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 1.3 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. Stoker
    Wasikowska is a fine, intriguing actress, though I'm not sure anyone could make actual psychological sense of this woman. Nobody on screen — not Kidman, not Goode, not Wasikowska, not Jacki Weaver as Auntie Gin — seems entirely at home in the chosen (or guessed-at) style.
  2. The Gatekeepers
    This is a great and necessary document in support of a two-state solution. Even those who don't believe in such a solution may find their minds changed by The Gatekeepers.
  3. Bless Me, Ultima
    The results are pretty, and sometimes beautiful. They're also a tad stiff, and the dialogue and voice-over narration sometimes has the ring of a scrupulously faithful adaptation.
  4. Snitch
    It's an entertaining picture — pulp, coming from a place of righteous indignation.
  5. A Good Day to Die Hard
    Isn't just the weakest of the "Die Hard" pictures; it's a lousy action movie on its own terms.
  6. Beautiful Creatures
    When classy, pedigreed British actors go hog-wild under the flowering dogwood trees of a Southern Gothic setting, often the results are good. Just as often they're so bad they're good. And sometimes, as is the case with Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson in Beautiful Creatures, they're simply doing the best they can under the circumstances.
  7. Safe Haven
    I like Duhamel, and in her first straight-up dramatic role Hough does well enough, though her singing and/dancing career thus far has trained her to oversell, as opposed to sell, as opposed to act naturally.
  8. John Dies at the End
    This is a fantasy grab bag in which nearly anything can happen.
  9. Side Effects
    With Rooney Mara as the woman in question — a poised, tense Manhattanite prescribed anti-anxiety medication by her psychiatrist with newsworthy results — Side Effects finds its ideal performer.
  10. Identity Thief
    Gordon is lost, and his style of shooting - telescopic close-ups, which never give us enough space to appreciate the performers - feels wrong for comedy.
  11. Stand Up Guys
    Arkin in particular can barely hide his lack of enthusiasm for the material. Some of the looks he shoots his co-stars appear to contain a secret code of some kind, deciphered as: 'Well, at least I'm in 'Argo.'"
  12. Bullet to the Head
    It's junk, and it's excessively violent, which is a given. Approach it as a Stallone movie (which it is) or as a Hill movie (which it is), but it's more interesting as a Hill movie. If it gets this director back into the hard-driving action game, then it will have done its duty.
  13. Warm Bodies
    Levine has a strong instinct as a packager of moments, ladling on the alt-rock just so before ladling on another ladle's worth.
  14. Consuming Spirits
    Dense like a detailed graphic novel in the Chris Ware or R. Crumb vein, but a real movie in every way, Consuming Spirits is a strange and wormy accomplishment, the sort of personal epic only the most obsessive of cinematic madmen undertake, let alone complete.
  15. Quartet
    The material settles for amiably familiar observations about the difficulties of growing old and the glories of being surrounded by beautiful music.
  16. Broken City
    For an hour or so, aided by the autumnal glow of Ben Seresin's cinematography, director Hughes maintains a firm handle on the story's turnabouts. Then the script goes a little nuts with coincidence and improbability.
  17. West of Memphis
    A strong, blood-boiling documentary from director Amy Berg, who made the similarly fine "Deliver Us From Evil".
  18. LUV
    An uneven but strongly acted debut feature from co-writer and director Sheldon Candis.
  19. Amour
    Small, sure and stunningly acted, this is a picture of exacting control.
  20. Gangster Squad
    A triumph of production design but a pretty dull kill-'em-up otherwise.
  21. Zero Dark Thirty
    The key American film of 2012 ... Its stance is extremely tricky. It's not a documentary. It's not a load of revenge nonsense. It's not '24.' I'm still arguing with myself over parts of it. And that's a sign that a movie will endure.
  22. Parental Guidance
    The pathos: considerable. The sight gags, involving Crystal puking chili dog on a kid's face, or the grandson with an imaginary friend peeing and causing an X Games skateboarder to wipe out: artless. The results: tolerably amusing.
  23. Not Fade Away
    If any one aspect of Chase's film keeps it from being more than merely coolly engaging (which it is), it's the casting.
  24. Promised Land
    More an argument than a fully fleshed-out drama ... The script is unconvincing; two key narrative twists, one related to the other, are deeply hokey.
  25. Django Unchained
    By the two-hour mark the fun had oozed out of the movie for me. It's long. Or feels it.
  26. Jack Reacher
    McQuarrie... is a real writer; his banter has snap and bite. His directorial skills are still catching up with his writing skills; the movie loses steam in the final half-hour.
