Chicago Sun-Times' Scores

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For 8,156 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: 6,085 out of 8156
  2. Mixed: 1,243 out of 8156
  3. Negative: 828 out of 8156
8156 movie reviews
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  1. I Am
    Give Shadyac credit: He sells his Pasadena mansion, starts teaching college and moves into a mobile home (in Malibu, it's true). Now he offers us this hopeful if somewhat undigested cut of his findings, in a film as watchable as a really good TV commercial, and just as deep.
  2. The Bang Bang Club
    This question, which will instinctively occur to many viewers, is never quite dealt with in the film. The photographers sometimes drive into the middle of violent situations, hold up a camera, and say "press!" - as if that will solve everything.
  3. POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
    The movie is quick and cheerful, and Spurlock is engaging.
  4. Water for Elephants
    In an age of prefabricated special effects and obviously phony spectacle, it's sort of old-fashioned (and a pleasure) to see a movie made of real people and plausible sets.
  5. In a Better World
    There are two strong stories here, in Africa and Denmark. Either could have made a film. Intercut in this way, they seem too much like self-conscious parables.
  6. Potiche
    There's little effort at psychological depth, and the characters float along on the requirements of comedy. But it's sweet comedy, knowing about human nature, and Deneuve and Depardieu, who bring so much history to the screen, seem to create it by their very natures.
  7. Putty Hill
    Putty Hill makes no statement. It looks. It looks with as much perception and sympathy as it is possible for a film to look. It is surprisingly effective.
  8. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
    If you are open, even in fancy, to the idea of ghosts who visit the living, this film is likely to be a curious but rather bemusing experience.
  9. The Conspirator
    Redford considers this material in an unusually literate and thoughtful historical film, working from years of research by his screenwriter, James Solomon. I found it absorbing and relevant today.
  10. Atlas Shrugged: Part I
    Now I am faced with this movie, the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone's vault.
  11. Scream 4
    All through the movie, Scream 4 lets us know that it knows exactly what it's up to - and then goes right ahead and gets up to it.
  12. Super
    I'm all for movies that create unease, but I prefer them to appear to know why they're doing that. Super is a film ending in narrative anarchy, exercising a destructive impulse to no greater purpose than to mess with us.
  13. Soul Surfer
    I feel something is missing. There had to be dark nights of the soul. Times of grief and rage. The temptation of nihilism. The lure of despair. Can a 13-year-old girl lose an arm and keep right on smiling?
  14. 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.
  15. Arthur
    A fairly close remake of the great 1981 Dudley Moore movie, with pleasures of its own.
  16. Hanna
    Here we have an odd cross between a fairy tale and a high-tech action movie. It could have been a fairly strained attempt at either, but director Joe Wright ("Atonement") combines his two genres into a stylish exercise that perversely includes some sentiment and insight.
  17. Desert Flower
    Desert Flower tells a rags-to-riches story, but it plays like two stories in conflict. Everything involving Waris in Africa or in London before her success feels true and heartfelt. Many later details are badly handled.
  18. Insidious
    This one is not terrifically good, but moviegoers will get what they're expecting.
  19. Trust
    David Schwimmer has made one of the year's best films: Powerfully emotional, yes, but also very perceptive.
  20. Source Code
    An ingenious thriller that comes billed as science fiction, although its science is preposterous.
  21. Win Win
    I'm happy I saw Win Win. It would have been possible to be happier.
  22. The Lincoln Lawyer
    I like movies about smart guys who are wise asses, and think their way out of tangles with criminals. I like courtroom scenes. I like big old cars. I like The Lincoln Lawyer because it involves all three.
  23. Paul
    Here's a movie that teeters on the edge of being really pretty good and loses its way.
  24. Limitless
    The movie is not terrifically good, but the premise is intriguing.
  25. Certified Copy
    For me, it is too clever by half, creating full-bodied characters but inserting them into a story that is thin soup.
  26. Vidal Sassoon: The Movie
    There must be more. We will not discover it here.
  27. Jane Eyre
    He's (Fukunaga) a director with a sure visual sense, here expressed in voluptuous visuals and ambitious art direction.
  28. Of Gods and Men
    I found myself resisting the film's pull of easy emotion. There are fundamental questions here, and the film doesn't engage them. I believe Christian should have had the humility to lead his monks away from the path of self-sacrifice.
  29. Cold Weather
    Good in so many subtle ways, I despair of doing them justice.
  30. Red Riding Hood
    Has the added inconvenience of being dreadfully serious about a plot so preposterous, it demands to be filmed by Monty Python.
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