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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    • 52 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Dead Man's Shoes
    There are flashes of grim humor interspersed with the murders, but not enough wit to elevate this movie beyond its primary identity: grisly revenge fantasy.
  2. Keeping Up with the Steins
    Squanders a decent comic premise.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wah-Wah
    There isn't enough heft to the story to pull everything together. Watching it is like trying to assemble a puzzle that's missing pieces.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Sketches of Frank Gehry
    Whatever you think of Gehry's architecture, if you have any interest in art, or the interplay between light and shadow, or the way buildings create space and community, you're likely to enjoy this film.
  5. Russian Dolls
    Russian Dolls, like "L'Auberge," has an excellent cast (mostly the same one, in fact) and an impish style and speed that gives it more obvious audience appeal than the average French film.
  6. Mission: Impossible III
    Mission: Impossible III hasn't the kinks or the oddball Continental chic of the first "Mission: Impossible," but it's less pretentious and obsessively pretty than the second movie.
  7. Art School Confidential
    The movie sputters in its later, darker passages, which by design are less audience-friendly than the earlier, satirically secure ones.
  8. Hoot
    The songs take some of the sting out of the numerous scenes involving alligators, snakes, attack dogs and bullies. Yet in their lazy way, they're one more reminder that kids are better off with a book than a middling movie adaptation of a book.
  9. Down in the Valley
    Jacobson, whose earlier film is a docudrama about Jeffrey Dahmer, is clearly fascinated with men who would be monsters. It's a ripe and infinite topic to explore, but without Norton, theme alone could not have sustained Down in the Valley.
  10. The Proposition
    It's a terrific, kinetic experience, and it's also a brilliant showcase for a crackerjack ensemble of great actors.
  11. One Last Thing...
    I found it bizarre and limp and all over the place and not in a good, messy, lifelike way.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Side Effects
    There is a great, even revolutionary movie to be made about pharmaceutical companies in America. Side Effects is definitely not it.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Stick It
    Stick It reels from its own frenetic pace. The music is loud, the camera cuts are incessant and everything seems geared toward distracting us from what's going on onscreen. Which is not much.
  14. United 93
    The superb United 93, from the British writer-director Paul Greengrass, does not waste time defining the undefinable. Nor does it strain for poetry when, with this story, prose is enough.
  15. Akeelah and the Bee
    Predictable, corny and formulaic...Yet this latest triumph of the spelling-bee spirit, like last year's earnest, flawed film version of "Bee Season," features a film-saving performance where it counts most: from the kid playing the kid with big brain and even bigger heart.
  16. RV
    Robin Williams is such a great comic virtuoso that it can almost hurt to see him straining to pump life into a conventional, uninspired, sometimes-goofy big-studio comedy such as RV.
  17. The Lost City
    Throbbing with music, seething with anger and romance, The Lost City is a film that breaks your heart, bewilders, alienates and ravishes you by turns.
  18. Water
    The writer-director doesn't raise her voice, even as she firmly condemns the injustice. Water seduces us with its beauty and sorrow.
  19. Lady Vengeance
    A comedy of evil and strange redemption, Lady Vengeance makes sure that we feel the pain, that we know what it's like to unreasonably suffer, because those are the rules of its mad, wounding, vengeful world.
  20. Army of Shadows
    A film masterpiece, restored more than three decades after its French release, "Army" remains a superb, coolly accurate portrait of a living hell recalled by two men who knew it well and record it truly, Melville and novelist Joseph Kessel.
  21. Police Beat
    An offbeat, poetic piece that eschews the terse, hard-boiled style of the standard cop movie or TV show for something softer-centered and more nakedly emotional.
  22. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    It is a black comedy, among the blackest. It is also more grueling in some stretches than anything in "United 93."
  23. Three Times
    Three Times is great cinema, pop romance that carries a special charge.
  24. American Dreamz
    Grant, playing a variation on Simon Cowell, resident meanie on "American Idol" and its inspiration, Britain's "Pop Idol," does what's required with seedy panache. Yet the characterization, both as written and acted, lacks a spark.
  25. The Sentinel
    Amid the nervousness Douglas and Sutherland do what they can to enliven their warring stereotypes. And now and then, blessedly, The Sentinel nudges toward camp.
  26. Somersault
    Erotic, poetic and light on its feet. It's a portrayal of a runaway teenager's sexual initiation, and though it comes close to being exploitive, it keeps dancing away.
