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. A Mighty Heart
    A worthy film on a great, tragic subject.
  2. Black Sheep
    I did like seeing the (fakey-looking) sheep take flying neck-high leaps at various human throats, in scenes recalling the killer rabbit in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." And I enjoyed the Kiwi dialects. And I suspect King's next film will be better.
  3. Broken English
    Cassavetes, who wrote the script, proves her skill with actors in this woozy push-and-pull of slurred compliments and shaky hopes for whatever lies beyond the next day.
  4. Lady Chatterley
    The result is not a movie of peekaboo titillation, but a studied, original portrait of sexuality and its role in human relationships.
  5. You Kill Me
    Leoni is one of the truly distinctive comic actresses we have in the movies today, a tough broad with murderously effective timing and phrasing.
  6. Manufactured Landscapes
    Feels constrained and rather dutiful, no matter how passionate these people are about what they're observing.
  7. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
    It is passable comic book stuff, dumb and loud. Loud. LOUD.
  8. Nancy Drew
    Nice. The film itself is more nice than good, but nice isn't the worst trait.
  9. When the Road Bends: Tales of a Gypsy Caravan
    As is, it's worth seeing, but you may get frustrated at the way Dellal raises provocative questions about ancestry and prejudice, only to lose them in the shuffle of so many mini-portraits of musicians, getting to know each other and each other's foreign yet familiar musical language, on a long 16-city tour.
  10. Czech Dream
    A small but droll big-box comedy.
  11. Macbeth
    It's all very "Scarface"--the De Palma remake of "Scarface," not the Hawks original. In other words, it doesn't feel modern at all. It feels about a generation late and 400 years short.
  12. Ocean's Thirteen
    The line between cool and cold is a thin one, however. Cool isn't the word for "Thirteen"; it's just smug.
  13. Hostel: Part II
    You live in a free country, you put up with crud like Hostel Part II. It truly is crud, though.
  14. Surf's Up
    Where Surf's Up falls down is in its central relationships. (A few more jokes wouldn't have hurt either).
  15. La Vie en Rose
    Wildly uneven.
  16. 12:08 East of Bucharest
    Porumboiu's picture, small and pungent, lacks the resonance of "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," Cristi Puiu's masterpiece of contemporary Romanian malaise released in the U.S. last year. But this one's less forbidding, and it has a satisfying shape and fullness.
  17. Gracie
    Dermot Mulroney takes the largest male role, that of the driven ex-soccer star and patriarch of the onscreen family. From certain angles he looks like a Shue too.
  18. Knocked Up
    Knocked Up is more verbally adroit than it is visually. But Apatow's awfully sharp as a chronicler of contemporary romantic anxieties.
  19. Mr. Brooks
    cleverly conceived and professionally executed and to hell with that. It's a serial killer movie in the dime-a-dozen era of serial killer movies, with the selling point being that the murderer is played by a movie star. This way you'll like the guy.
  20. Crazy Love
    Pugach's selfishness, his inability to detach love from gratification, is the key to this crazy story.
  21. Day Watch
    Though Day Watch seems less shocking and overwhelmingly strange than "Night Watch," it's another rocking mix of gritty thriller and glitzy sci-fi, once again in the vein of the director Bekmambetov's idols Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowski brothers.
  22. Bug
    Ashley Judd as Agnes White, and a relative newcomer, the remarkable Michael Shannon, as Peter Evans. They're both spellbinding.
  23. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
    The most visually spectacular, action-packed and surreal of the adventures of Capt. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp).
  24. Angel-A
    So stunningly shot and visualized--and scored so hauntingly well by Anja Garbarek, the daughter of saxophonist/composer Jan Garbarek--that it works even if you don't pay attention to the story. Maybe it works better that way.
  25. Golden Door
    Called "Nuovomondo" in its native Italy, it's bittersweet, neither as comic and sentimental as Charlie Chaplin's 1917 great silent comedy "The Immigrant," nor as cynical and epic as Elia Kazan's 1963 "America, America," but close to both.
