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. Happy-Go-Lucky
    There’s something of the harlequin in Leigh’s conception of this bright, manic young woman.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Billy: The Early Years
    It is Templeton's doubts that stir Graham's crisis of faith in 1949 before his first crusade in Los Angeles. And it is that compelling story line that is the movie's saving grace.
  3. RocknRolla
    Ritchie, who shoots and cuts everything in RocknRolla like an ad for a particularly greasy brand of fragrance for men, delivers the beatings and killings in his trademark atmosphere of morally weightless flash.
  4. Religulous
    It's a fairly entertaining bash, with a travelogue vibe established by director Larry Charles ("Borat"). It’s also smug as all hell.
  5. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
    Sollett works easily and well with Cera and Dennings, and lends a touch of awkward realism to what, from a screenwriting perspective, is pure formula.
  6. Blindness
    This film is very different: chilly, methodical, a slave to 10-ton metaphor as opposed to metaphoric provocation.
  7. Rachel Getting Married
    A triumph of ambience, Rachel Getting Married is the first narrative feature since the 1980s from director Jonathan Demme that feels like a party--bittersweet, but a party nonetheless.
  8. Ballast
    Ballast strikes me as one of the few American pictures of 2008 to say what it wants to say, visually and narratively, about a specific situation and part of the country, in a way that transcends regional specifics.
  9. Eagle Eye
    The movie itself is hyperactive and a jumble.
  10. Nights in Rodanthe
    As skillful and charismatic as Gere is, I never get the sense he's really in there, conversing with his fellow actor.
  11. Miracle at St. Anna
    Half the time I wasn't sure what Lee was going for in terms of tone, or style, or focus. It was a tricky assignment to begin with, because McBride's novel, and his screenplay, is part socio-historical corrective, part magical-realist folklore, part wartime procedural.
  12. The Lucky Ones
    The film itself, which has everything from erection jokes to a computer-generated tornado, comes down to a battle between the interpreters and a screenplay riddled with convenience, cliche and well-meaning contrivance.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Humboldt County
    A slow starter. But what appears to be the cliched "uptight nerd liberated by flighty sprite" tale--done better in films from "Bringing Up Baby" to "Barefoot in the Park"--evolves into something deeper, darker, more resonant.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
    By the end of Forbes' brisk, economical portrait, Atwater has been revealed as a repugnant and pathetic soul--and a political visionary, among the first to fully understand and harness the raw power of voters’ fears.
  15. Ghost Town
    A welcome surprise: a supernatural romantic comedy that works, graced with a cast just off-center enough to make it distinctive.
  16. Igor
    With an uneven and overstuffed script you appreciate the corner-of-the-mouth comments as delivered by Steve Buscemi.
  17. Lakeview Terrace
    One wishes LaBute, a bleak satirist and, at his best, a crudely compelling dramatist, had taken the script and made it his own sort of twisted comedy instead of a routine thriller
  18. Appaloosa
    It's less a western than a loping buddy picture.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Duchess
    Taken in isolation from the unsatisfying story, the performances are powerful--Knightley’s vivacious, wounded romantic does a great deal to carry the film on sheer personality, while Fiennes is a subtle master at projecting banked menace through his seeming detached ennui.
  20. Hounddog
    The film is responsible, earnest, well-intentioned and, as it was in Sundance, maddeningly inconsistent.
  21. Burn After Reading
    Clooney remains as game as ever, but the way he and McDormand push the energy here, you feel the strain. Pitt, just floating through, comes off best. He doesn't judge the moron he's playing; he just is.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Women
    It's a high-powered cast, but it has painfully little to work with, apart from widely varying humor.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Moving Midway
    In its 98 minutes, film critic Godfrey Cheshire’s documentary Moving Midway records an amazing architectural feat, and that’s the least of its virtues.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Towelhead
    Everything about the film is aggressively provocative, in both senses of the word.
  25. A Secret
    The acting is exceptional. If parts of A Secret veer toward soap opera, the ensemble work reduces the suds to a minimum.
  26. Mister Foe
    The film disappoints particularly in relation to "Young Adam," an earlier picture about sexual obsession from writer-director David Mackenzie; this one's more in line with the creamy tones and surface readings of "Asylum."
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Save Me
    Allen and Gant are principals in Mythgarden, a movie production company that promotes gay and lesbian storytelling, and Save Me makes a respectable showing as an early effort.
  28. The Pool
    It's a bit schematic and sweet-natured, perhaps to a fault, yet the faces linger. Smith and his mixture of actors and non-actors remind us that an act of generosity is all it takes to change a life.
  29. I Served the King of England
    The mordant wit and paradoxical melancholic bounce you find in a great many Eastern European filmmakers informs every joke and rosy sexual encounter in the work of Czech writer-director Jiri Menzel.
