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. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    Not only does this second movie match the charm, wit, animation skill and intelligent storytelling of the original, I think it even exceeds it.
  2. 22 Jump Street
    There are certainly a lot of actors who can match Hill and Tatum as comic actors, but it’s the oddball connection between these two that makes for a very entertaining couple of hours at the movies.
  3. Burt's Buzz
    Shapiro fails to sell Shavitz as the “wise and wry, ornery and opinionated” figure the press notes promise. No opinion, wise or otherwise, is uttered by this rustic quasi-eccentric, let alone a green ethos.
  4. The Fault in Our Stars
    Director Josh Boone does a wonderful job of celebrating the sentimentality without shying away from the tough moments. The pacing, music and editing are all first-rate.
  5. Edge of Tomorrow
    Edge of Tomorrow is the ultimate metaphor about Tom Cruise’s career. You can’t kill this guy. He’ll just keep coming. And he remains arguably the biggest movie star in the world for a reason. He brings it.
  6. Manakamana
    Despite our narrow angle on Nepal, Manakamana peers into lives at close range.
  7. Cold in July
    There’s a lot to admire in Cold in July, but its chief virtue is unpredictability. Most movies these days sleepwalk through their formulaic paces, but you’ll never guess where this one is going based on the way it begins.
  8. Chinese Puzzle
    It goes down like a French pastry, offering no real value but looking good and satisfying a craving for something light and airy.
  9. A Million Ways to Die in the West
    McFarlane goes as goofy as you’d expect, but there’s a fairly soft and traditional center lurking inside this hard-R candy.
  10. Maleficent
    Maleficent is an admittedly great-looking, sometimes creepy, often plodding and utterly unconvincing re-imagining of a famous romantic fairy tale as a female empowerment metaphor.
  11. Fed Up
    Snappy graphics channel the info flow like a sugar rush. Scary music cues are overused. Narrator Katie Couric wisely stays offscreen. That keeps Fed Up from feeling like an Oprah special.
  12. Ida
    Ida reaches spiritual depth through affecting performances rendered in sublime black-and-white compositions.
  13. Blended
    This is a clichéd, cynical, occasionally offensive, pandering, idiotic film that redefines shameless.
  14. X-Men: Days of Future Past
    Thanks to the first-class special effects, a star-packed cast, screenwriters who know just when to inject some self-aware comic relief without getting too jokey and director Bryan Singer’s skilled and sometimes electrifying visuals, X-Men: Days of Future Past is flat-out big-time, big summer movie fun.
  15. For No Good Reason
    Lovingly detailed with animated and archival imagery, For No Good Reason shares the fine-grain layered style of its subject.
  16. Palo Alto
    Palo Alto is a well-directed but relatively slight, only occasionally provocative and unremittingly bleak slice of life.
  17. God's Pocket
    While the subject matter is often bleak, this isn’t a depressing journey. Seeing great actors at the top of their game working with such rich material is never a downer.
  18. Chef
    Funny, quirky and insightful, with a bounty of interesting supporting characters and not a ton of concern about telling a conventional story.
  19. Godzilla
    While it has its moments of baffling plot development and the human characters aren’t exactly Shakespearean in depth, there’s some pretty impressive CGI monster destruction here, and the talented English director Gareth Edwards clearly respects the thought-provoking sci-fi roots of the original.
  20. Million Dollar Arm
    Nearly everything in this movie feels borrowed from other movies and ever so slightly reshaped, and almost never for the better.
  21. Devil's Knot
    Despite the fine performance by Witherspoon and a number of the supporting players, Devil’s Knot comes across as a cinematic, slightly dramatized Cliffs Notes edition of a story that’s been told often, and almost always more effectively, in other formats.
  22. Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
    Maybe this is unreasonable, but I can’t help thinking that if you’re going to make a movie with “Oz” in the title, you’d better be prepared to kick in at least a little inspiration. Yet that’s precisely what’s missing — so utterly absent it’s almost impressive in a way — in the painfully uninspired Legends of Oz.
  23. Moms' Night Out
    The life lessons about morals and values are soft-pedaled pretty well and packaged in a mostly funny romp as the trio of mothers’ night-on-the-town turns in all sorts of bizarre and wacky ways.
  24. Neighbors
    About 40 percent of Neighbors falls flat. About 60 percent made me laugh hard, even when I knew I should have known better.
  25. Belle
    When Asante finally closes with a close-up of Belle’s portrait, there’s something in her eyes and her smile that suggests so much more.
  26. Friended to Death
    This plays like a live-action cartoon where you root for nobody. Everyone seems to think that yelling their lines will make the dialogue funnier. It doesn’t.
  27. NOW: In the Wings on a World Stage
    In its best moments it travels into the heart of darkness with “Richard III” and brings to life the unique, all-involving heartbeat of theater performed before a live audience.
  28. Blue Ruin
    You couldn’t ask for a more unlikely avenger than the ill-equipped sort-of hero of Blue Ruin, and that’s precisely why it’s far, far more suspenseful than the typical violent revenge thriller. It’s also why it functions equally well as a potent reflection on the futility of revenge.
  29. Fading Gigolo
    There are moments of surprising tenderness in Fading Gigolo, and Turturro gives us some beautiful shots of a city he clearly loves. But this film is all over the map, veering from pathos to absurdist comedy to romance to weirdness for the sake of weirdness.
  30. Locke
    In writer-director Steven Knight’s mesmerizing jewel of film titled Locke, Tom Hardy is so brilliant we readily watch him drive a car and talk on the hands-free phone for virtually the entirety of the film — and it’s one of the more effortlessly intense and fascinating performances I’ve seen any actor give in recent memory.
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