  26. Paprika
    We've gotten perhaps too used to the computerized wizardry of our own cartoon features; Kon, like Miyazaki shows us some older ways that can still transfix us.
  27. Steel City
    One of the most hopeful movies I've seen recently--not just for its humane, realistic story line, but in its very being.
  28. The Boss of It All
    Bone-dry but completely assured, both in its visual strategy and its wry deconstruction of the workplace comedy genre.
  29. Severance
    I prefer my horror with a chaser of wit, and Severance, a modest but very lively British import, serves it up in harsh but high style.
  30. Shrek the Third
    I doubt even rabid fans of the first two will consider Shrek the Third a worthy addition to the franchise.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    In Search of Mozart
    What emerges is a far more accurate, complete and endearingly human portrait of Mozart than any documentary has ever painted.
  32. Fay Grim
    Strikes me as something of an elaborate mistake, a wasted opportunity and a script Hartley should have discarded. But I liked it anyway.
  33. Flanders
    Except for the tractors, and the tanks in the later desert battle sequences, Flanders could be taking place centuries ago. Or centuries from now.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Private Property
    Lafosse's frustrating, yet beautifully elegiac coda emphasizes the point that his production and storytelling style have been making throughout: Private Property is about processes, not conclusions.
  35. Hollywood Dreams
    Frederick is the key to the movie and she's definitely an impressive new talent, someone who can really hold the screen and who delivers something striking or memorable in every scene.
  36. Memories of Tomorrow
    By the time Watanabe encounters a holy senile fool in the forest, the film has foregone contemporary urban “King Lear” territory for something a lot closer to the Lifetime Channel.
  37. Once
    It's a very small piece, working in a deceptively casual storytelling style. But it's my favorite music film since "Stop Making Sense," and it's more emotionally satisfying than any of the Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptations made in the last 20 years.
  38. The Ex
    If you want a relationship comedy that feels like last year's stuff, doesn't go far enough in any direction and is made watchable only by an overqualified ensemble, there's The Ex.
  39. 28 Weeks Later
    Swift, vicious and grimly imaginative, the zombie film 28 Weeks Later exceeds its predecessor, "28 Days Later," in every way.
  40. Georgia Rule
    Maybe Georgia Rule should be required viewing for Paris Hilton during her term in the slammer. But not for us.
  41. The Hip Hop Project
    The film works best when it pays specific attention to how hard it is to write a rhyme worth hearing.
  42. Provoked: A True Story
    Most of the ingredients for a strong, tough film are there, and they have been sadly botched by a few key collaborators.
  43. The Salon
    The main problem with the movie is the by now shopworn nature of its setting. Been there, snipped it. Though dating from venerable material, The Salon turns out to be one haircut too many.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway
    Much of this strikingly human, rapidly paced and laudably well-rounded film is fascinating.
  45. Chalk
    The problem with the movie is that all this improvisational verisimilitude never finds its way into fully developed stories.
  46. Brand Upon the Brain!
    The film is a singular achievement.
  47. Lucky You
    A relaxed-looking expert piece that immerses us in another world. At the end, Hanson has a bonus. He and his producers hired Bob Dylan for the Oscar-winning "Things Have Changed" in "Wonder Boys," and Hanson brings Dylan back here, for a folky, bluesy number called "Huck's Tune."
  48. Away from Her
    One of the most remarkable and moving love stories the movies have recently given us.
  49. Spider-Man 3
    You want big wows with this sort of entertainment, and the wows here are medium.
  50. Civic Duty
    A clammy little number that might've been funded by the Department of Homeland Security.
  51. The Treatment
    Janssen is an intense screen presence. Too often she's stuck playing humorless towering antagonists. Here, happily, she's allowed to be a real person.
  52. Paris, je t'aime
    The masterpiece of the bunch is the last, wonderful piece by Alexander Payne ("14eme Arrondissement").
