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. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    Certainly Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creations have suffered permanent damage thanks to Ritchie's films.
  2. Young Goethe in Love
    Young Goethe in Love wants only to engage an audience with a capital-R Romantic ideal of Goethe's first love. It does so very well. And it was well worth the effort.
  3. Young Adult
    Cody would likely acknowledge she's working through her own contradictory feelings toward her protagonist - and that she may have been a draft or two away from shaping those feelings into a terrific black comedy, rather than a pretty interesting one.
  4. New Year's Eve
    I always enjoy Elizondo; he has a way of elevating some pretty lame banter, and thanks to New Year's Eve he has his way all over again.
  5. The Sitter
    I hope Green one day finds a way to bridge the style and rhythm of his early pictures (the ones that didn't make money) and the bumper-car approach of The Sitter.
  6. Tyrannosaur
    The result is a picture that is baldly manipulative yet weirdly sentimental, and while Considine (a fine actor) can write, he is capable also of writing dialogue you've heard before.
  7. Shame
    There is a good movie to be made about someone like Brandon, especially with someone like Fassbender, a performer of exceptional technical facility and a fascinating sense of reserve. McQueen's isn't quite it.
  8. Arthur Christmas
    A tender and upbeat spirit informs the writing and the execution.
  9. Hugo
    Rich and stimulating even when it wanders.
  10. My Week with Marilyn
    Such stalwarts as Judi Dench, Julia Ormond, Toby Jones and Dominic Cooper spice things up as characters of various degrees of familiarity.
  11. The Muppets
    At its best, though, The Muppets cuts back on the '80s-flashback self-consciousness and believes in the dream.
  12. Happy Feet Two
    The sequel's themes of friendship and interdependency fail to generate much momentum.
  13. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    Reveals a flash or two of real filmmaking (mostly in a suggestively grotesque birthing sequence), enough to save it from pure lousiness.
  14. The Descendants
    It's one of the year's most pleasurable American movies.
  15. Jack and Jill
    It's not much to hijack. But playing a lovelorn version of himself, in love with Adam Sandler in a dress, a lisp and breasts, Al Pacino holds a gun to the head of the comedy Jack and Jill and says: I now pronounce you mine.
  16. Melancholia
    Much of Melancholia plays, effectively, like a slice of late 20th century Dogme-style realism, in the vein of the film "Celebration" by von Trier's fellow Dane, Thomas Vinterberg.
  17. Into the Abyss
    The film is a river of pain, weirdly funny in places, as are all of Herzog's filmic essays.
  18. J. Edgar
    I like the way DiCaprio and Hammer capture the little things - the byplay, the moments in which two men are "playing" FBI agents, partly for show, partly for real. At times, DiCaprio's macho posturing recalls a junior G-man version of Marlon Brando's self-hating homosexual in "Reflections of a Golden Eye."
  19. Le Havre
    Does Kaurismaki believe in his own fairy tale? The movie, a humble delight, suggests the answer is yes.
  20. Like Crazy
    It's entirely possible, maybe even inevitable, that Like Crazy will win over a good many moviegoers despite its bouts of semipreciousness. In the end, I was one of them.
  21. Tower Heist
    For what it is - recessionary wish-fulfillment escapism, with a lot of highly skilled familiar faces in its amply qualified cast - it's fun.
  22. A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
    The first "H&K" caught people off-guard with its canny idiocy and zigzagging, picaresque treasure hunt premise. By now, there's no catching anyone off-guard with these two, except by way of the most off-color and off-putting means possible.
  23. In Time
    I like a lot of the film despite its drawbacks; its violence isn't rote or numbing, and there's a simplicity and elegance to the digital-countdown effect.
  24. Anonymous
    Anonymous is ridiculous, and like Oliver Stone's "JFK" it sells its political conspiracy theories by weight and by volume. But dull, it's not.
  25. The Rum Diary
    There isn't a sophisticated or "adult" perspective to be found in The Rum Diary.
  26. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    The acting in Durkin's feature is excellent. Olsen is utilized largely as an object for camera adoration, but not in the usual glamorizing way. Olsen, Hawkes and company play slippery figures with lovely assurance.
  27. The Three Musketeers
    This latest version is le pits.
  28. The Mighty Macs
    The film doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is: a story of one woman overcoming low expectations. Gugino and Burstyn and the young performers playing the young players do likewise.
  29. The Skin I Live In
    The film is an exercise in improbable contrasts. The more extreme the actions of the characters, the more contained and fastidious the director's technique.
  30. Margin Call
    On the facile side, but it's well-crafted and smartly acted.
  31. Paranormal Activity 3
    The films are not works of genius. They are, however, wily reminders of the virtues of restraint when you're out for a scare.
  32. Footloose
    The result is a film that feels hidebound. And nobody ever called a dance-driven movie "hidebound."
  33. The Big Year
    This is a gentle, diffident concoction. But it has barely enough pulse to power a hummingbird.
