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. A dead zone of comedy. The concept is exhausted, the ideas are tired, the physical gags are routine, the story is labored, the actors look like they can barely contain their doubts about the project.
  2. A vanity production beyond all reason. I am not sure, however, than the vanity is Dylan's. I don't have any idea what to think about him.
  3. This movie is a cross between the Mad Slasher and Dead teenager genres; about two dozen movies a year feature a mad killer going berserk, and they're all about as bad as this one.
  4. The Cannonball Run is an abdication of artistic responsibility at the lowest possible level of ambition. In other words, they didn't even care enough to make a good lousy movie.
  5. There was perhaps a time, 20 years ago, when the sophomorism of Amazon Women on the Moon might have seemed faintly daring. But even Mad magazine has moved on from simple satire to a more off-center view of its subjects.
  6. The Sword and the Sorcerer is so dominated by its special effects, its settings and locations, that it doesn't care much about character. It trots its people onscreen, gives them names and labels, and puts them through their paces. That's not enough.
  7. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is one of the more empty, pointless, baffling films I can remember, and the experience of viewing it is an exercise in nothingness.
  8. Not that the film is outrageous. That would be asking too much. It is dim-witted, unfunny, too shallow to be offensive.
  9. Not bad so much as inexplicable. You watch in puzzlement: How did this train wreck happen?
  10. Awful in so many different ways.
  11. Highlander 2: The Quickening is the most hilariously incomprehensible movie I've seen in many a long day - a movie almost awesome in its badness.
  12. The film has the obnoxious tone of a boring home movie narrated by a guy shouting in your ear.
  13. This is a movie without wit, style or reason, and the true horror is that actors were made to portray, and technicians to realize, its bankruptcy of imagination.
  14. Endless, pointless and ridiculous, right up to the final shot of the knife going through the cockroach. This movie is desperately bankrupt of imagination and wit, and Tom Selleck looks adrift in it.
  15. Funny Games represents the laborious execution of an abstract notion. The concept is the movie, kind of like Andy Warhol's ''Empire'' (1964), an eight-hour stationary shot of the Empire State Building. You don't have to sit through the whole thing to get the point, unless you really want to.
  16. An utterly meaningless waste of time...It is a dead zone, a film without interest, wit, imagination or even entertaining violence and special effects.
  17. The movie is a chaotic mess, overloaded with special effects and explosions, light on continuity, sanity and coherence.
  18. One of the worst movies of this or any year.
  19. It should be preserved by the Library of Congress, as an example of creative desperation. It plays like a documentary about a group of actors forced to perform in a screenplay that contains not one single laugh, or moment of wit, or flash of intelligence, or reason for being.
  20. It's a movie without a brain. Charlie's Angels is like the trailer for a video game movie, lacking only the video game, and the movie.
  21. A truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy. Elaine May, the director, has mounted a multimillion-dollar expedition in search of a plot so thin that it hardly could support a five-minute TV sketch.
  22. This movie is a real curiosity. It's dead. I don't mean it's bad. A lot of bad movies are fairly throbbing with life. Mannequin is dead. The wake lasts 1 1/2 hours, and then we can leave the theater.
  23. Mr. Magoo is transcendently bad. It soars above ordinary badness as the eagle outreaches the fly. There is not a laugh in it. Not one. I counted.
  24. It’s just deadly and dreadful, loud and obnoxious, convoluted and irritating, horrible and dumb.
  25. This is an appallingly silly movie, from its juvenile comic overture to its dreadfully sincere conclusion.
  26. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie is about as close as you can get to absolute nothing and still have a product to project on the screen.
  27. The very soul of sophomorism. It is callow, gauche, obvious and awkward, and designed to appeal to those with similar qualities.
  28. It goes through the motions of an action thriller, but there is a deadness at its center, a feeling that no one connected with it loved what they were doing.
  29. This is a dishonest, quease-inducing "comedy" that had me feeling uneasy and then unclean. Who in the world read this script and thought it was acceptable?
  30. It's the kind of movie that alternates stupefyingly lame dialogue with special effects scenes in which quicklime dissolves corpses and tarantulas eat lips and eyeballs.

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