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. The Meddler
    The smooth, cozy charm of writer-director Lorene Scafaria's "The Meddler" offers considerable seriocomic satisfaction.
  2. Louder Than Bombs
    Louder Than Bombs never quite comes together. You keep waiting for it to gel, but it just drifts along until it drifts away.
  3. Fireworks Wednesday (2006)
    Much of the action takes place in the couple's haphazard apartment, but the movie really does feel like a movie, with Farhadi's camera unobtrusively energizing the close-quarters exchanges, both verbal and non-verbal. The acting is splendid.
  4. Captain America: Civil War
    Nothing in “Civil War” takes your breath away. All the exteriors are shrouded in the same overcast, indistinct light. Little in story terms is what you’d call daisy fresh. But almost everything in it works on its own prescribed terms, and the quiet moments register.
  5. Keanu
    The movie is hit-and-miss in an unusually clear-cut way. It's funny for 45-50 minutes. Then it's strained and abrasive and entirely too devoted to action-movie tropes for 45-50 minutes, minus end credits. I can recommend the first half.
  6. Mother's Day
    Mother's Day is a total mess, but what's truly offensive is that they didn't even try to make this cynical, post-Sunday brunch cash grab even remotely watchable. Your mom deserves so much better this Mother's Day. Go see "The Meddler" instead.
  7. Elvis & Nixon
    It's a small film, perhaps less ambitious or probing (even in a comic vein) than it might've been. But it's a good one, and the actors go to town without turning Elvis & Nixon into a chance meeting between an Elvis impersonator and Rich Little.
  8. The Huntsman: Winter's War
    Every time Charlize Theron is on screen, the movie gets crazy campy, and therefore at least somewhat interesting.
  9. Criminal
    Criminal feels like the kind of high-concept, unapologetically preposterous action movies of the heyday in the '80s and '90s. If that's your thing, it's a hoot.
  10. The Jungle Book
    Director Jon Favreau's voice cast for the animals is tiptop.
  11. The Invitation
    The movie is a small marvel of contained spaces, exploited beautifully by Kusama and cinematographer Bobby Shore.
  12. Barbershop: The Next Cut
    It's a mixed message, but that perfectly encapsulates the confusion of 2016 American politics.
  13. Demolition
    Gyllenhaal certainly holds the screen; at this point in his career, he has found a way to rise above whatever needs rising above. But midway through Demolition, I longed for a sequel to "Nightcrawler" instead.
  14. Miles Ahead
    The reason I like Miles Ahead, despite its problems, has everything to do with Cheadle both behind and in front of the camera.
  15. The Boss
    The Boss has zero finesse as a comedy.
  16. I Saw the Light
    Hiddleston, his eyes full of fire and melancholy longing, was an inspired choice. Everything not-quite-right with most movies, however, goes wrong long before the actors arrive on set.
  17. Midnight Special
    What happens, when it happens, is … well, either enough or too much, depending on your taste for the fantastic.
  18. Everybody Wants Some!!
    The film doesn't so much build as glide, in a pleasing, half-stumbling way, to the first day of school, which links Everybody Wants Some!! to Linklater's previous film, the gentle masterwork "Boyhood."
  19. Marguerite
    Marguerite achieves what the protagonist herself never managed: perfect pitch.
  20. Krisha
    The naked emotions, when they finally break loose, carry serious weight, akin to a John Cassavetes psychodrama.
  21. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
    Snyder is not without skills, or ideas, but when a critic finds himself at odds with almost every aspect of a director’s visual approach to material like this, material like this becomes pretty joyless.
  22. The Divergent Series: Allegiant
    It's a pretty dull picture, I must say, because it's my duty to say it. And it's a pretty dull picture, I must say, because something about its particular grade of dullness may cause memory loss.
  23. Miracles from Heaven
    While the film runs a bit too long, and the heartstring tugging becomes overwrought, overall, this family melodrama about a devastating illness and the freak accident that cured it is surprisingly effective, even for those of little faith.
  24. City of Gold
    It's a tasty primer on the man, the eater, the critic and the city.
  25. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    It's best to approach this crafty, intriguing offshoot as its own thing. And this time you actually notice the people.
