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. Paranormal Activity 2
    Demons of mediocrity, be gone! Here we have a shrewd sequel a touch better than the original.
  2. Conviction
    This is an inspirational true story worried less about turning dramatic screws than earning its feeling through character.
  3. Tamara Drewe
    It's easy to watch.
  4. Hereafter
    Morgan and Eastwood are scrupulous in keeping their notions of the afterlife as general and inoffensive as possible. They have no religious or spiritual worldview to sell. As I say: Many admire this film to no end. I found its use of recent tragic events, including the London underground bombing, to be more than a little cheap.
  5. Stone
    Genuinely odd in its mixture of bluntness and indirection, screenwriter Angus MacLachlan's study in biblical temptation is saved from its own heavy-handedness by a fine quartet of actors.
  6. Grizzly II: Revenge (1983)
    It’s a pity Grizzly II: Revenge isn’t giddy-bad, the way Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room” delights so many. But it’s here, it’s seriously disoriented and disorienting.
  7. Rhino Season
    Rhino Season unapologetically favors poetry over prose, layering its images and time frames in elegantly wrought detail. At times the visual landscape feels fussy. [12 Oct 2012, p.C3]
    • Chicago Tribune
  8. RED
    Red starts repeating itself and spinning its wheels and looking for an ending, well before the ending arrives. The actors have considerable fun with it, though.
  9. Jackass 3-D
    It's reductive, insanely violent slapstick, but that's the phenomenon in a nutshell.
  10. Secretariat
    Secretariat isn't bad but it's precisely what you'd expect.
  11. Life as We Know It
    The movie begins with a tragedy and eases into a more interesting blend of drama and comedy than we've gotten in this genre lately.
  12. It's Kind of a Funny Story
    The result is both a success and a disappointment. It's Kind of a Funny Story, divided into neat little daylong chapters in Craig's stay, lacks the staying power and bittersweet layering of "Half Nelson" and "Sugar."
  13. Inside Job
    Matt Damon narrates, and I do wish the narration didn't end on such a generalized, throw-the-bums-out note, over footage of the Statue of Liberty.
  14. The Social Network
    Is director David Fincher's film the stuff of greatness? Not quite. But the picture is very, very good.
  15. Let Me In
    The original was a very good thriller. The new one is simply a good one.
  16. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    Has its satisfactions, thanks mainly to a cast skillful enough to finesse what is effectively two films sharing the same screen.
  17. Buried
    This exercise in racked nerves makes most of the year's thrillers look like flailing maniacs by comparison.
  18. Enter the Void
    As pure, outlandish outlaw cinema it's undeniable.
  19. Howl
    It's well-crafted, but I wish the film showed us an additional dimension or two of the central figure, who once said the great challenge in writing, any kind of writing, is "to write the same way you are."
  20. The Town
    I love Pete Postlethwaite as a rule, but here - as a murderous florist who pulls all the strings - he overacts his key scene so badly it's as if he did it on a dare. Also, Jon Hamm may rule on "Mad Men," but here he's stuck as a rather dimwitted FBI agent who's two beats behind the action, always.
  21. Catfish
    Catfish is fascinating. At the same time, it emits a condescending, pitying odor.
  22. Never Let Me Go
    The film is a success. It works. Greatness eludes it, yes. But greatness eludes almost every film adaptation of a major novel, which we must remember when confronted by a good one.
  23. I'm Still Here
    Rarely has the question of a documentary's artifice mattered less. I genuinely hated this picture, almost as much as I've admired Phoenix's work in everything from "Gladiator" to "Walk the Line" and even the hackneyed but affecting "Two Lovers."
  24. Legendary
    Legendary is so intent on paying heartfelt tribute to dogged young athletes that it neglects basic story needs.
  25. Machete
    It's outlandishly gory and bluntly political, the latter being more interesting than the former. It wears out its welcome, though, long before la revolucion and sequels are promised.
  26. Going the Distance
    I liked the movie mainly for Barrymore. The way she handles the crucial, early "I love you" moment (he's saying it to her, and the camera shows us what she's thinking), you think: This is one canny actress.
  27. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
    The exhausting slapstick violence is the film's chief variation, and it's no fun at all.
  28. The American
    The movie is a paradox. It's ostentatiously restrained. You cannot say Corbijn lacks rigor. You can, however, say that when a talented director's approach too precisely mirrors the tightly calibrated performance strategy of his leading player, a movie risks stalling out completely.
  29. Mesrine: Killer Instinct
    So what is it? Primarily it's a showcase for Vincent Cassel, who dines out on the role and won a Cesar award (the Gallic Oscar) for his efforts.
  30. Takers
    Noisy, unsubtle, but it gets the job done.
  31. The Switch
    Around the halfway point it starts getting interesting and the people who put it together are at least working in a realm of reasonable intelligence and wit and respect for the audience.
  32. Lottery Ticket
    This movie's good. It's fast, deftly paced and funny.
  33. Nanny McPhee Returns
    Too much of the contrasting comedy in Nanny McPhee Returns is shrill, laden with routine computer-generated effects and pounded into dust by James Newton Howard's shut-up-already musical score.
