Chicago Tribune's Scores

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For 7,601 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 1.2 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: 5,106 out of 7601
  2. Mixed: 1,473 out of 7601
  3. Negative: 1,022 out of 7601
7601 movie reviews
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  1. Kidnap
    Kidnap probably could’ve played into its feverish, violent, trashy side more aggressively. As is, something seems to be holding it back from its own monstrously exploitative premise.
  2. Imperfections
    As a caper, it’s a breezy hour and 43 minutes of well-done indie filmmaking. And the look and sound of the film (a driving funk-inflected score from Singer that says “heist!”) is right.
  3. The Emoji Movie
    The Emoji Movie could not be more meh.
  4. Landline
    Landline follows the contours of a conventional ensemble comedy-drama. Which it is, from one angle. But the writing's often prickly and funny. The actors aren't tested or challenged, necessarily, but they're playing in comfortable grooves and there's a lot of satisfaction in watching the results.
  5. Atomic Blonde
    It's a shame, because Atomic Blonde is a visual cinematic delight. It's not that it's all style, no substance. But it doesn't seem to know what to do with its substance, and ultimately, Atomic Blonde becomes a film that's all dressed up with just nowhere to go.
  6. Detroit
    A handful of films, from "The Battle of Algiers" to Paul Greengrass' splendid "Bloody Sunday," have met the challenge of dramatizing civil unrest and law enforcement outrages, memorably. Detroit comes close.
  7. Girls Trip
    All the women turn in funny performances — it's great to see Pinkett Smith cut loose, and the charming and radiant Hall displays a faculty for physical comedy — but this is Haddish's movie, and will make her a star.
  8. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
    Besson's commercial instincts for sleek, violent fantasy are often sound, but "Valerian" is more sedative than show.
  9. Lady Macbeth
    Throughout Lady Macbeth we see Pugh's eyes, full of possibility and optimism at the outset, gradually darken. Even her breathing changes. It's a wonderful performance in a very fine film.
  10. Dunkirk
    With a bare minimum of dialogue, and a brutal maximum of scenes depicting near-drowning situations in and around Dunkirk, France, in late May and early June 1940, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is a unique waterboarding of a film experience.
  11. The Little Hours
    I liked a lot of writer-director Jeff Baena's picture; it may be a one-joke movie, but I've seen comedies recently that would've killed for that many.
  12. Wish Upon
    Wish Upon isn't over-the-top wacky or campy, and in fact, feels slightly low-energy at times, but it's the kind of simple filmmaking coupled with absolutely insane writing and plot points that make it an ideal candidate for so-bad-it's-good viewing.
  13. A Ghost Story
    David Lowery's film A Ghost Story is best seen a second time, though obeying the customary rules of time and cinema, you'll have the mysterious pleasure of seeing it a first time to get there.
  14. War for the Planet of the Apes
    Gripping, visually assured and working far above its summer-sequel paygrade, War for the Planet of the Apes treats a harsh storyline with a solemnity designed to hoist the tale of Caesar, simian revolutionary — the Moses of apes — into the realm of the biblical.
  15. My Journey Through French Cinema
    Modeled on Martin Scorsese's engaging first-person documentaries on the cinema, this one has its own avid personality and scholarly charm. Whoever you are, you'll learn a lot.
  16. Austin Found
    Linda Cardellini can play just about anything, with honesty and delicacy, so it's no surprise she makes even a semi-sweet nothing like Austin Found worth a look.
  17. Spider-Man: Homecoming
    It's the non-superhero elements of Spider-Man: Homecoming that make it a great movie, and a non-stop fun summer flick. There isn't an ounce of fat on this film, packing in so many story elements and characters, while finding room for small, funny asides and moments that make it an addictively rich, idiosyncratic and re-watchable movie.
  18. Mr. Majestyk
    With a story that is absurd every step of the way, Mr. Majestyk is turned into a hodge podge of cruel and unusual punishments.
  19. Patriot Games
    A pretty good how-to movie as far as the CIA combating terrorism is concerned and a very good movie in terms of explaining why Harrison Ford is one of the most compelling leading men. [5 June 1992, p.C2]
    • Chicago Tribune
      • Posted Jun 29, 2017
  20. Hot Shots!
    Hot Shots! is very sharp and very funny, and if it doesn't have the aggressive, anarchic edge of "Airplane!" (attitude seems to be the specialty of David Zucker, who has just released "The Naked Gun 2 1/2 "), it is consistently, almost exhaustingly hilarious.
  21. Eddie Murphy: Raw
    Unlike Richard Pryor, whose rough language adds an important rhythmic punctuation to his monologues, Murphy uses vulgarity to shock and divide his audience.