  27. This Is 40
    It displays a growing sense of fluidity and craft [from Apatow]. ... But much of the script feels oddly dishonest and dodgy.
  28. The Impossible
    Everything that was false about the tsunami sequence in the recent Clint Eastwood film 'Hereafter' - the bland overview perspectives, the lack of human immediacy - is corrected, terrifyingly, by the first half-hour of director J.A. Bayona's nerve-shredding docudrama 'The Impossible.'
  29. Les Miserables
    The camera bobs and weaves like a drunk, frantically. So you have hammering close-ups, combined with woozy insecurity each time more than two people are in the frame. Twenty minutes into the retelling of fugitive Valjean, his monomaniacal pursuer Javert, the torch singers Fantine and Eponine and the rest, I wanted somebody to just nail the damn camera to the ground.
  30. The Guilt Trip
    Well, it's a masterpiece compared with 'Little Fockers,' the last movie featuring Barbra Streisand.
  31. Hyde Park on Hudson
    The music's the best thing ... But it isn't enough to lift this middlebrow, middleweight and middling project ... above its misjudgments and limitations.
  32. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    Extracting three generously proportioned films from Tolkien's books made sense. But turning the relatively slim 1937 volume 'The Hobbit' into a trilogy, peddling seven or eight hours of cine-mythology, suggests a better deal for the producers than for audiences.
  33. Playing for Keeps
    Only Biel and Greer lift it above the level of bleh.
  34. The Central Park Five
    An unusually good documentary about an outlandish miscarriage of justice.
  35. Starlet
    It's an odd film in some ways. The porn milieu is detailed in ways at once sparing, in terms of actual screen time, and bluntly explicit. The odd-couple relationship guiding the story has its familiarities. But where it counts, 'Starlet' ... allows its characters room to maneuver within the potential cliches.
  36. Killing Them Softly
    Killing Them Softly isn't anything major. But it's a pungent minor film only vaguely resembling the one The Weinstein Co. is advertising, and that's fine with me.
  37. Wuthering Heights
    Arnold's interpretation is taciturn, often entirely without dialogue, though it becomes increasingly conventional in its scene structure as it goes and as the actors hand off the key roles. In reality it's a bit of a slog. ... The movie plays like an idea for a 'Wuthering Heights' adaptation.
  38. Tales of the Night
    Eighty-four minutes is about right for this style of animation. Even at that trim running time, the silhouette approach won't be for everyone. Ocelot's unity of vision, though, cannot be denied. Your kids, even the preteens, will likely fall headlong into his worlds.
  39. The Comedy
    If it weren't for Kate Lyn Sheil, who has a couple of scenes as a blase Brooklyn waitress inexplicably ending up in the protagonist's bed, 'The Comedy' might well have qualified as the worst film of 2012.
  40. Hitchcock
    I prefer [HBO's Hitchcock biopic] "The Girl," not because of its salaciousness but because it gets at something underneath the great (truly, great) director's skin.
  41. Red Dawn
    Many of the original film's booby-trap scenarios are repeated here, but without Milius' grandiosity and nihilism. There's less of both in the new Red Dawn. It's not a disaster. It's just drab.
  42. Life of Pi
    Life of Pi, Yann Martel's beautiful little book about a young man and the sea and a tiger, has transformed into a big, imposing and often lovely 3-D experience.
  43. Anna Karenina
    At its most frantic the cutting and staging here veers perilously close to Baz Luhrmann "Moulin Rouge!" territory for comfort. ... I'd rather have seen Wright's carefully elaborated production on a stage, instead of in a movie partly on a stage.
  44. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    Boasts one moment, perhaps three or four seconds in length, so delightfully intense and uncharacteristically juicy that the rest of the film - most of the rest of the whole series, in fact - looks pretty pale by comparison. Not vampire pale. Paler.
  45. Silver Linings Playbook
    Cooper's performance is his best yet. As is Lawrence's (the more crucial role, in fact).
  46. Holy Motors
    Lavant is splendid in the film, and he's essentially the entire film - and yet, Holy Motors is somewhat more than a contraption built for a fearless performer.
  47. Lincoln
    It blends cinematic Americana with something grubbier and more interesting than Americana, and it does not look, act or behave like the usual perception of a Spielberg epic. It is smaller and quieter than that.
  48. Skyfall
    While the protracted third act doesn't kill the two-hour, 23-minute picture, "Casino Royale" remains the best of the recent Bonds, with Skyfall just a notch below it.
  49. Brooklyn Castle
    See it, and I dare you not to care about what happens to these kids, these Yankees of chess.
