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. Valentino: The Last Emperor
    The filmmaker's access was impressive, the results moderately entertaining.
  2. The Last House on the Left
    Hinges on humiliation and vengeance, which makes it like most other modern horror titles. Its focus on sexual assault, however, puts it in a different, more primal league.
  3. Race to Witch Mountain
    The action beats are so relentless, no sooner does one chase end than another begins.
  4. Sunshine Cleaning
    The director, New Zealander Christine Jeffs ("Sylvia"), loosens the plotting as best she can, letting the interactions breathe. Her work, and the film, is strictly about the performers.
  5. Brothers at War
    Made with the full cooperation of the Pentagon, Brothers at War makes the war on-screen seem eminently winnable, eminently noble. Rademacher's desire to prove himself to himself, and to his soldier brothers, may stir different reactions among different audience members. And that's as it should be.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Cake Eaters
    In her first feature film, Masterson creates a slice of life that is very believable (especially if you've ever seen "The Jerry Springer Show") and often endearing.
  7. Tokyo Sonata
    Each performance in this plaintive work is superb, but Kyoko Koizumi's gently melancholy portrait of the businessman's wife keeps Tokyo Sonata true and affecting, even when the later passages go a little nuts.
  8. Watchmen
    The appeal of the film version, such as it is, relates almost entirely to eye-for-an-eye, severed-limb-for-a-limb vengeance, two hours and 41 minutes of it, with just enough solemnity to make anyone who thought "The Dark Knight" was a little gassy think twice about which superhero myth THEY'RE calling gassy.
  9. Everlasting Moments
    There is a good deal of honest charm in this story, and in the three principal performances.
  10. Crossing Over
    The movie expresses honest concern for the plight of so many newcomers to America, legal or illegal. What it lacks is moment-to-moment credibility.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience
    The film is awkwardly stitched together from candy-gloss arena concert footage and somewhat grimier-looking backstage/limo/hotel room moments. There is no attempt to make it all hang together as an organic whole.
  12. Fired Up!
    I didn't half-mind Fired Up, but half a mind is more than it deserves.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Madea Goes to Jail
    If the movie is a mess, it's a purposeful mess, cannily, if not artfully, pushing all the right buttons to ensure Perry will be back for another round.
  14. Katyn
    Katyn will not join Wajda's list of masterworks. In its final flashback, however, when we're taken back to the forest and the details of what really happened, we see what we must see, the clear-eyed way we should see it.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Friday the 13th
    This new Friday the 13th, unquestionably savvier and snappier than the original "Friday the 13th," though just as useless, is a needed return to simplicity.
  16. Gomorrah
    The characters in Gomorrah may lack an extra dramatic dimension: Garrone errs, if anything, on the side of detachment. Yet that detachment is also the key to the film's success. There's so little hooey and melodramatic head-banging here.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Two Lovers
    A small, delicate concoction of moods and moments, far quieter than all the current Phoenix-related hoopla. But his heartbreaking performance may incline audiences to think of him in a new light, or at least return to thinking of him in the old one.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Under the Sea 3D
    In addition to the romantic music for the cuttlefish courtship, the several musical selections are a step above the usual IMAX fare.
  19. Coraline
    It pulls audiences into a meticulously detailed universe, familiar in many respects, wacked and menacing in many others.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    He's Just Not That Into You
    Some of the players comport themselves better than others--Barrymore is sweetly wistful in her minor role, while Johansson, as a confident go-getter who sets out to steal her crush object rather than moon over him, is sexier than the whole cast put together.
  21. The Pink Panther 2
    Nothing is harder and more elusive than successful slapstick onscreen. Nothing.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Push
    Director Paul McGuigan ("Lucky Number Slevin") has never been keen on plot logic, and that might be fine here if he offered anything other than Peter Sova's lush images of Hong Kong.
  23. Fanboys
    A genial, sloppy, minor affair, offering a smidgen of inside baseball, which includes a gag at the expense of the forgotten, late '80s Lucas-produced epic "Willow."