  22. Three Amigos!
    Martin is joyful; Chase seems depressed, and Short comes off as merely happy to be in his first movie.
  23. The 'Burbs
    Though The burbs is hardly an actor's film, Hanks continues to demonstrate the ease and maturity that has been his since Big, while Dern, Ducommun and Feldman lend broad but effective support.
  24. Despicable Me 3
    The whole thing might as well all be written in Minions chatter. It's wacky, but somehow dull, kind of like conversing with a Minion.
  25. The Big Sick
    The Big Sick has the confidence to let the audience come to Nanjiani and Gordon's fictionalized real-life situation, rather than yank us in, kicking and screaming.
  26. The Beguiled
    The Beguiled probably could've benefited from a little more energy in its telling. Still, Coppola offers some gorgeous images of the past made present.
  27. Jumpin' Jack Flash
    A good third of this overblown movie consists of stunt-filled action sequences that turn a human story into something akin to Cannonball Run. That's too bad, because Goldberg's character is a terrible thing to waste.
  28. Soapdish
    Soapdish runs on longer than necessary, and not every scene is as funny as one would like, but it's funny enough to recommend. [31 May 1991, p.C]
    • Chicago Tribune
      • Posted Jun 28, 2017
  29. Baby Driver
    It's a thrill to watch it unfold, but the slick filmmaking combined with familiar tropes precludes most spontaneity.
  30. Maudie
    Maudie works valiantly, and not entirely convincingly, to suggest a happy-ish marriage, all things considered.
  31. Transformers: The Last Knight
    The rhythmic assurance of truly bracing screen action, even if it's just a bunch of metal beating up a bunch of other metal, or clobbering humans, never gains traction. The cross-cutting suggests the editors took care of things via group text.
  32. All Eyez on Me
    Shipp nails the energetic, motor-mouthed cadence of the outspoken Shakur. But the film surrounding Shipp is rough going.
  33. Beatriz at Dinner
    By Lithgow's standards this is pretty low-keyed acting, but he may have played one too many blowhards in his recent career. His performance works, but it lacks surprise and, as written, he's a bit much.
  34. Rough Night
    Rough Night is good one minute, weak or stilted or wince-y the next, though even with seriously uneven pacing and inventiveness it's a somewhat better low comedy than "Snatched" or "Bad Moms," or (here's where I part company with the world) the "Hangover" pictures. Yes, even the first one.
  35. Cars 3
    Cars 3, a reasonably diverting account of middle-aged pity, humiliation and suffering as experienced by Rust-eze-sponsored race car Lightning McQueen, is not the weakest of the Disney/Pixar sequels (I’d vote “Cars 2” or “Monsters University,” those sour, desperate things). But it’s by far the most guilt-ridden.
  36. Megan Leavey
    Animals make for good screenwriting devices, as characters can speak their inner feelings to them, but that doesn't make for the most subtle or efficient screenwriting.
  37. My Cousin Rachel
    Weisz and the sharpest supporting players lift My Cousin Rachel to a higher plane. Holliday Granger as Philip's smitten family friend; Simon Russell Beale, a truly great actor, as the skeptical family solicitor; Tim Barlow, tottering around as the sublimely crusty servant: These are choice turns.
  38. It Comes at Night
    While the film's patient, moody progression into personal nightmare territory won't be for everyone, it's a genuinely evocative creation.
  39. The Mummy
    The mayhem in The Mummy feels desperate, mistimed, grueling in the wrong way (the film's violence is infinitely less appropriate for preteens than that of "Wonder Woman").
  40. Dean
    Martin's a smooth enough director to make fuller and more ambitious pictures than Dean. This one's a promising start.
  41. Wonder Woman
    For the first time in a long time, I came out of a DC comic book movie feeling ready for a sequel. It feels right, at this actual historical moment, when men made of something less than steel are bumbling around trying to run things. Paging Paradise Island!
  42. Baywatch
    The movie is all preening and very few laughs, though Daddario and Efron have a few moments, and Johnson remains a supremely likable slab of movie star.
  43. Everything, Everything
    Aside from its leading lady, what Everything, Everything has going for it is its light, fantastical aesthetic, an unexpected sense of buoyancy and light.
  44. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul
    A dirge of unfunny scatological material, techno-anxiety and child endangerment masquerading as familial bonding. Settle in for the "Long Haul," because this is one bumpy, miserable ride.
  45. Alien: Covenant
    It's a maddeningly uneven picture, with an action climax staged and executed with the air of a contractual agreement.
  46. The Wall
    The Wall may be fictional, but at its occasional, patient best it feels truthfully scary.
