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 1.4 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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    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser
    Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser is quite probably the finest documentary about jazz ever made. [08 Dec 1989, p.C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  2. Finding Vivian Maier
    Vivian Maier is a great Chicago story. And what she did for, and with, the faces, neighborhoods and character of mid-20th century Chicago deserves comparison to what Robert Frank accomplished, in a wider format, with "The Americans."
  3. The Set-Up
    To cop a phrase, it's a knockout. [05 Sep 1999, p.32C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  4. Frida
    What “Frida” does, it does well. It also does too much, probably, crowding its subject with expressive add-ons.
  5. Harry Is Here to Help
    The actors and writing lend unexpected dimension to all of the characters, and Lopez's Harry is an indelible antagonist, one who manages to be genuinely big-hearted and evil.
    • Chicago Tribune
  6. Startup.com
    Combining the immediacy of the Internet and the wise perspective of history, Startup.com proves that investing in real-life drama can reap rich dividends.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Liberty Heights
    Few mainstream films portray the religiousness or ethnicity of characters with such detail, warmth and humor as Liberty Heights.
  8. The Full Monty
    Takes a premise that seems ripe for broad, vulgar joking and turns it into a sly, even subtle, comedy.
    • Chicago Tribune
  9. Roger Dodger
    Revives the art of smart, scathing movie conversation as it skewers Manhattan's singles scene while providing a goodly number of laughs. Like its subject, the movie may have its prickly moments, but it's awfully fun to watch.
  10. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    If Hollywood is really a dream factory, then it's the movie moguls and movie stars who live that dream to the hilt. In the late 1970s few lived quite as large as Robert Evans.
  11. Kitchen Stories
    The movie's gentle humor and offbeat whimsy prove that humanity trumps bureaucratic foolishness, in Norway or anywhere else.
  12. The Square
    A nerve-racking noir from Australia.
  13. Les amitiés maléfiques
    It's intellectual without being dry, dramatic without bombast, smart without posturing. Its characters and milieu are very well drawn, and Andre is one of the more intriguing and convincing fictional creations in recent film.
  14. Born on the Fourth of July
    for all its flaws, Born on the Fourth of July provides the final proof that Tom Cruise is the real thing-a movie star with all the natural, unforced ability to connect with an audience that the title implies. [20 Dec 1989, p.1]
    • Chicago Tribune
  15. Funny Face
    A blithe classic with Gershwin songs, Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. [03 Oct 1997, p.10]
    • Chicago Tribune
      • Posted Jun 7, 2022
  16. Dial M for Murder
    It remains the best movie ever photographed in 3-D, although the film, adapted from Frederick Knott's stage play, seems less than ideal for the 3-D process, given its tight interiors and extended dialogue scenes. [19 May 2000]
    • Chicago Tribune
  17. Catch Me If You Can
    Brilliant performances by DiCaprio as Frank Jr. and Christopher Walken as his fallen father - and an enjoyable one by Tom Hanks.
  18. Thoroughbreds
    For material that started out for the stage, Finley’s directorial debut really does feel like a movie. It’s elegant and well-plotted but not at the expense of the performances.
  19. Peggy Sue Got Married
    Droll, pungent, and superbly told, Peggy Sue Got Married is more than a return to form for Francis Coppola. It's a film that reveals a new depth, a new sensitivity and a new sureness of technique for the 47-year-old director, a film that marks Coppola's entry into a rich, mature period.
  20. The LEGO Batman Movie
    The Lego Batman Movie offers more mayhem and less funny.
  21. A Prairie Home Companion
    Like his recent, elegant dance film "The Company," A Prairie Home Companion will appeal especially to those who are not story-dependent. Altman's sidewinding tribute to a surprisingly hardy 32-year-old public radio phenomenon is like a 105-minute putter in the garden, with a few songs and some jokes.
  22. Baadasssss!
    Overall, Baadasssss! succeeds marvelously at evoking the passion and frantic energy behind "Sweetback" and putting it all in the context of its politically charged era.
  23. Trainwreck
    Trainwreck is all kinds of funny, and like any talent showcase worth its salt, the tone of the humor adjusts to suit the talents on screen.