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Confessions of a Shopaholic
    A thin, largely unfunny comedy that marries lazy filmmaking with bad timing.
  25. The International
    While its globe-trotting itinerary recalls the mad whirl of a "Bourne" picture, nothing about this film's style resembles the second or third "Bourne" outings (which I loved).
  26. The Uninvited
    The actors are strong, however, and Banks in particular shows some skill and wiles in keeping her rascally stepmother stereotype lively.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Taken
    There is no mythology, no irony, no real soul--just a Charles Bronson simplicity about the whole affair.
  28. New in Town
    New in Town is "The Pajama Game" without the songs, the laughs or the bare-knuckled realism.
  29. Service (Serbis)
    The theater building is a four-story monster, and by the end of the picture we know it very well, in all its broken-down glory.
  30. Outlander
    The nuttiest hunk of junk in many months.
  31. Inkheart
    A fine ensemble, some gorgeous Italian Riviera locales, intermittent flashes of magic amid a more manufactured air of whimsy.
  32. Chandni Chowk to China
    A massive and rather tiring showcase for Bollywood action hero Akshay Kumar.
  33. Hotel for Dogs
    Not bad, not great, a little less pushy and grating than the usual.
  34. Bride Wars
    Bride Wars really does not capture the mood of the moment. It comes from a different time, a different planet.
  35. Not Easily Broken
    The film is likable. Its messages, many of them Lord-oriented, are all equally heartfelt.
  36. The Unborn
    This material is offensive. The film may end with a straight-faced reassurance that "no actual Torah scrolls were destroyed or damaged in the making of this motion picture," but it's perfectly willing to exploit the Holocaust for cheap, weak thrills.
  37. Just Another Love Story
    A preposterous but beautifully polished Danish thriller.
  38. Silent Light
    Even with its limitations, I find Silent Light spellbinding.
  39. Defiance
    The film should've aimed higher, given all that these people endured to have their story told.
  40. Revolutionary Road
    However sterling the craftsmanship, the film adaptation inflates the meaning and buffs the atmospheric surfaces of Yates' story, rather than digging into its guts.
  41. The Spirit
    Only Sarah Paulson, as the Spirit's doctor and sometime lover, seems to be in there playing the scenes as if she were a human being in a comic book superhero scenario, as opposed to a comic book character stuck in a cruddy movie.
  42. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    Yet it's worth seeing because the sights are truly something. Claudio Miranda's pearly cinematography, Donald Graham Burt's luscious production design, the visual effects supervised by Eric Barba--everything blends, and none of the seams show.
  43. Bedtime Stories
    Clean enough to fly the Walt Disney Pictures flag, yet it's full of bimbos and cleavage and shots of Adam Sandler getting kicked in the shins by a dwarf.
  44. Last Chance Harvey
    Last Chance Harvey is what it is: a pleasant put-up job, held up by world-class pros.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Marley & Me
    And then there's Alan Arkin, who, as John's editor, is hilarious and dry--it's frankly a shame he's not onscreen for every single scene.
  46. Valkyrie
    It's a procedural, often absorbing, rarely surprising, about a briefcase bomb and a near-miss. Yet there's no question the film feels dodgy and vague when it comes to the personalities and ideology of the men onscreen.
  47. Waltz with Bashir
    It is personal filmmaking of the highest order, recognized with an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film.
  48. The Secret of the Grain
    For me, it's a sign that a filmmaker is on to something if you love hanging out with the characters as they eat and drink and talk and reveal little bits of themselves through everyday action.
  49. The Tale of Despereaux
    I admired the craft more than I loved the results. But The Tales of Despereaux is still better-than-average animation.
  50. Yes Man
    Starts out wobbly but ends up quite nicely, primarily because Carrey has a wonderful acting partner in Zooey Deschanel.
  51. The Class
    This is one of the screen's most rewarding explorations of the teacher/student relationship in any language.
  52. Seven Pounds
    Seven Pounds has a heart as big as all outdoors. Unfortunately it's made out of high-fructose bull.