  47. Lowriders
    While Lowriders offers an interesting entree into this world, it's unfortunately too formulaic and predictable to leave much of an impact.
  48. The Lovers
    The Lovers is not about them as individual performers; it's about these actors working in tandem with each other, the script, the director and the other actors. The film works as a whole, not a sum of its parts.
  49. Snatched
    Snatched, more about victimhood than women running their own show, is funny here and there, but in ways that make the bulk of the formulaic material all the more frustrating.
  50. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    Optimism is nowhere to be found in Ritchie's movie itself. It is a grim and stupid thing, from one of the world's most successful mediocre filmmakers, and if Shakespeare's King Lear were blogging today, he'd supply the blurb quote: "Nothing will come of nothing."
  51. The Dinner
    The finished product feels tonally indistinct and plays as a bit of a grind.
  52. Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary
    This is a general-interest documentary, not one for the wonks or jazzbos. But the music, as we keep hearing from the cited experts, friends and admirers, covered so many different styles, Chasing Trane rides right past its own prescribed length of track.
  53. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    This one's a step down from the original.
  54. Unforgettable
    It's a uniquely feminine kind of villainy that's transfixed us since classical Hollywood, and Di Novi and Heigl understand it implicitly in order to execute it perfectly.
  55. Sleight
    Sleight fuses superhero story with a tough coming-of-age tale, and it enlivens and elevates both genres into something new and different, while heralding the arrival of Latimore as a star.
  56. Graduation
    A beautifully spun and morally searching tale of interlocking compromises.
  57. Born in China
    The message stays firmly on spiritual questions about the circle of life, but doesn't educate or leave the audience with a call to action about how to personally act to protect these animals, and that feels like a missed opportunity.
  58. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
    A vital and wily seriocomic odyssey. And Gere has never been better, more alive, on screen.
  59. The Lost City of Z
    This is a really good film. It just isn't the traditionally rousing one many will expect, and the trailers promise.
  60. Colossal
    This weird marriage of indie earnestness and matter-of-fact fantasy gives Colossal its moderately engaging distinction.
  61. The Fate of the Furious
    It's ridiculous but fun, as it careens from Havana to Berlin and icy, terrorist-ridden Russia played by Iceland, and a spit-ton of medium-grade digital effects. But the second hour gets to be a real drag, and not the racing kind.
  62. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    The jokes are sodden, relying on tired wordplay and sarcastic delivery to draw the faintest of laughs.
  63. Gifted
    This contrived mashup of "Proof" (earth-shaking algorithms), "Kramer vs. Kramer" (nerve-wracking custody battles) and "Little Man Tate" really isn't much.
  64. Going in Style
    Going in Style stays in the safe zone every second, nervous about risking any audience discomfort, as opposed to Brest's quietly nervy ode to old age and its discontents. Times change.
  65. The Boss Baby
    The Boss Baby is great fun for parents, but it remains to be seen if kids will get it at all.
  66. The Zookeeper's Wife
    The film's flaws in pacing and suspense are easily overlooked in the shadow of Chastain's moving performance, as well as the performances of those around her. Caro unspools an evergreen tale about the clarifying power of empathy to diffuse fear and hatred.
  67. Ghost in the Shell
    If you want a list of comics-derived spectacles less successful and worthy than this one, "Suicide Squad" heads the list. And that's the only list it'll ever head.
  68. Saban's Power Rangers
    Power Rangers maintains the essence of its origins in that it's rather pleasantly bonkers.
  69. Song to Song
    Frequently maddening in its reiteration and circularity, Song to Song nonetheless offers more of interest (along with the hooey) than I found in "Knight of Cups" or "Voyage of Time," his recent IMAX cosmos travelogue.
  70. CHIPS
    The jokes are dirty and wildly inappropriate, but are thoughtfully played.
  71. Dig Two Graves
    It's an intriguing premise, weakened by a script lacking in strong forward motion.
  72. Wilson
    Warming up this material, as Johnson tries to do, doesn't make it warmer; it just makes it seem warmed-over.
  73. Life
    A grim and fairly effective cross between "The Martian" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"?
  74. Raw
    Like all good horror films (though it's more of a psychological thriller with a teeming, festering wealth of body-horror preoccupations), this one takes its central theme — cannibalism — as a way into a variety of other matters, other indicators of a society and a psyche under extreme duress.
  75. Beauty and the Beast
    The problems here, I think, are weirdly simple. The movie takes our knowledge and our interest in the material for granted. It zips from one number to another, throwing a ton of frenetically edited eye candy at the screen, charmlessly.