  34. Mao's Last Dancer
    A dramatic true story has been made into a diffident biopic.
  35. The Tillman Story
    It is enraging yet nuanced, an elusive combination for any documentary.
  36. Soul Kitchen
    The funky, enjoyable Hamburg-set comedy Soul Kitchen is a celebration of co-writer-director Fatih Akin's home base, a spacious, moody city of apparently limitless industrial warehouse space - like Chicago.
  37. Eat Pray Love
    The very elements of Eat Pray Love that helped make it a success in 40 languages -- the breezy prose, the relentless sorting-through of dissatisfactions, a steady stream of intriguing sights -- turn the film into a travelogue with a little spiritual questing on the side.
  38. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    At its best, Wright's film is raucous, impudent entertainment.
  39. The Expendables
    At one point Rourke delivers a monologue about his time in Bosnia, and the conviction the actor brings to the occasion throws the movie completely out of whack. What's actual acting doing in a movie like this?
  40. The Other Guys
    For a good hour, this is the picture Kevin Smith was trying to make with "Cop Out."
  41. Step Up 3-D
    It boasts a generous exuberance and, as entertainment products go, it's surprisingly sweet.
  42. Middle Men
    Who would have believed a film with this much skin and reckless, life-threatening excess could end up a rather dull muddle?
  43. Flipped
    The story should have made for charming results on screen. Instead - and I truly don't enjoy saying so - co-adapter and director Rob Reiner's picture lands somewhere between synthetic nostalgia and the texture of real life.
  44. Lebanon
    It's an uncompromising drama, not easy to watch. And it is one of the year's highlights.
  45. Dinner for Schmucks
    A remake for schlemiels, or at least easy marks when it comes to formulaic Hollywood comedy. But the film's peculiar sluggishness and nagging hypocrisy probably won't get in the way of its popularity.
  46. Charlie St. Cloud
    Director Burr Steers milks them dry, like an overeager farmer at milking time, which is a paradox since this is the wettest picture of 2010, what with the sea spray and Efron's tear ducts and the general metaphysical mist.
  47. Get Low
    This film, calm but full of feeling, relays an intriguing story brought to life by some beautiful actors.
  48. The Extra Man
    Some actors are dinner. Kevin Kline is dessert, and his comic brio saves the film version of The Extra Man from its limitations.
  49. Ramona and Beezus
    For the record: Josh Duhamel brings some welcome exuberance to the role of the goofball suitor, Hobart. Like Oh, he's fun to watch. This is something never to be underestimated
  50. Salt
    Like the "Bourne" franchise to which Noyce's film is indebted, Salt is a combination of pursuit, evasion, name-clearing and a reversal or two.
  51. 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.
  52. Countdown to Zero
    Like Charles Ferguson's excellent Iraq documentary "No End in Sight," "Countdown to Zero" has an agenda but has the cogent, reasoned rhetoric to support it.
  53. 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.
  54. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    The CGI is relentless and what you might call reverse-magical: The more we're hit with stuff, the less wondrous it becomes.
  55. Despicable Me
    Is the movie itself good? Half-good, I'd say - the second, more openly sentimental half.
  56. Predators
    Predators, plural, starts well and ends poorly, and in the middle it's in the middle.
  57. The Kids Are All Right
    "All right" doesn't begin to describe it. The Kids Are All Right is wonderful. Here is a film that respects and enjoys all of its characters, the give-and-take and recklessness and wisdom of any functioning family unit, conventional or un-.
  58. The Girl Who Played with Fire
    The second film lingers less determinedly on the degradation of Lisbeth and concentrates more on moving the narrative furniture around. The relationship between the main characters is the glue holding the balsa wood together.
  59. The Last Airbender
    The Last Airbender (they couldn't use the series' "Avatar" title because another film got there first, without all the bending) is more about marshaling extras and interpolating tons of computer-generated effects and keeping the factions straight. It's a tough sit.
  60. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    More happens in Eclipse than in the previous "Twilight" zone, "New Moon," and yet it's duller
  61. Love Ranch
    What could have been a juicy, pulpy noir, based loosely on the real-life 1976 Mustang Ranch love triangle involving Joe and Sally Conforte and Sally's boxer paramour, instead has the dramatic consistency of rice milk.
  62. Grown Ups
    The only people humiliated, really, are older people and heavy people and nerds and vegans and black people and mothers who breast-feed their 4-year-olds. Everybody else gets a pass.
  63. Restrepo
    The film is unusually free of cant and the usual trappings of war docs. There is no voice-over narration and very little dramatic underscoring. Right or wrong, the filmmakers shave matters of political policy and contextual analysis clean off the finished product, which runs a tight 94 minutes.
  64. Wild Grass
    It is craftsmanship incarnate and the embodiment of tonal unpredictability.
  65. Knight and Day
    Knight and Day may well suffice for audiences desperate for the bankable paradox known as the predictable surprise, and willing to overlook a galumphing mediocrity in order to concentrate on matters of dentistry.