  53. The Wrestler
    The Wrestler works for the same reason "Rachel Getting Married" works. The way they're acted, shot, edited and scored, both films deploy a loose, rough-hewn documentary style to great dramatic advantage. The corn isn't hyped. The performances click without going for the jugular.
  54. Timecrimes
    Timecrimes doesn't end as well as it begins. Then again, writer-director Nacho Vigalondo deliberately fudges the beginning and endpoints of his premise, which involves one of those nutty causal loops so dear to writers and consumers of science fiction.
  55. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    Keanu Reeves plays Klaatu, confining his usual two-and-a-half-note vocal range to half that.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Dark Streets
    Dark Streets lost me early, real early, like still-adjusting-my-eyes-in-a-dark-theater early.
  57. Doubt
    While Streep has a tiny bit too much fun with some of her character's excesses, she's awfully good. So is Hoffman, who walks a fine line between obvious guilt and possible innocence.
  58. Gran Torino
    Eastwood's foursquare directorial aesthetic tends to heighten, rather than camouflage, a screenplay's shortcomings.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Nothing Like the Holidays
    It's what we need at the holidays, and it's the modest goal of a modest little picture like this--to capture something heartfelt and real.
  60. Che
    Che is Soderbergh's most interesting film in years, defiantly eccentric and absorbing at its best.
  61. The Reader
    Can a formidable actress redeem a pile of solemn erotic kitsch? Kate Winslet answers that one as honestly as she can in the film version of Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel "The Reader."
  62. Wendy and Lucy
    If a Warner Bros. social-protest film from the early 1930s somehow got into bed with an American indie from the 1970s, how would the love-child turn out? Like this.
  63. Frost/Nixon
    Frost/Nixon is wholly absorbing.
  64. The Black Balloon
    At its sharpest Elissa Down's feature directorial debut is guided by intense, rough-edged emotional swings that feel authentically alive, even when the script settles for tidiness.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Cadillac Records
    Mos Def makes a terrific Berry, all flash and confidence, and Wright offers a memorably soulful take on Waters, whether he's strutting, singing, suffering or all three. Walker's Howlin' Wolf is a deep-throated, pride-filled bear of a man who dominates the screen.
  66. Hunger
    It's a strength of this carefully composed, almost obsessively controlled picture that it has no interest in the conventional biographical focus on a subject.
  67. Nobel Son
    I enjoyed Eliza Dushku's mad poetess, probably for the wrong reasons, but with a project this meager, you take your artful sneers and scenic diversions where you can get them.
  68. Punisher: War Zone
    The film works a bit better than the 2004 "Punisher" installment, the one starring surly, dislikable Thomas Jane as Frank Castle.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Transporter 3
    The best sequences involve Frank's inventive ability to stay within 75 feet of his car, but otherwise, it's the charismatic unruffled dexterity in the face of impossible odds that rivets.
  70. Four Christmases
    As Vaughn's therapist mother, Sissy Spacek comes off best. But she's a rare bird of whom it truly can be said: She's always good. No matter how grim the material.
  71. Milk
    The story of Harvey Milk is a tragedy, but not since Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" has Sean Penn played such a serenely happy individual.
  72. Bolt
    It's a seriously withholding action comedy, stingy on the wit, charm, jokes, narrative satisfactions and animals with personalities sharp enough for the big screen, either in 2-D or 3-D.
  73. Twilight
    The superfast running effects, with Edward dashing up mountains, or rival, evil vampires swooping here and there at amazing speed, look genuinely cheesy, like the guy running the race in the smart-phone ad. I'm surprised Hardwicke and her colleagues couldn't solve this one more effectively. Set pieces such as a vampire baseball game fall flat as well.
  74. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
    The film isn't much as cinema, but it doesn't really matter. The final half-hour, in particular, generates the sort of suspense you rarely get in a sports documentary.
  75. Australia
    At times the film appears on the verge of morphing into a singing-cowboy musical.