  76. Before I Fall
    As Sam, Deutch is supported by the likes of Halston Sage as uber mean girl Lindsay, using her armor as a weapon, Logan Miller as longtime pal Kent, and Medalion Rahimi and Cynthy Wu as the rest of her clique. But this is Deutch's film.
  77. The Shack
    Though the dialogue is written with all the finesse of a self-help book, and the visuals are a garish technicolor explosion, there are some nuggets of wisdom that do resonate, regardless of personal belief.
  78. Kong: Skull Island
    Any movie with the sense, the wit and the visual instincts to introduce Kong the way this one does is fine with me.
  79. Logan
    Logan is deadly serious, and while its gamer-style killing sprees are meant to be excitingly brutal, I found them numbing and, in the climax, borderline offensive.
  80. Get Out
    It's a little of everything: unnerving, funny in just the right way and at the right times, serious about its observations and perspectives on racial animus, straight-up populist when it comes to an increasingly (but not sadistically) violent climax. That's entertainment!
  81. A Cure for Wellness
    A Cure for Wellness is an odd film. It's exceedingly well-crafted; the attention to detail and design, composition and camera movement on display here has largely been abandoned by recent horror films grasping for a jarring sense of realism.
  82. XX
    The results offer a collective shiver (not a lot of shrieks here) for those in the mood for sprightly, short-form misfortune.
  83. The LEGO Batman Movie
    The Lego Batman Movie offers more mayhem and less funny.
  84. The Red Turtle
    The grace, elegance, carefully muted color palette and gradual acknowledgment of life's milestones lift The Red Turtle far above the average so-called "family-friendly" animation.
  85. Fifty Shades Darker
    The last third of the film descends straight into a combination of "Dynasty" with shades of cult classic "The Room." It's fantastic because it's complete and utter silly madness. Helicopter crashes! Slaps! Drinks thrown in faces! Fully clothed shower sex! A framed "Chronicles of Riddick" poster! All the makings of an instant cult classic.
  86. John Wick: Chapter 2
    John Wick 2 stages its gun-fu melees sleekly and sometimes well, from the catacombs of Rome to the subway platforms of New York City.
  87. The Salesman
    The acting is wonderful throughout, but Alidoosti creates an especially haunting depiction of one woman's adversities in a country, and a marriage, that may not have her best interests at heart.
  88. I Am Not Your Negro
    This movie isn't just a tribute to Baldwin. It's a warning bell regarding leaders who, in Baldwin's words, care only about "their safety and their profits."
  89. The Comedian
    Everyone in The Comedian deserves a better movie than The Comedian.
  90. Gold
    His latest film, Gold, directed by Stephen Gaghan, is his most extreme character work yet, with him playing a balding, paunchy, cigarette chomping gold prospector in the 1980s, and yet McConaughey is so good he makes it work.
  91. Toni Erdmann
    It has found a considerable, gratefully discombobulated audience all around the world, and it deserves one here.
  92. A Dog's Purpose
    The real problem here, though, is that it's painfully cheesy pablum, relying on hokey burger joint and Friday night football game stereotypes to take the place of character development.
  93. Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened
    Jim Walton, Ann Morrison and other original cast members talk about what the show meant to them, and how it felt (in a word: lousy) to have their dreams crash into a brick wall of harsh reviews.
  94. xXx: Return of Xander Cage
    Pure spectacle has since been subsumed into narrative filmmaking, but the cinema of attractions is always present, especially in modern action movies, and there may be no greater current example of this than xXx: The Return of Xander Cage.
  95. The Founder
    Certain things get fudged in The Founder, among them Kroc's middle marriage, and director Hancock can't completely resolve the warring strains in what he sees as Kroc's personality. But that's what gives the movie its tension, and it works.
  96. Split
    While McAvoy is known for his dramatic roles, and as the young Charles Xavier in the "X-Men" franchise, he's delightful when let off the leash and allowed to show off his loud, campy, unhinged side.
  97. Live by Night
    The damper here is Affleck, who appears to have been too concerned with placing himself just so, and then posing, so that nothing drew attention away from cinematographer Robert Richardson's pretty light.
  98. Silence
    The easiest thing you can say about Silence is that it's a labor of love, made by a valiant soldier for his chosen storytelling medium.
  99. 20th Century Women
    Ever since she took "The Grifters" by storm, Bening has been a spectacular if often ill-used actress. Here, it's a marvelous fit of performer and role, and she makes Dorothea a dozen things at once: warm, chilly, open, wary, worldly, insecure, grave, blithe.
  100. Why Him?
    The biggest problem with Why Him? though, isn't him, it's her. Stephanie is so underwritten, that though these men are competing ruthlessly over her, she drops out of the story completely. She's the center of attention, but she's a void.
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