  50. Wreck-It Ralph
    I found the first 30 minutes of Wreck-It Ralph a lot of fun, the second and third 30 minutes progressively more routine.
  51. Flight
    Flight is exciting - terrific, really - because in addition to the sophisticated storytelling techniques by which it keeps us hooked, it doesn't drag audience sympathies around by the nose, telling us what to think or how to judge the reckless, charismatic protagonist played by Denzel Washington.
  52. Fun Size
    It's a soul-crusher, and when I say it may be the most dehumanizing experience since "Hostel: Part II" the comparison is not an idle one.
  53. The Sessions
    John Hawkes is wonderful as O'Brien, as is Helen Hunt as the surrogate whose sessions with O'Brien form the crux of the film. The results are extremely moving and, in general, low on egregiously yanked heartstrings or the usual biopic filler.
  54. Cloud Atlas
    The movie doesn't really work, but it's fascinating in the ways it doesn't. Then again, I enjoyed the spacey insanity of the Wachowskis' "Speed Racer," which they didn't even like in Asia.
  55. Smashed
    Feels different from most recovering-train-wreck stories. The movie is a tidy relaying of a messy situation involving two reasonably functional middle-class LA alcoholics, one of whom gets serious about cleaning up a lot sooner than the other.
  56. Alex Cross
    The sharpest five minutes in Alex Cross, by a considerable margin, belong to Giancarlo Esposito.
  57. Seven Psychopaths
    The result is a clever, violent daydream. But McDonagh's skill behind the camera has grown considerably since "In Bruges." And the way he writes, he's able to attract the ideal actors into his garden of psychopathology.
  58. Here Comes the Boom
    Once it gets going and commits to its time-worn inspirational formula, it's not half-bad.
  59. Argo
    In the populist vein of Ron Howard's "Apollo 13," Affleck's rouser salutes the Americans (and, more offhandedly, the Canadians) who restored our sense of can-do spirit when we needed it.
  60. The Oranges
    The result is a placid tale of impulses running wild. Farino is a smooth operator, but he puts little on screen that feels like life, as opposed to a middle-of-the-road indie.
  61. The Paperboy
    To say The Paperboy doesn't work is one thing; to say it's dull is a lie. This movie is berserk, which is more interesting than "eh."
  62. Taken 2
    Revenge is a dish best served cold, as some Albanian dramatist once said, but Taken 2 isn't good-cold, as in steely and purposeful; it's cold as in "lost the scent."
  63. 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.
  64. Won't Back Down
    Davis, in particular, manages to create a fully dimensional character in the midst of a highly polemical screenplay.
  65. Hotel Transylvania
    Dominated by Adam Sandler's D-minus Bela Lugosi impression, the 3-D animated feature Hotel Transylvania illustrates the difference between engaging a young movie audience and agitating it, with snark and noise and everything but the funny.
  66. Looper
    For about an hour Looper really cooks. Its second half is more of a medium boil, and less fun. But watching it, I realized how few commercial entertainments hold up straight through to the end-point.
  67. How to Survive a Plague
    From a terrible epidemic comes a beautiful documentary.
  68. Detropia
    The oddly beautiful documentary made by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Gray is subtler and richer than its blunt title suggests.
  69. Dredd
    Calling Dredd 3D a movie is sort of a lie. It's a premise, and there are levels to reach, and always there's another grimy hallway to stalk, and then you turn right or left, and then kill some more.
  70. Hello I Must Be Going
    There are times when the facile flimsiness of Hello I Must Be Going threatens to float right off the screen. But Lynskey has her ways of surprising us, even when nothing in the script itself is doing so.
  71. End of Watch
    The drawback of the film's visual approach, however, is a considerable one. The relentless first-person shooting in End of Watch - figurative and literal - is less about YouTube factuality than it is about Xbox gaming reconfigured for the movies.
  72. Trouble with the Curve
    Wholly predictable yet serenely enjoyable.
  73. The Master
    The Master is brilliantly, wholly itself for a little more than half of its 137 minutes. Then it chases its own tail a bit and settles for being merely a fascinating metaphoric father-son relationship reaching endgame. It may not all "work," but most of it's remarkable.
  74. Arbitrage
    Part "Law & Order" morality play, part "Wall Street" with a dash of the more recent and topically pertinent "Margin Call," Arbitrage hums along, complicating its narrative without tying itself in knots.
  75. Samsara
    Samsara is gorgeous. And sometimes, depending on expectations, looks are enough.