  24. About a Boy
    It's funny, moving and true, and it respects the audience's intelligence as much as the characters'. That combination, no matter the movie's label, deserves to be treasured.
  25. The Believer
    One of the year's most thought-provoking, hard-hitting films, gutsily opening up a subject rarely done with this kind of all-out chutzpah.
  26. In This World
    This is an amazing movie, released at a frightening time and made under remarkable circumstances.
  27. Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
    A compelling piece of press criticism as it probes the media as terror's conduit of choice, spreading message and validating violence in the 1970s and today.
  28. Secret Ballot
    Reserves its sharpest jabs at the harshly circumscribed lives of women in Iran.
  29. This Film Is Not Yet Rated
    100 percent right about our corrupt and hypocritical industry-controlled movie ratings system. Being right, however, doesn't automatically make for a strong documentary. I enjoyed a lot of it. Yet fully half of what's on screen is beside its own point.
  30. Orlando
    What it lacks in coherence it makes up for in sheer spectacle.
  31. A Foreign Affair
    That great ex-Berliner Wilder's cynical, darkly funny look at postwar Berlin--a hive of bombed-out buildings, desperate citizens and black-market morality, run by the U.S. military with a slightly blind eye. [02 Jun 2006, p.C4]
    • Chicago Tribune
  32. Origin
    It is, I suppose, educational; it’s also vibrant and adroit and searching as human drama.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Bastard Out of Carolina
    The genetic seeds of John Huston's gift are manifest in his daughter's direction of Carolina. Despite its sorrowful subject, Bastard Out of Carolina offers the deep satisfaction of material that rings true. [15 Dec 1996, p.5]
    • Chicago Tribune
  34. Point Blank
    Frantic, violent and unrelenting, it is all of a piece, its tightly packed storytelling making cassoulet of its own implausibilities and familiar terrain covering a web of political and institutional conspiracy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Pearl Jam: Let's Play Two
    As an affirmation of one famous fan’s dedication, “Let’s Play Two” works well enough. As a Pearl Jam documentary, not so much.
  36. Blast of Silence
    Blast is as bleak as noir gets, packed with black-and-white images of '60s New York City that recall Jean-Pierre Melville's French thrillers, and a street-tough taste that suggests Cassavetes and points ahead to Scorsese. [29 Oct 2004, p.C2]
    • Chicago Tribune
  37. Manhunter
    Manhunter is full of useful tips on interior decoration, but a movie it's not. [15 Aug 1986, p.JC]
    • Chicago Tribune
  38. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
    A bittersweet comedy about the great sleuth's great love and the one case he couldn't handle. [07 Jan 2000, p.L]
    • Chicago Tribune
  39. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
    The most assured and satisfying of the five so far.
  40. The Purple Rose of Cairo
    A cornball adventure film about a dashing young explorer mixing with New York cafe society types. What a delightfully complicated fantasy film this is. What Woody Allen has done with The Purple Rose of Cairo is create a classic film about our love affair with fantasy. [28 Jun 1985, p.1]
    • Chicago Tribune
  41. Frozen
    It's entertaining, and following an old Disney tradition Frozen works some old-school magic in its nonhuman characters.
  42. They Died with Their Boots On
    Errol Flynn deifies Gen. George Armstrong Custer in a silly though well-directed biopic. [25 May 2001, p.C1]
    • Chicago Tribune
  43. Solas
    A beautifully acted and deeply compassionate study of ordinary people coping with the vicissitudes of life.
  44. On the Run
    The sheer stark speed and measured violence of On the Run catch us up quickly--and the film becomes a searing portrait of a killer-idealist lost out of time.
  45. Waitress
    The ending of Waitress is so beguiling and whimsical that it makes you, like its diner's patrons, hungry for more--and it makes you miss that red-headed movie auteur/pastry chef/heart stealer Shelly even more.
  46. The Skeleton Twins
    And it's too bad The Skeleton Twins settles for tidy, slightly hollow narrative developments. The performers are ready to rip. For many they'll be enough.