  53. Waitress
    The ending of Waitress is so beguiling and whimsical that it makes you, like its diner's patrons, hungry for more--and it makes you miss that red-headed movie auteur/pastry chef/heart stealer Shelly even more.
  54. Jindabyne
    While not everything in Jindabyne works, especially in its final, redemptive third, the film and its faces stay with you.
  55. The Condemned
    A real stinker. It doesn't have the courage of its own bad taste, or that of its villain.
  56. Diggers
    The best thing in Diggers, besides the close-up of the back end of the Vista Cruiser, is the interplay between Rudd and Tierney. They really do seem like brother and sister, adults yet not entirely grown up.
  57. Les amitiés maléfiques
    It's intellectual without being dry, dramatic without bombast, smart without posturing. Its characters and milieu are very well drawn, and Andre is one of the more intriguing and convincing fictional creations in recent film.
  58. Something to Cheer About
    Routine cinema but rich history.
  59. Disappearances
    The movie looks like far more than a million dollars and it offers the kind of smart, picaresque good time you get from books like "The Reivers" and "Huckleberry Finn" and movies like "Bronco Billy" and "Bonnie and Clyde."
  60. Zoo
    To what degree does Zoo test our limits of tolerance? In the end, not much, which is why Devor's strange, carefully composed objet d'art is a limited achievement.
  61. Hot Fuzz
    The best of it is a riot--a "Bad Boys II" fireball hurled with exquisite accuracy at a quaint English town peopled by Agatha Christie archetypes.
  62. Vacancy
    It's a sordid but expert shocker.
  63. Fracture
    Effective dialogue doesn't necessarily mean witty dialogue, but wit certainly helps, and you tend not to get much of it in a low-key legal thriller. Fracture is an exception.
  64. In the Land of Women
    Kasdan has inherited much of his father's surface skills; he knows how to round out a scene and keep things on story point. But In the Land of Women doesn't for a moment feel messy and chaotic where it counts.
  65. The Valet
    Veber's early stage training serves him well both as an adapter (he wrote the "La Cage aux Folles" screenplay) and as a maker of originals though, truth be told, The Valet isn't especially original.
  66. Stephanie Daley
    A stark, painful drama about pregnancy--a subject rarely treated this fully, candidly or tragically.
  67. Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
    The late U.S. Rep. Sonny Bono and his widow and successor Mary Bono have spent a good deal of time trying to save it. It's a hard task, but the film does suggest there's more to the sea than meets the eye.
  68. Red Road
    Arnold reminds us that the best thrillers don't settle for taking the audience away from their everyday experience; rather, they burrow inward and, by sheer power of cinematic observation, make it hard for us to look away lest we miss something--on a screen or off.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
    The TV episodes invariably embed a character or a bit of dialogue in your brain that you continuously describe or repeat to your friends. No such find in the movie, though the offbeat soundtrack is very gettable.
  70. Pathfinder
    A bizarre, bloody adventure movie.
  71. Perfect Stranger
    It lacks the rutting nuttiness of "Basic Instinct," even as it recycles much of that film's kiss-or-kill premise.
  72. Everything's Gone Green
    A romantic comedy/social satire that, on a modest budget, manages to be hip, charming, funny and dressed to kill.
  73. Private Fears in Public Places
    The cast is tremendous; these actors work with Resnais like a well-oiled stock company that knows every trick and can communicate almost telepathically.
  74. Year of the Dog
    In Year of the Dog, there are dark moments that are both strangely poignant and bizarrely hilarious. The ending took me by surprise. In a way it's a cheat, a redemption that arrives out of nowhere. But it's also a cosmic joke, a perfectly funny, sincere salute to dog and pet-lovers everywhere.
  75. Disturbia
    For all its glitz and gadgets, is markedly inferior in everything but teen appeal.
  76. Grindhouse
    Gives dumpster-divers a chance to slum in the antiseptic safety of a multiplex. (Planet Terror ** (out of four) / Death Proof ***1/2 (out of four).
