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 6.1 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: 6,087 out of 8158
  2. Mixed: 1,243 out of 8158
  3. Negative: 828 out of 8158
8158 movie reviews
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  1. Bright Lights, Big City
    Fox is very good in the central role (he has a long drunken monologue that is the best thing he has ever done in a movie). To his credit, he never seems to be having fun as he journeys through club land. Few do, for long. If you know someone like Jamie, take him to this movie, and don't let him go to the john.
  2. Carol
    Director Haynes has a knack for framing his characters with just the right touch. There are no throwaway shots in this film.
  3. Welcome to New York
    In Abel Ferrara’s lurid, sometimes grotesque, train-wreck-watchable Welcome to New York, Depardieu almost literally fills the screen as an enormous bear of a man with insatiable appetites for money, sex and power.
  4. To Die For
    Kidman is superb at making Suzanne into someone who is not only stupid, vain and egomaniacal (we've seen that before) but also vulnerably human.
  5. The World Is Not Enough
    A splendid comic thriller, exciting and graceful, endlessly inventive.
  6. Dark Days
    Portrait of men and a few women who stubbornly try to maintain some dignity in the face of personal disaster.
  7. Ulee's Gold
    Nunez has a gift for finding the essence, the soul, of his actors.
  8. Midnight Run
    Whoever cast De Niro and Grodin must have had a sixth sense for the chemistry they would have; they work together so smoothly, and with such an evident sense of fun, that even their silences are intriguing.
  9. Spenser Confidential
    It’s a fantastically over-the-top, drive-in B-movie for the streaming generation.
  10. Ready Player One
    You need to see this one on the biggest screen possible, and let it wash over you as if you had stepped inside the most incredible video game experience ever created — one in which events in the manufactured universe can have lasting and serious real-world consequences.
  11. Black Swan
    A full-bore melodrama, told with passionate intensity, gloriously and darkly absurd. It centers on a performance by Natalie Portman that is nothing short of heroic.
  12. 12
    Mikhalkov has made a new film with its own original characters and stories, and after all, it's not how the film ends, but how it gets there.
  13. Clockwatchers
    Clockwatchers is a wicked, subversive comedy about the hell on earth occupied by temporary office workers.
  14. The Small Town (Kasaba)
    Poetic Turkish tale. Nuri Bilge Ceylan shot this entrancing black-and-white story in his hometown, from a story written by his sister and with a cast of friends and relatives. [20 Oct 1998, p.37]
    • Chicago Sun-Times
  15. Dick
    A sly little comic treasure.
  16. X
    It’s a new twist on the period-piece slasher movie, smart and strange and fantastically depraved. I kinda loved it.
  17. A River Runs Through It
    Redford and his writer, Richard Friedenberg, understand that most of the events in any life are accidential or arbitrary, especially the crucial ones, and we can exercise little conscious control over our destinies.
  18. Brothers
    This becomes Tobey Maguire's film to dominate, and I've never seen these dark depths in him before. Actors possess a great gift to surprise us, if they find the right material in their hands.
  19. The Beguiled
    The 1971 version of The Beguiled was blunt and overheated and a little bit nuts. The 2017 edition is more sophisticated and nuanced — but it’s still a little bit nuts.
  20. Tesla
    I found it to be a fantastically creative, fourth-wall-breaking, pop-art waking dream.
  21. Cyrano de Bergerac
    A splendid movie not just because it tells its romantic story, and makes it visually delightful, and centers it on Depardieu, but for a better reason: The movie acts as if it believes this story. Depardieu is not a satirist - not here, anyway. He plays Cyrano on the level, for keeps.
  22. Tell Them Who You Are
    What Mark does, better perhaps than either he or his father realizes, is to capture some aspects of a lifelong rivalry that involves love but not much contentment.
  23. Pride
    This film moves effortlessly from some pretty intense dramatic moments to hilarious scenes showcasing the contrasting lifestyles of the gay and straight worlds to some vignettes of incredible poignancy.
  24. Rocket Science
    I suspect a lot of high school students will recognize elements of real life in the movie, and that the movie will build a following. It may gross as little as "Welcome to the Dollhouse" or as much as "Clueless," but whichever it does, it's in the same league.
  25. Braveheart
    An action epic with the spirit of the Hollywood swordplay classics and the grungy ferocity of "The Road Warrior."
  26. The Brother from Another Planet
    The movie finds countless opportunities for humorous scenes, most of them with a quiet little bite, a way of causing us to look at our society.
  27. In Search of a Midnight Kiss
    We increasingly admire the quality of the acting: Both actors take their characters through a difficult series of changes, without ever seeming to try, or be aware of it.
  28. Love, Charlie: The Rise and Fall of Chef Charlie Trotter
    Neither hagiography nor cold-plate dish, this is a solidly researched, well-photographed, crisply edited film that chronicles Trotter’s life with journalistic integrity, while providing fascinating glimpses into the “foodie” culture of the times, in Chicago and around the world.
  29. Café Society
    Café Society is a gorgeous and lightweight confection, a love letter to the Hollywood of the mid-1930s, as well as the New York of the same era.
  30. Two for the Money
    In D.J. Caruso's Two for the Money, you can see Al Pacino doing something he's done a lot lately: Having a terrific time being an actor.
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