  47. The Bridesmaid
    A classic of realistic terror, in which passion and murder can't lie buried.
  48. Natural Born Killers
    Natural Born Killers is visually complex and thematically simple. Mixing film and video, black-and-white and color, morphing and animation, Stone breaks visual ground here for a major studio release. [26 Aug 1994, p.B]
    • Chicago Tribune
  49. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    The chief limitation of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is an old story: However touching, Cooke's Rachel is there mainly to prop up the sweetly messed-up young male lead, and then to quietly guide him toward adulthood.
  50. 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene
    Philippe’s strongest work in 78/52 is the historical context, ranging from the images and roles of mothers in 1950s popular culture to a key handful of movies photographed in black and white (as was “Psycho,” partly to get the blood past the censors) released the previous year, 1959.
  51. Sicko
    Sicko doesn't formulate a way out of this heartless craps game we're playing. It is, however, a very entertaining position paper, and a reminder that we should do better by more of our citizenry.
  52. Monster
    I don't think it's a great movie -- though Theron's is a near-great performance -- but it's not one you can easily forget.
  53. The Lady and the Duke
    A vivifying film, though it's done in such a strange style that it takes a while to get used to it.
  54. Daddy Longlegs
    I don't know if what the Safdies endured growing up was akin to what audiences experience in Daddy Longlegs. But I'm very glad they survived to make a very good film about it.
  55. Tabloid
    One of Morris' swiftest works, yet also one of his saddest, Tabloid reveals among other things what happens when one person's definition of ordinary healthy romance is undone by another's.
  56. Monkey Business
    Volcanically funny. [23 Dec 2005, p.C7]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Watermelon Woman
    The Watermelon Woman is quite smart, remarkably sophisticated filmmaking for a first-time director.
  58. Key Largo
    Maxwell Anderson's poetic-political play about crime and fascism, set in a "Petrified Forest"-style ensemble during a Key West hurricane, was turned by Huston and co-writer Richard Brooks into a crackling thriller. [27 Nov 1998, p.Q]
    • Chicago Tribune
  59. Frankenweenie
    The entire project is carefully wrought in visual terms and more than a little familiar. Sometimes even a well-applied pair of jumper cables can't do the trick.
  60. Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys
    Code Unknown is a film you think more than feel. Though each scene is executed close to flawlessly, the cumulative effect is often oppressive. But at the center of the film -- the real reason it was made -- is Binoche, one of the genuinely radiant presences in movies today.
  61. Black Hawk Down
    It's one of the most ferociously convincing physical re-creations of warfare ever put on screen.
  62. Divine Intervention
    About the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it treats war as a cosmic joke and its participants as hapless but recognizably human clowns.
  63. Radio Days
    The brilliance of the film is the way in which Allen pays tribute to radio while subtly condemning television, which, he seems to be arguing, has partially robbed us of our imaginations.
  64. Strawberry Mansion
    I like this film for many reasons. Its sensibility is truly a gentle one. The screenplay may not cohere in ways designed to please the dream-logic-averse, but its wit is neatly matched by the wit of the visual landscapes.
  65. Woman of the Year
    It's very smart, very sleek and one of the great Hollywood romantic comedies. [04 Jul 2003, p.C2]
    • Chicago Tribune
  66. Southside with You
    Southside with You is best taken as a reminder of the value of the slow relational build, of taking your time and actually talking, and actually listening, with someone new. Even if there's not a staggering political future in your shared future.
  67. Rize
    A compelling, bittersweet hybrid of a movie.
  68. Bottoms
    In the end, all these young women want is a foothold on life, a little less humiliation and some physical intimacy. If that makes Bottoms snarky on the outside but conventionally heartfelt on the inside, well, that’s fine, actually.
  69. Wild
    Like the Danny Boyle film version of "127 Hours," Wild is extremely nervous about boring its audience with its protagonist's aloneness. Still, Witherspoon and Dern are reason enough to see it.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Ground Truth
    Compelling and intensely provocative.
  71. Iron Island
    A powerful symbolic drama.
  72. Shakespeare Behind Bars
    The power of art to redeem the pain and cruelty of life is demonstrated to enormous effect inShakespeare Behind Bars.