  30. Traitor
    Problems aside, this is a good, twisty, absorbing work.
  31. Death Race
    Nothing in director Paul W.S. Anderson's schlock drawer--prepares you for the peppy, good-time nastiness that is Death Race.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Longshots
    It's almost always rewarding to watch an underdog triumph--what else could explain why movies exactly like this keep being made?--but Longshots is one underdog that's hard to love and harder still to champion.
  33. Hamlet 2
    The film, which really is sloppy, slips around in terms of tone and goes every which way.
  34. Trouble the Water
    Trouble the Water is so much better and truer and deeper and more illuminating than either of them ("Bowling for Columbine"/"Fahrenheit 9/11").
  35. Momma's Man
    It works from a specific place and lets audiences relate to that place, and the people in it, like trusted intimates.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    I.O.U.S.A.
    Packed with facts, figures and the testimony of policy experts, the film is no wallow in wonkiness, though, but a surprisingly sprightly tough-love lesson in fiscal responsibility.
  37. The Rocker
    It's a lot of fun. Its spirit is genuine and, even with the odd vomit gag, fundamentally sweet.
  38. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
    At what point might animators be arrested for doing work so ugly it causes aesthetic blindness in millions of younglings?
  39. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    I enjoyed it as much as any Allen film of the last 20 years.
  40. The Girl Cut in Two
    Keeps you off-balance as it establishes a world where every conversation is a flirtation, and trouble and heartbreak sneak in on little cat feet when no one's looking.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer
    Swinging gleefully on a sun-soaked afternoon, crafting strangely intoxicating phrases, O’Day could do no wrong on that afternoon at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island in 1958.
  42. Henry Poole Is Here
    Unfortunately it’s all a bit dull.
  43. Fly Me to the Moon 3D
    The vocal characterizations aren't the problem here; the script and the animation are the problems, and in feature animation, you can't arrange more significant problems than those.
  44. Tropic Thunder
    In the end Tropic Thunder is an expensive goof about an expensive goof, and the results are very impressive and fancy-looking.
  45. Elegy
    Elegy is a curious example of misplaced good taste.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Beautiful Losers
    On your deathbed you will want back the time it takes to see this one.
  47. Hell Ride
    A whopper this isn't. It's not even a Whopper Junior. It's the paper the Whopper Junior came in.
  48. What We Do Is Secret
    Like so many earlier movie biographies, Secret suffers from bathetic storytelling and dialogue, some of it laughable.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Last Stop for Paul
    A micro-indie passport party that, while well-intentioned, evokes the same feelings that have been known to arise from being subjected to your friends' vacation movies.
  50. Pineapple Express
    Around the midpoint, Pineapple Express falls apart and keeps falling, and the comedy, spiced with considerable, unevenly effective violence in that first hour, goes out the window, and in comes all the gore and the bone-crunching.
  51. Bottle Shock
    Wine may be sunlight held together by water, as Galileo said, but Bottle Shock is held together only by Alan Rickman.
  52. Patti Smith: Dream of Life
    If one thing holds the picture back, it’s the self-conscious album-cover aesthetic of Sebring’s visual approach.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
    The four stars of Sisterhood are back for this smart, confident second act, based on novels by Anne Brashares.
  54. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
    The film has one objective: to smack its audience in the face with fleeting, competing wows, over and over.
  55. Swing Vote
    This one may be soft and derivative. But the actors establish a groove and stay on-message.
  56. Sixty Six
    It's labeled a "true-ish story," and the results are cheeky fun.
  57. In Search of a Midnight Kiss
    It wanders and putters and follows its main characters around.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Frozen River
    Possibly one of the biggest reasons Frozen River stands out among bad-decision movies is that Ray never really tries to justify her actions.
  59. The X Files: I Want to Believe
    The story is both a muddle and a drag.
  60. Step Brothers
    Stupid, predictable and fairly funny.
  61. American Teen
    As close to fraudulent as a documentary can get and still be worth seeing.
  62. Brideshead Revisited
    The new film seems a little nervous about the religious content; it's more interested in the swoony bits between Charles and Julia.
  63. CSNY/Déjà Vu
    By no means a typical concert movie; the selections are played mostly in short takes and snippets. It's more a road movie with music, its war topic treated with earnest seriousness.
  64. Man on Wire
    The film itself is perfectly poised between artistry and audacity. It's beautiful.
  65. Boy A
    Like "Control," the recent Anton Corbijn treatment of rock star Ian Curtis' short life, the powerful British drama Boy A announces its gravitas with a look--organically achieved, with cinematography, production design and direction working together--you are meant to notice.
  66. The Dark Knight
    Sensational, grandly sinister and not for the kids, The Dark Knight elevates pulp to a very high level.
  67. Mamma Mia!
    It's funny what you buy completely onstage and resist completely, or nearly, on-screen. Case in point: Mamma Mia!