  76. Quantum of Solace
    The way it's shot and cut, it plays like a parody of a car commercial shot in the style of a Bond film.
  77. A Christmas Tale
    Desplechin's films are great, chaotic, unsettling fun. This one's scored, elegantly, to a mixture of standards and classics and original music by Gregoire Hetzel.
  78. Slumdog Millionaire
    After last year's black-hearted "No Country for Old Men," the Oscars may well be in the mood to embrace a fairy tale sampling every imaginable genre, with a note of triumph accompanying even the worst suffering, capped by the snazziest ending money can buy.
  79. Role Models
    Role Models wouldn't be anything without Mintz-Plasse, whose character occasions what may be the cinema's first really funny Marvin Hamlisch joke, and whose camera presence is at once unfailingly modest and distinctive.
  80. JCVD
    The film sags in the middle section, and it's more a novelty item than a fully formed work . But it's very entertaining. And Van Damme proves himself a brave, possibly foolhardy actor, which is more than Steven Seagal ever did.
  81. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
    The visual style is typical, ultra crisp computer animation, bright, sharp, somewhat clinical.
  82. Soul Men
    The funniest bit in the crude but diverting Soul Men really makes you miss Bernie Mac, who died in August, a few months after completing the picture.
  83. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
    Zack and Miri has a bright, chipper look to it, thanks to cinematographer Dave Klein, a frequent Smith colleague. Wintertime in Pittsburgh never looked so good.
  84. Pride and Glory
    Full of interesting little grace notes, and the cast is excellent, yet it grows more and more frustrating.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    High School Musical 3: Senior Year
    What it lacks in narrative ambition, it makes up for in dazzling choreography.
  86. Changeling
    Changeling fundamentally works; it holds you. But these issues of texture and detail matter too, and they hold clues as to why Eastwood's latest is a good, solid achievement rather than a great, grieving one.
  87. I've Loved You So Long
    The movie is held together by the scenes between Thomas and Zylberstein, which are superbly acted.
  88. Let the Right One In
    This is one of the real finds of 2008.
  89. Synecdoche, New York
    As a director, Kaufman isn't yet his own best salesman. He's not enough of a visual stylist to sell his script's most challenging conceits. But the cast rises to a very strange and rich occasion.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Fear(s) of the Dark
    Works best when it works primal--which is not the same thing as working dumb.
  91. Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
    Remarkable documentary filmmaking, unflinching and full of unlikely grace.
  92. W.
    In the end it depicts its subject as lost, and pitiable--like Richard Nixon, but more a pawn than a dark knight.
  93. Filth and Wisdom
    It's rather sweet to think of Filth and Wisdom as Madonna's reconnection to her own boho Manhattan striver self a generation ago, and I did enjoy the last five minutes or so, when the movie essentially stopped and Hutz's band, Gogol Bordello, took over.
  94. Max Payne
    Max Payne offers max pain along with min invention, and the only thing that keeps it out of the bottom of the Dumpster--it’s more of a top-of-the-Dumpster movie--is the presence of Mark Wahlberg.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Secret Life of Bees
    Sweat and good intentions will take you only so far. And they take Bees right up to the threshold of entertaining--but not one step further.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Sex Drive
    Sean Anders' derivative gross-out movie Sex Drive is easier to take if you accept that the answer to every baffling plot question is "because it’s a teen sex comedy."
  97. Body of Lies
    The most interesting thing about this slick but frustrating picture is the way it puts Crowe’s Hoffman at the center of our mixed feelings.
  98. The Express
    Too often The Express sidelines its own main character in favor of the lemon-sucking, jaw-jutting glower patented by Quaid.
  99. Dung che sai duk
    Ashes of Time Redux remains a hermetic and rather frustrating work, dotted by lonely, windblown figures dwarfed by the sand dunes of western China.
  100. City of Ember
    If older kids and adults seek out this picture, which 20th Century Fox and Walden Media clearly aren't sure how to sell, they may well find themselves drawn into a subterranean world of considerable imagination.
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