  66. Toy Story 3
    Though uneven and less witty than the first two, Toy Story 3 delivers quite enough in two dimensions.
  67. Jonah Hex
    Here's how you know Josh Brolin has become a movie star: Jonah Hex may not be much with him, but without him? Perish the thought. Perish it, throw an ax in its heart, then burn it to a crisp.
  68. Cyrus
    Amuses and unnerves in equal measure.
  69. I Am Love
    I Am Love makes no apologies for its style. None needed: The film, a two-hour swoon, is a cry for romantic freedom, perched on the edge of self-parody, as all good melodramas are.
  70. Let It Rain
    The interview sessions are all disastrous in one way or another; Let It Rain is at its wittiest when Michel flails around, grousing about his own divorce and child custody troubles without ever quite asking his interview subject an actual question
  71. The Karate Kid
    Jackie Chan co-stars in Morita's old role of the humble maintenance man who coaches the Bullied One. The older Chan gets, the simpler and truer he becomes as a performer.
  72. The A-Team
    Until a leaden third act, it IS reasonably entertaining.
  73. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
    A gripping documentary.
  74. Winter's Bone
    The way Lawrence captures a young woman's fear and resolve, often non-verbally, well … this is a considerable talent well on her way to a great career. It's for performances like this that moviegoers find themselves taking a chance on a title that doesn't have a fast-food tie-in.
  75. Splice
    The sexual component to Splice pushes the story in provocatively eerie directions.
  76. Get Him to the Greek
    Extremely raunchy, Get Him to the Greek is also very funny
  77. Killers
    Haven't we seen the oh-my-gosh-my-spouse-is-secretly-an-assassin-but-you-know-a-nice-one routine once too often?
  78. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
    It's sort of fun, certainly more so than the "National Treasure" pictures, as well as less manic (a little less) than the recent "Mummy" films.
  79. Micmacs
    For me, the mechanics or even the (excellent) designs are not enough. Jeunet's archness keeps conventional empathy or engagement at bay, and by design maintains a tone of artificiality.
  80. Agora
    Agora has everything except real drama.
  81. Sex and the City 2
    I enjoyed these characters more when they were rich, rather than obscenely rich, when their self-involvement and life crises had one foot on planet Earth -- and when they weren't all gussied up like Mae West in "Sextette."
  82. Solitary Man
    Still, it's a pleasant surprise about an unpleasant guy brought to life by an ingratiating paradox, a movie star who has turned into a wily character man.
  83. Robin Hood
    What strikes me about the new Robin Hood, directed by Ridley Scott, is how its preoccupations and sensibilities lie almost precisely halfway between the derring-do of the 1938 film and the harsh revisionism of the '70s edition
  84. Letters to Juliet
    She delivers a solid and easy star performance. Some young performers lack a relatable quality; Seyfried has it, even with those old-school, big-screen peepers.
  85. Just Wright
    The reason Just Wright works is simple. It finds ways to let familiar characters move around inside a familiar premise like living, breathing, likable human beings.
  86. Looking for Eric
    From director Ken Loach, England's longtime disciple of social realism, comes his most audience-friendly picture yet
  87. 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.
  88. Iron Man 2
    A movie like this can handle a large character roster, but it helps if the story retains clean lines and a sense of propulsion. Iron Man 2 sags and wanders in its midsection
  89. Babies
    But by not "saying" ANYTHING about the lives behind all the lovely, easygoing footage of infants making their way to their first steps and beyond, Babies feels a tad dodgy (and repetitive) by the hour mark.
  90. Mother and Child
    Garcia's calm, steady guidance behind the camera, along with his nicely finessed faith in a very good cast, makes Mother and Child a fuller and more satisfying example of this storytelling style than we've seen lately.
  91. A Nightmare on Elm Street
    By today's standards, it is only medium-bloody, though it's more than usually grim, its young protagonists sullen enough to qualify for the "Twilight" movies. Yet it affords precious little sadistic pleasure, partly because it "dares" to lay out more directly the pedophiliac demons plaguing Freddy the serial killer.
  92. The Good Heart
    As robust and clever an actor as Cox is, he can't make Jacques any less of a blowhard; Kari's wit simply doesn't come through in English, at least with this script.
  93. Harry Brown
    The tragedy is that the performance comes to nothing. Nearly everything else in the film is vile.
  94. Anton Chekhov's The Duel
    It takes something like a miracle to unlock the magic in his exquisite aggravations, the essence of the human comedy. This film is indeed something like a miracle.
  95. The Losers
    The movie is ALL revenge, all the time
  96. The Back-up Plan
    A weak romantic comedy.
  97. Kick-Ass
    It may well be a hit, but me, I'm waiting for "Iron Man 2."
  98. Death at a Funeral
    Gets by for many of the same reasons "Date Night" got by, all of them performance-related.
  99. Exit Through the Gift Shop
    The brilliantly untrustworthy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop reminds us that a film can start out in one direction and then change course so radically, it becomes an act of provocation unto itself.
  100. The Joneses
    Duchovny and Moore have their moments; they're like two preening sharks working on commission.
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