  68. Space Chimps
    Sucks a whole lot of talented people into a wormhole of lousy. The film either needed to be a lot wittier to make up for the way it looks, or a lot better-looking to compensate for the funny it isn't.
  69. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
    The movie overall is engaging, though it's more cavalier regarding story and relentless in its action than its predecessor.
  70. Journey to the Center of the Earth
    You don't believe a second of it, but it's easy to enjoy, partly because of the casting of all three leads.
  71. Meet Dave
    The heartbreaking thing about Meet Dave...is its occasional funniness amid a sea of pablum. If it were completely rank, it'd be less frustrating.
  72. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
    This is a superb picture, sharp, open-minded, wised-up and cinematically accomplished.
  73. Das wilde Leben
    The film's tone is utterly indistinct, beyond fatuous adoration of its subject.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
    Like Thompson's work itself, it sometimes feels like a smoke screen, a colorful but distracting, distracted set of pretenses hiding as much as they reveal.
  75. Diminished Capacity
    Striving for low-key character comedy, Diminished Capacity ends up diminishing its returns.
  76. Hancock
    Not even Smith's charisma can mitigate the chaos that is Hancock.
  77. Tell No One
    Enough talk; enough flashbacks. Sometimes the best thing a mystery can do is give its protagonist a reason to run like hell.
  78. Finding Amanda
    This debut picture never makes up its mind about what sort of comedy it wants to be. But at least it has one--a mind, that is.
  79. WALL-E
    While I may argue with the little guy's taste in musicals, it's remarkable to see any film, in any genre, blend honest sentiment with genuine wit and a visual landscape unlike any other.
  80. Wanted
    What are Jolie and Freeman and McAvoy doing here, besides acting cooler than Clive Owen in "Shoot ’Em Up"? Cashing a check, that's what. Bekmametov may have talent, but the arrested-adolescent "escapism" of this picture emits a pretty bad odor.
  81. Elsa y Fred
    Though recalling a truckload of antecedents, "Harold and Maude" and "Sweet November" among them, Elsa & Fred manages enough fresh touches and performance subtleties to stand alone as an irresistible, bittersweet comedy.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Gunnin' for That #1 Spot
    Yauch clearly understands this world, but his film would have profited from looking more deeply at fewer players.
  83. The Last Mistress
    The picture's visual style is clean, exact and beautifully photographed by Yorgos Arvanitis.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Red Roses and Petrol
    Hoffs' Dublin appears to consist of stock street footage and a lot of stand-in California, which makes a hash of an exterior scene in which the characters complain about the incessant rain as the sun clearly shines through the damp.
  85. Get Smart
    Missed it by that much. Actually, the new version of Get Smart misses by a fair-size margin.
  86. The Love Guru
    The Love Guru”does not bring out Myer's best, and aside from a deft early Bollywood parody, there’s nothing visually to help the fun along.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
    Strictly a kids' movie--brimming with easy-to-swallow life lessons.
  88. The Happening
    After the insufferably dense mermaid mythology of "Lady in the Water," Shyamalan clearly wanted to keep things simple. He whizzed straight past "simple" to simplistic.
  89. The Incredible Hulk
    Until the last 20 minutes, which stumble around in an attempt to set up a sequel, The Incredible Hulk keeps slamming everything forward, satisfyingly.
  90. Chris & Don. A Love Story
    A fascinating documentary, one much better than its rather flat and unimaginative title.
  91. My Winnipeg
    Deeply personal, wryly funny and fantastically cinematic.
  92. Encounters at the End of the World
    Takes you places an ordinary documentary filmmaker might’ve gone to yet missed completely.
  93. Kung Fu Panda
    Everything about Kung Fu Panda is a little better, a little sharper, a little funnier than the animated run of the mill.
  94. You Don't Mess with the Zohan
    An Israeli-on-Arab version of "Shampoo," You Don’t Mess With the Zohan is terrible in many ways, and shoddy in every way that has to do with filmmaking. But politically it's sort of interesting.
  95. Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan
    A grandly kitschy rendering of Genghis Khan's early years.
  96. Mother of Tears
    Mother of Tears can't rival the David Lynchian otherworldliness of "Suspiria," but at least you know you're in the hands of a director.
  97. The Promotion
    Then there's screenwriter Steve Conrad. He's interesting. He likes his protagonists to suffer a little en route to finding a better place, and not in the usual sitcomic ways.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Bigger Stronger Faster*
    Bell confronts Smelly, labeling him a cheater. But he also sympathizes with him, explaining, "There is a clash in America between doing the right thing and being the best."
  99. The Foot Fist Way
    Staggers and wanders and feels far longer than its 85 minutes, and it's best considered a calling card for better things to come.
  100. Savage Grace
    Savage Grace comes up bland and seems to go nowhere in particular.
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