  34. The Thing
    While I wish van Heijningen's Thing weren't quite so in lust with the '82 model, it works because it respects that basic premise. And it exhibits a little patience, doling out its ickiest, nastiest moments in ways that make them stick.
  35. Take Shelter
    Here's what I most appreciate about Shannon's work with the writer-director Jeff Nichols: the subtlety.
  36. The Way
    Here and there, the actor invests the kind of feeling that makes The Way come alive in human terms.
  37. Real Steel
    I suspect a lot of what I found synthetic and sort of galling in Real Steel will work just fine with the target audience.
  38. The Ides of March
    I would see The Ides of March again just for the way Jeffrey Wright takes command of the screen in the secondary role of a senator who is either a cipher, a sphinx, a two-faced sphinx, a lying sack of D.C. dung or a steely man of principle.
  39. Machine Gun Preacher
    The events of the movie may be a little bit true, or a lot, but hardly any of it plays that way.
  40. What's Your Number?
    Dumb film; smart comedienne.
  41. 50/50
    Some of it's schematic and on the nose. But the grace notes are what make 50/50 better than simply "good enough."
  42. Love Crime
    Scott Thomas can play these sorts of ice queens in her sleep, but I've long thought she's a more effective and nuanced performer in French-language projects than in English-language ones. The performance is laced with just enough wit to make it sting.
  43. Dolphin Tale
    The best of Dolphin Tale takes it easy. Led by Connick and Judd, plus the crucially empathetic Gamble and Zuehlsdorff, the cast includes Kris Kristofferson as the seafaring old salt of a grandpa. The acting has a nice, low-pressure vibe, in contrast to the film's high-pressure peril.
  44. Killer Elite
    The script is a mess. It's an object lesson in taking a nonfiction book ("The Feather Men," about a cadre of ex-British Special Air Service operatives) and making a hash of it.
  45. Moneyball
    Moneyball is the perfect sports movie for these cash-strapped times of efficiency maximization.
  46. Mysteries of Lisbon
    It's a lot. But if you're at all inclined, it's just right.
  47. Bellflower
    A rewardingly twisted hybrid of low-fi mumblecore and stylized thriller.
  48. Straw Dogs
    It's miscast, barely functional in terms of technique, stupid and unnecessary. Other than that….
  49. I Don't Know How She Does It
    Doesn't know how to do what I think it's trying to do.
  50. Drive
    Drive begins extremely well and ends in a muddle of ultraviolence, hypocrisy and stylistic preening, which won't be any sort of deterrent for those who like its looks.
  51. Circumstance
    The film wages an internal battle between its ripely sensual atmosphere and its often stilted pacing and plotting.
  52. Contagion
    He's the anti-Michael Bay, the un-Roland Emmerich. No fake-documentary "realism" here; Soderbergh values the silence before the storm, or a hushed two-person encounter in which one or both parties are concealing something.
  53. Warrior
    Every time you start resisting, somehow the film makes the sale, again.
  54. Apollo 18
    Many will find Apollo 18 silly and derivative. It is. Yet it's also a break from the usual hyperbolic, down-your-throat brand of silly and derivative scare movies.
  55. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy isn't just not funny, it's totally just not funny.
  56. Higher Ground
    Farmiga's film doesn't state things directly, but we sense what is happening to Corinne, and how some turn to fundamentalism for complex and interconnected reasons.
  57. The Debt
    Director Madden vacillates between treating the issues and historical context of The Debt seriously, and as the story demands, as pure, heavy-handed pulp. The cast does what it can in the service of this assignment. But some jobs simply resist satisfying completion.
  58. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    Both the man and his times resist a compact 93 minutes. This much anguished history, and Aleichem's inspired literary response to that history, has difficulties being confined to conventional documentary feature length. Yet Dorman's touch is sure, his pacing fleet and his chorus of voices marvelous.
  59. Brighton Rock
    Although Joffe appears to be making a Brighton version of the seductively natty evil we find stateside in "Boardwalk Empire," this Brighton Rock remains muffled, half-formed pulp fiction.
  60. Our Idiot Brother
    It's sweet, and low-key. It's very '70s in its vibe, which helps when the script veers in and out of formula.
  61. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    To my taste there's too much of everything. The soundtrack never shuts up with the wind, the murmurings, the shudderings. And while director Nixey has talent, his indiscriminately roving camera tends to diffuse the tension, not heighten it.
  62. Senna
    The film is a remarkable experience on a purely sensory level, and the best of its archival footage - on the track, in private meetings with drivers before the races, from the white-knuckle, over-the-shoulder perspective of Senna himself - is pure gold.
  63. Conan the Barbarian
    It's mostly noise and splurch and, as I mentioned, aaaaarrrrggggghhhhh!
  64. Fright Night
    Plenty gory, but graced by a jovial sense of humor and an enjoyably guts-centric use of 3-D.
  65. One Day
    What proved tasty in book form comes across a little more like work in the movie.
  66. 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.
