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 Went Down
    I Went Down is a crime movie in which the dialogue is a great deal more important than anything else. It takes the form of a road movie and the materials of gangster movies (do real gangsters learn how to act by watching movies?), but what happens is beside the point. It's what they say while it's happening that makes the movie so entertaining.
  2. Mulan
    Mulan is an impressive achievement, with a story and treatment ranking with "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King."
  3. The X Files
    As pure movie, The X-Files more or less works. As a story, it needs a sequel, a prequel, and Cliff Notes.
  4. Henry Fool
    You watch, you are absorbed, and from scene to scene, Henry Fool seems to be adding up, but then your hand closes on air. I am left unsure of my response - of any response.
  5. Edge of Seventeen
    Maggie, Eric's mother, and Angie the manager are the most fully realized characters in the movie, which doesn't offer a single positively drawn male homosexual.
  6. Can't Hardly Wait
    The kind of movie that somehow succeeds in moving very, very slowly even while proceeding at a breakneck pace. It cuts quickly back and forth between nothing and nothing.
  7. High Art
    So perceptive and mature it makes similar films seem flippant. The performances are on just the right note, scene after scene, for what needs to be done.
  8. Six Days Seven Nights
    It's the kind of movie that provides diversion for the idle channel-surfer but isn't worth a trip to the theater. A lot of it seems cobbled together out of spare parts.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dirty Work
    The joy of Dirty Work is in Macdonald's observational writing and sardonic delivery. Because he and director Bob Saget never take the film too seriously, nearly every scene transcends the ordinariness of the movie's plot line by giving way to Macdonald's charisma. [15 Jun 1998, p.32]
    • Chicago Sun-Times
  10. The Truman Show
    I enjoyed The Truman Show on its levels of comedy and drama; I liked Truman in the same way I liked Forrest Gump--because he was a good man, honest, and easy to sympathize with.
  11. A Perfect Murder
    I think it works like a nasty little machine to keep us involved and disturbed; my attention never strayed, and one of the elements I liked was the way Paltrow's character isn't sentimentalized.
  12. Mr. Jealousy
    Mr. Jealousy isn't quite successful, but it does provide more evidence of Baumbach's talent.
  13. The Last Days of Disco
    If Scott Fitzgerald were to return to life, he would feel at home in a Whit Stillman movie. Stillman listens to how people talk, and knows what it reveals about them.
  14. Hope Floats
    A turgid melodrama with the emotional range of a sympathy card.
  15. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
    A horrible mess of a movie, without shape, trajectory or purpose--a one joke movie, if it had one joke.
  16. The Opposite of Sex
    The De-Dee character subverts those expectations; she shoots the legs out from under the movie with perfectly timed zingers.
  17. Bulworth
    Warren Beatty's Bulworth made me laugh -- and wince.
  18. Godzilla
    A big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie.
  19. The Horse Whisperer
    Robert Redford has shown that he has a real feeling for the West--he's not a movie tourist--and there is a magnificence in his treatment here that dignifies what is essentially a soap opera.
  20. Clockwatchers
    Clockwatchers is a wicked, subversive comedy about the hell on earth occupied by temporary office workers.
  21. Quest for Camelot
    The animation isn't vivid, the characters aren't very interesting, and the songs are routine.
  22. Deep Impact
    You can enjoy the way they create little flashes of wit in the dialogue, which enlivens what is, after all, a formula disaster movie.
  23. He Got Game
    Lee uses visual imagination to lift his material into the realms of hopes and dreams.
  24. Wilde
    Stephen Fry brings a depth and gentleness to the role that says what can be said about Oscar Wilde: that he was a funny and gifted idealist in a society that valued hypocrisy above honesty.
  25. Les Misérables
    Les Miserables is like a perfectly respectable Classics Illustrated version of the Victor Hugo novel. It contains the moments of high drama, clearly outlines all the motivations, is easy to follow and lacks only passion. A story filled with outrage and idealism becomes somehow merely picturesque.
  26. Sliding Doors
    As we switched relentlessly back and forth between A and B, I found that I wasn't looking forward to either story.
  27. The Big Hit
    The characters in these movies exist in a Twilight Zone where thousands of rounds of ammunition are fired, but no one ever gets shot unless the plot requires him to.
  28. Two Girls and a Guy
    The movie is essentially a filmed stage play, one of those idea-plays like Shaw liked to write, in which men and women ponder their differences and complexities.
  29. The Object of My Affection
    All of this promising material is dealt with on that level where characters are not quite allowed to be as perceptive and intelligent as real people might be in the same circumstances.
  30. Nightwatch
    It's a visually effective and often scary film to watch, but the story is so leaky that we finally just give up.
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