  26. Zootopia
    Ultimately, all audiences can find something to enjoy in Zootopia, though adults may find more to sink their teeth into, which is always refreshing.
  27. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    While it's no disaster, it's oddly indistinct and uncertain.
  28. London Has Fallen
    The film, with its wearying gamer-style rounds of death, is routine at best.
  29. Triple 9
    It's not a ridiculous degree of complexity per se, but screenwriter Matt Cook mistakes solemnity for gravity, and a high body count for dramatic urgency. The cast is terrific, unfortunately.
  30. Gods of Egypt
    Call it "Clash of the Whitans," and call it a folly that doesn't have the energy or delirium to qualify as entertaining crap. It's just crap.
  31. Race
    What's the point of telling Jesse Owens' story if you don't get into what made him tick, and drove his success as an athlete?
  32. The Witch
    Writer-director Robert Eggers' "New England folk tale" film isn't likely to go bonkers in the popular culture the way "Blair Witch" did. But it's an infinitely richer, more meticulous, more elegant and more unnerving horror film — the best since "The Babadook," and very likely a 21st century classic in its hardy yet malleable genre.
  33. Where to Invade Next
    The film is entertaining and disingenuous, which doesn't make it wrong.
  34. How to Be Single
    Roughly half the scenes are terrible, nervously edited and predictable. The other half transcend the innate shrugginess of the script. At the end there's a dose of voice-over narration assigned to Johnson that is so, so very Carrie Bradshaw, you half-expect Sarah Jessica Parker to show up with a lawsuit.
  35. Deadpool
    The movie's far from dull. But first-time feature director Tim Miller's film serves as critique as well an example of what ails the superhero movie industry.
  36. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    For all the splurch and head-lopping, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is monotonal. It turns its action sequences into a noisy blur.
  37. Hail, Caesar!
    The tone of "Hail, Caesar!" is even and assured, yet the comic inspiration is sporadic.
  38. The Finest Hours
    The script embraces certain character archetypes wholeheartedly (pig-headed crew mate; ramrod-stiff officer) and not always successfully. Yet the tone, the mood of the picture, with its desaturated color palette, maintains the right atmosphere.
  39. Son of Saul
    This is a small, tight, starkly claustrophobic film, closer in impact to Elie Wiesel's first-person account of the concentration camps, "Night," than to the artful, slightly suspect emotional catharsis of director Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."
  40. Ride Along 2
    The script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi gives you next to nothing for narrative complication and surprise, and a meager amount of verbal jokes.
  41. The Lady in the Van
    Shepherd, apparently, was a genuine, needle-sharp wit and the way Smith plays her, the character's tart rejoinders are superhumanly perfect.
  42. 45 Years
    It's more than a first-rate film showing up and doing its job. It's cathartic, and moving, without any of the usual obvious contrivances or manipulations.
  43. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
    Some of this is slick and enjoyable in what I'd characterize as the wrong way, the painlessly bloody, box-office-friendly way.
  44. Mustang
    The issues at play in Mustang are gravely serious but the tone and rhythm is brisk, headlong and intelligently lively, like the women at the center.
  45. The Forest
    For the record, Gus Van Sant recently made "The Sea of Trees," set in the same infamous suicide forest, starring Matthew McConaughey and Ken Watanabe. In its contrived sentimentality that film is twice as frightening as this one.
  46. The Great Beauty
    It's a beauty, all right. It's more a style show than a deep philosophical treatise, but with surfaces this sleek and faces this interesting, I'll take style over substance any day.
  47. Anomalisa
    It's Chekhovian screwball, a perfect little tale of love (or thereabouts) in bloom among the weeds of an ordinary life. It feels like a classic already.
  48. Carol
    This excellent film works the way Blanchett's characterization of Carol works: It's meticulous about appearances, while fully aware that appearances can deceive.
  49. The Hateful Eight
    The Hateful Eight is an ultrawide bore.
  50. Sisters
    Compared to so many varied and skillful female-driven hits such as "Bridesmaids," or this summer's "Trainwreck" and "Spy," Sisters isn't worth talking about.