  67. Final Destination 5
    If more of the picture had the inventively grotesque payoff of the scene set at the gymnastics tryout, capped by a female character's inarguably poor dismount, we might have something to puke home about.
  68. 30 Minutes or Less
    The movie ends up being just sharp enough at its peaks to be frustrating in its valleys. But the laughs are there.
  69. The Help
    Davis is reason No. 1 the film extracted from Kathryn Stockett's 2009 best-seller improves on its source material.
  70. The Guard
    Part Joel & Ethan Coen and part John Millington Synge, this grotty little fairy tale casts a deft line and reels you in. I'd see it again just to hear the drug smugglers argue over the use of the Americanism "good to go."
  71. The Future
    This sense of unruly behavior is mitigated, deliberately, by the gentleness and odd comic grace of July's presence and voice.
  72. The Change-Up
    Some comedies have the knack for affrontery and shock value; The Change-Up, written by the "Hangover" team of Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, merely has the will to offend.
  73. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    While it's effects-heavy, the movie itself does not feel heavy. Consider it a fanciful extension of the recent and very fine documentary "Project Nim."
  74. Crazy, Stupid, Love
    This is the "Babel" or "Crash" of ensemble romantic comedies, with screenwriter Dan Fogelman mapping out several narrative surprises that throw you for little loops as they're delivered.
  75. Cowboys & Aliens
    The component genre parts coexist, excitingly, without veering into camp or facetious desperation. Alien-invasion aficionados should be pleased. Western nostalgists may be pleasantly surprised. Fans of cowboys-versus-aliens movies, well, it's been a long wait and here's your movie.
  76. A Little Help
    A Little Help settles for familiar and modest payoffs. It's not much. Yet Fischer clearly relishes the chance to play someone who's a demurely reckless mess.
  77. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
    The gentle erotic undertow in the friendship of Snow Flower and Lily has been toned down, and replaced by … niceness.
  78. Terri
    Wysocki is a genuine talent, as is Jacobs, but the subject of Terri remains a pleasant blur.
  79. Captain America: The First Avenger
    The most stylish comics-derived entertainment of the year...It's paced and designed for people who won't shrivel up and die if two or three characters take 45 seconds between combat sequences to have a conversation about world domination, or a dame.
  80. Friends with Benefits
    I enjoy both Timberlake and Kunis; just this side of manic, they seem right together.
  81. Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
    The best material, however, keeps returning to the unstable power dynamic between Q-Tip and Dawg.
  82. 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.
  83. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    It's virtually non-stop action, though director David Yates, who has taken good care of these final four, ever-meaner Potter adventures, does a very crafty thing, following adapter Steve Kloves' screenplay.
  84. Project Nim
    Project Nim is practically irresistible. The story keeps getting odder and richer and more complicated.
  85. Horrible Bosses
    Cleverly structured, Horrible Bosses works in spite of its cruder, scrotum-centric instincts.
  86. Monte Carlo
    Unlike a few other well-drilled young actress-singers we could name, such as the one whose name rhymes with "Riley Myrus," Gomez knows how to relax on camera.
  87. Larry Crowne
    It's the neediest movie of 2011, and one of the phoniest.
  88. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    A work of ineffable soullessness and persistent moral idiocy.
  89. Bad Teacher
    Timberlake is not afraid to make himself look like an idiot. He is, in fact, already the comic actor Diaz may yet become: a looker who knows how to use his looks to get away with murder.
  90. Cars 2
    Lasseter's sequel smooshes the vehicular ensemble of the first "Cars" into a nefarious James Bond universe, heavy on the missiles and ray guns and Gatling guns and electrocutions. Sound peculiar? It is peculiar.
  91. Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
    Maybe this review is more about me than about Conan O'Brien, but I really couldn't get past the odor of self-congratulation emanating from nearly every scene in Conan O'Brien Can't Stop.
  92. The Trip
    The Trip isn't much, but it's more than enough.
  93. Green Lantern
    Green just isn't the superhero color this year.
  94. Mr. Popper's Penguins
    For some reason I was under the impression Jim Carrey already made his penguin movie. Doesn't it seem like it?
  95. The Art of Getting By
    The glibness of Wiesen's freshman effort wouldn't be a problem if the wit was there.
  96. Film Socialisme
    Those receptive to Godard's sense of humor will find Film Socialisme an elusive yet expansive provocation. Those less receptive will find it elusive, period.
  97. Beautiful Boy
    If the key performances in Beautiful Boy were any less honest, the film's half-formed suppositions would undo it utterly.
  98. Submarine
    Isn't merely joke-funny. It's texture-funny.
  99. Beginners
    Just cute enough for some tastes, too cute by half for others.
  100. Super 8
    Abrams knits together the ordinary stories of the mill town's inhabitants in a way that feels dramatic without showing their contrivances too obviously. And his casting of Courtney and Fanning was fortuitous, though Abrams' banter for the supporting kids grows tiresome in that "Goonies" way.
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