  73. Burning Cane
    The film favors more subtly melancholy strains and, at its best, a poetic touch.
  74. The Sea Inside
    Wrings honest emotion and riveting dramatics from its tale.
  75. The Others
    A classic haunted-house story enshrouded in fog and steeped in portentous atmosphere. It gives you a case of the creeps oh-so slowly, then hits you with a clever, mind-warping way of saying, "Boo!"
  76. Flushed Away
    After the fourth electrocution gag, the 10th smack in the face and the 12th assault on a wee rodent crotch, we could all use something quiet.
  77. Awakenings
    Awakenings is a film that unquestionably succeeds on its own terms, though those terms are deeply suspect. It is a canny piece of false art, one that consistently swaps meaning for superficial effect. [20 Dec 1990, p.1]
    • Chicago Tribune
  78. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
    A surprisingly emotional, simplified version of the Victor Hugo novel.
  79. Duck Season
    A highly satisfying miniature. Its subject may be adolescence, and some of its pot-smoking, kick-back humor is adolescent too--in a good way. But the film's calm and witty visual rhythm offers a rueful awareness of time passing and of time wasted, in ways that people tend not to appreciate fully until long after they've wasted it.
  80. Inception
    The film is Nolan's labyrinth all the way, and it's gratifying to experience a summer movie with large visual ambitions and with nothing more or less on its mind than (as Shakespeare said) a dream that hath no bottom.
  81. Serenity
    A brash, funny, action-packed bit of sci-fi ecstasy--and a giant raspberry to the execs who let "Firefly" fall out of the sky.
  82. The Last King of Scotland
    The director is Kevin Macdonald, a documentary filmmaker making his fiction film feature debut. (He won an Oscar for his Munich Olympics hostage chronicle, "One Day in September.")
  83. Cast Away
    An adventure movie of extraordinary simplicity and power.
    • Chicago Tribune
  84. Gun Crazy
    A fascinating study of sexual heat fueled by guns and ammo. [19 Oct 2001, p.C8]
    • Chicago Tribune
  85. Farewell
    This complicated but absorbing tale is not told through primarily American eyes ( Willem Dafoe plays a CIA. figurehead); primarily it's about French and Soviet brinksmanship, and those who succeeded at it, or failed, and one man who died for the risks he took.
  86. The Orphanage
    As in “Pan’s Labyrinth,” The Orphanage relies on a risky blend of clinically realistic horrors and poetic suggestions of an alternate world, one that can be visited, but at a price.
  87. Dune: Part One
    If you’re at all interested in what a reliably compelling, stubbornly solemn commercial filmmaker can do with money, imagination and no little nerve, Dune is epic enough — even if there’s a wee hole in the middle, where a more compelling protagonist belongs.
  88. The Invitation
    The movie is a small marvel of contained spaces, exploited beautifully by Kusama and cinematographer Bobby Shore.
  89. Joe Gould's Secret
    A wonderful, heart-breaking movie.
  90. Ocean's Eleven
    Good, expensive, easygoing fun. It's no masterpiece, but why should Soderbergh -- or anybody -- get three in a row?
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    End of the Century
    Much to their credit, filmmakers Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields leave almost all the talking to band members and their inner circle. That gives this documentary--their first film--a brisk authority, humor and directness true to the band's scrappy story.
  92. Red Lights
    The sights, sounds and traffic in Red Lights are oppressively ordinary; the people are unnervingly real. That reality doubles the suspense we might feel in a more slickly made but thinly plotted thriller.
  93. They Shot the Piano Player
    The film basically and improbably works, even with some limitations.
  94. Wonder Boys
    An often-wondrous comedy, just as rich and surprising as "L.A. Confidential" but considerably less dark.
  95. Mysterious Skin
    An absorbing story. Even though it takes you to places you may not want to go, the film never loses its human touch--that feel of skin on skin or of the past inescapably invading the present.
  96. Rush
    It's big, brash and dramatically it goes in circles. The first two may be enough for most people, especially if they're into Formula One racing, to overlook the third.
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