  51. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    It is good. Not great. But far better than "not bad." Solidly, confidently good.
  52. The Ridiculous 6
    Strange as it seems, if you choose to set aside the female roles in The Ridiculous 6 reducing women to cleavage or to mute humiliation, the movie is a long, long way from the worst Sandler movie ever made.
  53. In Jackson Heights
    Wiseman's film allows everyone their say, so that In Jackson Heights becomes one of the truest images of gentrification and its costs on film.
  54. Joy
    Lawrence is very good in the role, as far as the role goes. But the script never jells; the comedy feels forced and mechanically boisterous, particularly in the crucial early passages.
  55. In the Heart of the Sea
    I wish Howard's film had more of a distinct personality and drive behind it; Howard's made some supremely enjoyable films, in various keys, but this waterlogged, effects-crazed picture isn't one of them.
  56. Macbeth
    Partly, I think, the problem lies in Kurzel and his key performers being so determined to make the language conversational and naturalistic, they forgot to make the individual scenes move.
  57. The Big Short
    If a film can essentially succeed while also remaining essentially frustrating, here's a prime example.
  58. The Revenant
    That first hour is big, and imposing. The rest grows smaller, with the script's self-conscious deeper meanings either layered on top, like pelts, or — more successfully — left to Luzbeki's meticulous images of a sun-dappled 19th century Eden now home to one too many Wal-Mart stores.
  59. Chi-Raq
    If Chi-Raq disarms even a small percentage of those who see it, and provokes any reflection about a gun culture, the uses of satire and the plight of a sadly emblematic city, it was worth the effort. However mixed-up the results.
  60. The Night Before
    Still, it's pretty rich watching Rogen puke all over a Christmas Eve Mass in front of his in-laws.
  61. Secret in Their Eyes
    Writer-director Billy Ray's Americanized redux isn't a disaster, exactly; it keeps its head down and does its job. But nothing quite gels, or clicks, or makes itself at home in its adopted setting.
  62. Creed
    Half the film, written by Coogler and Aaron Covington, revels in cliches, skillfully. The other half sidesteps them and concentrates on scenes and relationships that breathe easily and draw us in the hard way: not by narrative fiat or bald calculation, but through well-written and shrewdly acted encounters.
  63. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
    The Hunger Games has completed its tasks well and met fan expectations.
  64. Heart of a Dog
    It sounds sentimental, icky, even, but Heart of a Dog sparkles with its creator's wisdom and droll philosophical insight.
  65. Spotlight
    Director and co-writer Tom McCarthy played a weasel of a journalist in "The Wire." Now he has made a meticulous, exacting procedural on real-life journalists who excelled at their job; had the resources to do it properly; and in early 2002, published the first in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of grim, carefully detailed stories of pedophile priests.
  66. Brooklyn
    It's one of the most satisfying films of 2015.
  67. The 33
    What these men endured is remarkable, and the logistics of the rescue are remarkable as well. The 33 settles for an unremarkable chronicle of that endurance test.
  68. I Smile Back
    While it's a cliche to praise a performance requiring some harsh, fairly explicit on-screen behavior and interactions, Silverman's doing the opposite of grandstanding here.
  69. SPECTRE
    For all its workmanlike devotion to out-of-control helicopters, “Spectre” works best when everyone’s on the ground, doing his or her job, driving expensive fast cars heedlessly, detonating the occasional wisecrack, enjoying themselves and their beautiful clothes.
  70. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Jane is a genius, but she's deeply flawed and complicated, struggling with substance abuse, mental illness, her own past regrets. That dark underbelly adds depth and dimension to the ironic humor of Our Brand is Crisis.
  71. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    From its initial first-person, behind-the-wheel viewpoint to its final implication of all-pervasive surveillance, Panahi creates a fascinating hybrid that becomes a microcosm of Tehran.
  72. Suffragette
    The torment that Maud is put through is devastating, but Suffragette, as a film, often robs itself of its own emotional power.
  73. Truth
    The film feels dodgy, tentative and uncertain as to how to frame its own protagonist in a complicated story of journalistic compromise (and worse).