  77. The Hoax
    Isn't all it could have been. But the filmmakers catch the right glittery look and paranoid intensity, and they make gutsy speculations about the story beneath the story.
  78. Ping Pong
    There's nothing particularly original or striking about Ping Pong except its style. It's a breezy, likable story, and the director here, Fumihiko Sori, obviously enjoys his work.
  79. The TV Set
    For all its bright writing, TV Set is contrived and predictable, another morality lesson from a poisoned pen telling us what we've heard before.
  80. The Reaping
    Ludicrous and overstuffed, it plows through the Big 10 of Biblical plagues.
  81. Are We Done Yet?
    Calling a sequel Are We Done Yet? is like calling it "Enough Already."
  82. Firehouse Dog
    A surprisingly heartfelt father/son relationship, handled with restraint by director Todd Holland.
  83. Black Book
    The movie scrambles our responses and covers so much ground, with such zest, that its two and a half hours race past like a firestorm.
  84. Blades of Glory
    Fundamentally Blades of Glory works; it's full of laughs both subtle and ridiculous.
  85. The Lookout
    Frank's dialogue owes a little something to Elmore Leonard, but it's less comic and heavily brocaded.
  86. Meet the Robinsons
    When it enters the future, it's a new-fangled, old-fashioned jim-dandy of a show.
  87. After the Wedding
    After the Wedding defies the odds: For once, the bigger the emotion, the truer the moviegoing experience.
  88. Killer of Sheep
    Of all the memorable feature film debuts, Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” may be the freest from contrivance, disinterested to a lovely degree in conventional story machinery or in anything more than moments in time and the daily lives of people Burnett knew in his Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts.
  89. Sacco and Vanzetti
    One of the movie's most moving elements is the duo's famous prison correspondence, as eloquently read by Tony Shalhoub as Sacco and John Turturro as Vanzetti. But Miller's obvious passion and dedication shine throughout.
  90. Shooter
    A screwy assassination thriller for these murky times, it takes half its pages from Soldier of Fortune and the other half from links provided by conspiracytheories-zapoppin.org.
  91. The Last Mimzy
    The sense of the unknown that "Padgett" created are largely absent. And the movie fails to supply us with an antagonist to work up some dramatic conflict. Nor are the toys themselves very interesting and Mimzy is a toy bunny of no distinction.
  92. Pride
    Howard, playing an inspirational and resourceful man up against long odds, really is an inspiration.
  93. Reign Over Me
    Reign works better much better than "Upside" because of the cast and because Sandler and Cheadle together keep it lighter. It's an easy film to watch, but less easy to be moved by.
  94. TMNT
    Without the brute vigilante junk, this 82-minute picture would be approximately 2 minutes long.
  95. Boy Culture
    It's a better-than-average gay relationship film, largely because neither plot mechanics nor the same old camp intrude much.
  96. Color Me Kubrick
    In Color Me Kubrick, John Malkovich has one of the roles of his life, and he acts it up like a haughty gourmet who's just picked up a succulent treat.
  97. First Snow
    Movies like First Snow rise or fall on characters and atmosphere, and Fergus gets them both. But though the story's resolution does have irony and even a certain power, it lacks the charge, the Serlingesque "gotcha," that it needs.
  98. Offside
    Jafar Panahi of Iran is one of his country's great filmmakers, and Offside is his best movie to date.
  99. The Page Turner
    Dercourt, a very fine filmmaker, is a musician himself, a music teacher and one-time solo viola player with the French Symphony Orchestra. And he directs, with a musician's precision and an insider's sly wit, the world of classical music performance.
  100. The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair
    The style is brash, and it works. Tucker and Epperlein illustrate Yunis' account of his eight-month imprisonment, much of that time spent at the notorious Abu Ghraib compound, with literal illustrations--pages seemingly torn out of a Frank Miller graphic novel.
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