movie tell their story entirely from a boring male point of view, supply us with male wimps and studs who are equally uninteresting, and view women only as wet T-shirt finalists. What a letdown for horny movie critics.
  26. Life or Something Like It
    This is an ungainly movie, ill-fitting, with its elbows sticking out where the knees should be. To quote another ancient proverb, "A camel is a horse designed by a committee." Life or Something Like It is the movie designed by the camel.
  27. Staying Alive
    Staying Alive is a big disappointment.
  28. House of the Sleeping Beauties
    House of the Sleeping Beauties has missed its ideal release window by about 40 years. It might -- might -- have found an audience in that transitional period between soft- and hard-core.
  29. Screwballs
    Screwballs opens outside the local hot dog stand, where a giant inflatable hot dog is swinging back and forth like a pendulum, gently nudging the backsides of two teenage girls. From such beginnings I suppose we should not anticipate a masterpiece, but the opening shot is the high point of this dumb movie.
  30. Hocus Pocus
    Hocus Pocus is a film desperately in need of self-discipline. It's one of those projects where you imagine everyone laughing and applauding each other after every scene, because they're so convinced they're wild and crazy guys. But watching the movie is like attending a party you weren't invited to, and where you don't know anybody, and they're all in on a joke but won't explain it to you.
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