  74. Burnt
    Director John Wells dices the action, even the simplest conversation, into five harried shots when one would suffice. The many food-prep montages are cut and paced to the same numbing rhythm.
  75. Room
    The parent/child relationship at the movie's core is endlessly fascinating.
  76. Rock the Kasbah
    Star vehicles this rickety have a way of making the world unsafe for comic democracy.
  77. Beasts of No Nation
    I never felt emotionally exploited by the terrors on screen. Rather, Beasts of No Nation is an act of gripping empathy.
  78. Crimson Peak
    Not even the film's occasional bursts of ultra-violence, or the endlessly oozing red clay, or Hiddleston crying a red tear, or Chastain swanning around in one flaming crimson ball gown after another, can infuse this gorgeous bore with anything like red-blooded suspense.
  79. Bridge of Spies
    The film is an anomaly — a confident, slightly square, highly satisfying example of old-school Hollywood craftsmanship, starring a major movie star brandishing a briefcase, and a handkerchief, rather than a pistol.
  80. Steve Jobs
    The movie, a formidable technical and design achievement, has everything going for it except a sense of Jobs' inner life.
  81. Pan
    The most joyless revisionism since Disney's "The Lone Ranger.
  82. The Second Mother
    Muylaert's picture relates to many other South American domestic comedies pitting "the help" against the economic overlords, but this one has the grace to humanize everyone on screen. The results are both smart and curious.
  83. Hotel Transylvania 2
    The spookiest thing about Hotel Transylvania 2 is how much funnier, colorful and more original it is this second time around.
  84. The Green Inferno
    It's clear that Roth was trying to say something about the brave new world of social media-enabled social justice, and public shame as a tool for change, but the message is garbled. That it comes wrapped in a horror package that just isn't truly scary or suspenseful is the real shame though.
  85. 99 Homes
    At its best, 99 Homes finds Bahrani tightening the screws on his own style, going for speed, concision and an agitating rhythm where his previous films took their time. I hope he'll go on to make movies combining the vital aspects of all his work.
  86. Shanghai
    Cusack puts in work as Paul, an old-fashioned hero. But he seems miscast and can't quite modulate the levels of camp in his performance.
  87. Prophet's Prey
    The movie finds what solace it can in giving voice to those who escaped this church's grasp.
  88. Mississippi Grind
    Reynolds and Mendelsohn could not be more different actors, but in this pairing they are perfect.
  89. The Martian
    It's one of the most comforting science fiction films in years.
  90. The Walk
    I cannot say how I'd feel about The Walk if I'd never seen "Man on Wire," because I did see "Man on Wire," and I can't un-see it. I love it. I can only say The Walk struck me as an honorable good try of an also-ran, though with some lovely things to offer.
  91. Uncle John
    A fair amount of Uncle John puts us behind the wheel or alongside Ashton as he drives, preoccupied with his misdeeds, along country roads lined with cornfields. No dialogue needed; in these transitions, Ashton and his surroundings are enough.
  92. Goodnight Mommy
    Flashes of Goodnight Mommy are forceful and blackly funny.
  93. Sicario
    Sicario doesn't fall apart in its second half, exactly, but it does settle for less than it should.
  94. Stonewall
    Because Stonewall turns everyone into a sentimental or suffocating "type" instead of a dimensional character, the results are sheer noise.
  95. The New Girlfriend
    The actors are more than fine. Demoustier is the key, making her character's shifts in astonishment and perplexity honest and plausible.
  96. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
    It's a strong reminder of the times, then and now.
  97. The Intern
    Has its bright spots but is practically blinded by its own privileged perspective of life among the landed gentry of Brooklyn.
  98. Black Mass
    If anything, director Cooper is so intent on portraying Bulger as a man, not a monster, the man comes off a little softer than he was, probably.
  99. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
    Though Ball's workmanlike handling of the second in the trilogy, "The Scorch Trials," proves mainly that he can keep a franchise from running completely off the rails when the tracks have been laid perilously near a swamp of "dys-lit" cliches.
  100. Everest
    A fairly good, extremely grueling movie as far as it goes — tracks the true-life fortunes of a battered group of climbers to the highest place on Earth. Yet somehow it doesn't go far enough.
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