Chicago Tribune's Scores

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For 7,599 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 62% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 36% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.5 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Autumn Tale
Lowest review score: 0 Car 54, Where Are You?
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5,104 out of 7599
  2. Mixed: 1,473 out of 7599
  3. Negative: 1,022 out of 7599
7599 movie reviews
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  1. Mortal Kombat II
    The costumes are giving Halloween, the sets and props are giving Xena: Warrior Princess and the story and performances aren’t giving anything at all. Mortal Kombat II seems destined to go the way of the ‘90s sequel Mortal Kombat: Annihilation — directly into obscurity.
  2. Dreams
    The circumstances of the story might be “timely,” but “Dreams” doesn’t help us understand the situation better, leaving us in the dark about what we’re supposed to take away from this story of sex, violence, money and the state. Anything it suggests we already know.
  3. Scream 7
    Scream 7 is an unfortunate tarnish on this otherwise sturdy franchise’s legacy.
  4. Mercy
    There is some excellent location-shooting in downtown Los Angeles during the climax, seen through the lens of a bodycam or quadcopter or drone camera. It’s not enough to save the aesthetic of the entire film, though, which is somehow both gray and nauseating.
  5. Ella McCay
    It never feels like Brooks has a grasp on the material here, which careens aimlessly through Ella’s harried day-to-day, in a handsomely bland, serviceable style.
  6. Mountainhead
    Mountainhead is a talky movie and I tend to like talky movies. But at some point in the nearly two-hour running time, it just becomes boring.
  7. Love Hurts
    It’s such a drag to see Ke Huy Quan undermined so persistently by the script and the role handing him his first lead in a movie.
  8. Red One
    Red One is the holiday fantasy built on retribution, punishment and crushed hopes we deserve right now.
  9. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
    What’s missing is not simply surprise, or the pleasurable shock of a new kind of ghost comedy. It’s the near-complete absence of verbal wit, all the more frustrating since Keaton is ready to play, and he’s hardly alone.
  10. Deadpool & Wolverine
    Reynolds retains his skittery comic timing, and Jackman (while tonally a little lost here) certainly put in his time with a personal trainer. But there isn’t a single shot in Levy’s film that flows excitingly into the next one.
  11. MaXXXine
    While there’s some payoff in the many visual callbacks to ’80s-and-earlier genre movies, at some point the filmmaker lost sight of how to best serve Goth a third time.
  12. Kinds of Kindness
    It’s a luxe treatment of some puny satiric ideas, toned up by a cast led by Emma Stone and Lanthimos first-timer Jesse Plemons, who won the best actor prize this year at Cannes. But everything has a chance to go wrong with a movie long before the actors film anything.
  13. Bad Boys: Ride or Die
    If a movie doesn’t care enough about its selling points, aka the stars, to give them decent lines more than twice per hour, the “bad” in “Bad Boys” ends up being the wrong kind of bad. And, in a truly sad way, its own review.
  14. IF
    IF reminds us how certain key ingredients — charm, wit, clarity, emotional tact and resonance — cannot be willed into narrative existence, or fixed in post.
  15. Madame Web
    It plays like a bland, third-season Marvel series as watched on a 12-year-old TV set playing in the wrong dramatic aspect ratio, which I realize isn’t a real thing. But now it is.
  16. Argylle
    It’s lousy, and a frantic bore, squandering its on-screen talent and making bland visual hash of its preening, recreational slaughter.
  17. The Killer
    A sleek, tight, fastidiously executed nothing.
  18. Expend4bles
    The action is messy, the geography indiscernible, and a few shots seem stitched together with but a single pixel and a prayer.
  19. Heart of Stone
    To become a true screen action hero outside the “Wonder Woman” realm, Gadot needs better material than this, and only when she gets to square off with Bhatt’s increasingly conflicted superhacker does Heart of Stone suggest a human pulse.
  20. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
    The full-on assault on the audience’s tear ducts in much of “Guardians 3″ may be sincere, but the rhythms and pacing of the film never find the beat. We end up waiting for the reductive punchline, or for another round of wanton slaughter.
  21. Cocaine Bear
    Ultraviolence is a funny thing, unless it’s not: Here, watching Martindale’s ranger character getting her face ripped off while being dragged along a gravel road isn’t a sight gag, and it isn’t an effective shock bit. It’s just sour. Composer Mark Mothersbaugh’s consciously ‘80s-vibe score has more personality than what’s on screen.
  22. Your Place or Mine
    In a funnier world, Zoë Chao and Tig Notaro are starring in their own romantic comedy together.
  23. Knock at the Cabin
    Knock at the Cabin is a real load — 100 lugubrious minutes of what is intended as steadily mounting dread and apocalypse prevention seminar.
  24. Violent Night
    I found Violent Night to be a joyless slay ride, not to mention verbally witless. There’s not much kick in seeing an R-rated version of “Home Alone,” and even that owed its home-invasion nastiness to Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs.”
  25. Blonde
    Dominik drains the complication and, saddest of all, the screen wiles, from a plainly complicated legend.
  26. Confess, Fletch
    Fletch tends to think he’s the smartest guy in the room. So how is that supposed to work when the performance itself is so adrift and unappealing?
  27. Cha Cha Real Smooth
    Raiff most likely wanted to make a movie about a well-intentioned guy in his early 20s who gradually finds his way to a better life. What undermines his efforts is a creeping smugness and self-regard, positioning every side character as an intern in the Andrew Improvement Program.
  28. Elvis
    Instead of dramatizing this subject’s life, it dramatizes the extravagance of moviemaking. The script shoves the dicey stuff off to the side: race, infidelity, a complicated figure’s inner demons.
  29. All the Old Knives
    All the Old Knives settles for all the old tropes.
  30. The Bubble
    No one seems particularly good at their jobs, but that’s beside the point. They’re silly and self-absorbed — mildly obnoxious more than anything — but rarely is their desperation funny.
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