  76. The Words
    It's more or less a grown-up picture, and not bad at that, though its muted and patient style has both its merits and its drawbacks. Still, as I say: not bad.
  77. Sleepwalk with Me
    With a refreshing lack of fake glamour, the film captures what it's like to be an initially unpromising comedian on the road.
  78. Compliance
    The very antonym of "fun," writer-director Craig Zobel's new film Compliance is one of the toughest sits of the movie year 2012. But it's an uncompromising and, in its way, honorable drama built upon a prank call that goes on and on.
  79. For a Good Time, Call...
    Even if the film should be retitled "For a Fairly Good Time, Call ..." at least we're not back on the couch with another variation on the same old group of arrested-development young adult males, hanging on to their adolescence with as much determination as their marijuana intake allows.
  80. Lawless
    This should've been a really good picture, especially with Hillcoat's crack ensemble. Instead it's a stilted battle waged between the material and the interpreters. It's up to you, the thirsty customer, to decide who won.
  81. Red Hook Summer
    It's a scramble, marked by the unruly variety of visual strategies Lee prefers.
  82. Cosmopolis
    I just wish Cronenberg hadn't adapted the book on his own. Behind the camera, he does remarkable things, turning Packer's limo into what Cronenberg himself has described as an upscale version of "Das Boot." But the playlets constituting the whole are thick, stubbornly undramatic affairs; the verbiage is lumpy, self-conscious.
  83. Premium Rush
    Premium Rush is great fun - nimble, quick, the thinking person's mindless entertainment.
  84. Hit and Run
    Hit & Run is pretty rancid as comedy. Worse, the chases are strictly amateur hour, all shortcut editing and no gut satisfaction.
  85. 2 Days in New York
    The comedy works some of the time; the pathos, more so. There's an undertow of grief in 2 Days in New York relating to the passing of Marion's (and Delpy's) mother, who died in 2009.
  86. ParaNorman
    What works about ParaNorman is its subtle interweave of the stoical and the heroic. The voice work is inspired, without a lot of theatrical flourish. The low-key musical score by Jon Brion, one of the year's best, teases out the macabre humor in each new challenge faced by Norman.
  87. Sparkle
    Most of the stuff that's new in the new Sparkle, written by Mara Brock Akil (who is married to the director), is shrewd and cleverly considered. The stuff that's old is what people responded to back in '76.
  88. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    Hedges is a determined romantic and a bit of a saphead. He's also humane.
  89. Searching for Sugar Man
    At 85 minutes, it's a tight, sharp achievement, yet one of the things I love about it is simple: It moves to a relaxed rhythm, in sync with its slightly otherworldly subject.
  90. Celeste and Jesse Forever
    Jones is first-rate (and her fellow writer McCormack is fun as the wild-eyed pot dealer, Skillz). The film has a conventional fake-documentary look, but underneath it is an honest concern about how to learn to treat people well and kindly after the end. Or to get to an ending, or a new beginning, in the first place.
  91. The Campaign
    Because The Campaign tries to say something about truth vs. hogwash in election season, it's doubly sad the efforts of screenwriters Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell come to so little.
  92. The Bourne Legacy
    "The Bourne Identity." "The Bourne Supremacy." "The Bourne Ultimatum." And now, "The Pointless, Confused and Then, For the Last Half-Hour, Exciting Bourne Sequel, After a Fashion," more commonly known as The Bourne Legacy.
  93. Hope Springs
    As Kay and Arnold struggle to reconnect, Hope Springs stays close to the task at hand. The characters aren't fabulously dimensional, but the actors are.
  94. The Queen of Versailles
    An indelible portrait of an American family at its most blithely macabre.
  95. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
    Here and there, in the father/son scenes, you see a glimmer of an honest interaction. All in all, I'd rather watch a "Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide" rerun.
  96. Total Recall (2012)
    The movie marches in predictable formations as well. But when Biel's rebel pulls over in her hover car and asks Farrell if he'd like a ride, your heart may sing as mine did.
  97. A Cat in Paris
    Some of the action (and violence) in A Cat in Paris borders on the jarring, and the slam-bang finale - set atop Notre Dame Cathedral - favors bombast over wit. But getting there is a lot of fun, in part because the animators take time to make Dino a truly charismatic animal.
  98. Red Lights
    The storytelling proceeds in such a halting manner, with De Niro's speeches going on and on and on, that before long you'd kill for an easy scare.
  99. The Watch
    It sticks in the craw. The whole movie does.
  100. Ruby Sparks
    The picture, intelligent but mild, has more of a 10-volt hum than a true spark.
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