  27. Mongolian Ping Pong
    A tender, visually stunning comedy-drama.
  28. The Wild
    It has a good director, snazzy visuals and some really funny animals, and that's at least half the battle.
  29. Kinky Boots
    Directed by Julian Jarrold and co-written by Tim Firth ("Calendar Girls"), the movie is quite enjoyable, effortlessly well-done on every level, even moving at times, but relatively light weight.
  30. Hard Candy
    High-minded sleaze, the film deceives you with its first 10 minutes, which are interestingly creepy.
  31. The Notorious Bettie Page
    It's a joy to see so many cheerful and contented characters on screen, especially on a screen that looks this good.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Look Both Ways
    Watt's direction is stylish, and her choices feel sure-handed.
  33. Mountain Patrol
    This largely non-verbal picture uses only as many words (spoken in Mandarin and Tibetan, with English subtitles) as necessary, and draws you in as surely as one of his characters, in an amazing sequence, is drawn into.
  34. La Mujer de Mi Hermano
    Some movies sell and you don't know why. With La Mujer de mi Hermano, a big-screen romantic drama with the aura of a nicely steamed telenovela, you know why: because the three stars look good in plush white bathrobes, that's why.
  35. Metal: A Headbanger's Journey
    Sam Dunn's unabashed wet kiss to his favorite genre of music, heavy metal, a.k.a. devil's music.
  36. The Sisters
    The Sisters isn't just bad Chekhov; it's bad Chekhov modernized and then plunked in front of a camera.
  37. Lucky Number Slevin
    The talk is witty, the twists are ingenious, the look and the mood are drop-dead.
  38. Take the Lead
    The latest ballroom dance-fever picture isn't very good, but some of the dancing is fun.
  39. Friends with Money
    Acutely perceptive and slyly quick-witted.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    On a Clear Day
    While On a Clear Day can claim both a surplus of heart and adequate brains, it comes up lacking in the courage department.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    When Do We Eat?
    By the time the ending rolls around, as we watch the slow unclamping of jaws from jugulars, we feel exhausted. Imagine how the actors must have felt.
  42. Sir! No Sir!
    Sir! No Sir! honors those who fought, then questioned the morality of that fight, then joined the national protest.
  43. I Am a Sex Addict
    A confessional film that's almost too confessional--is like getting buttonholed by a casual acquaintance at a party and then subjected to a flood of highly intimate revelations that just don't stop.
  44. Basic Instinct 2
    Once the credits are done rolling it's a dour, enervated mystery, selling the old cat-and-mouse games.
  45. ATL
    If "Roll Bounce" and "Boyz n the Hood" fell in love and had a PG-13 baby, it would be ATL.
  46. Ice Age: The Meltdown
    This "Ice Age" is still a good movie (especially for kids) with top-of-the-tech CGI.
  47. Slither
    Aside from Henry, Gunn's cast is on a collective wavelength. Banks, whose perkiness carries a slightly demented edge, matches up well with Nathan Fillion, who plays the lovelorn police chief.
  48. Brick
    Challenging to follow, at best.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
    The result: a swirling, kaleidoscopic take on a familiar concept, and a raucous, you-are-there atmosphere.
  50. Adam & Steve
    A mostly bland, sporadically crude, by-the-numbers romantic comedy about two gay men in love.
  51. The Devil and Daniel Johnston
    With humor, honesty and awe, Feuerzeig's portrait may love Daniel Johnston, but it won't give his parents much hope.
  52. Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School
    Too cute, too transparent, too precious and ultimately too much.
  53. Iowa
    A flashy-looking low-budget indie about drugs, love and crime in small-town Iowa. But, speaking as an ex-small-town Midwesterner, I found it hard to buy.
  54. Iron Island
    A powerful symbolic drama.
  55. Drawing Restraint 9
    As visually stunning as it is, "DR9" is also more than two hours and contains, at best, 10 lines of dialogue, an ear-piercing Bjork score and no discernible plot.
  56. Inside Man
    The best scene in Inside Man is one of the simplest, a cat-and-mouser, wherein the hostage negotiator played by Washington pays a visit to Foster's wily manipulator. These two play it so cool, yet so clearly enjoy each other's onscreen company, it's a ticklish reminder of the simple pleasures of screen acting.
  57. The Beauty Academy of Kabul
    Democracy might not really come from a bottle of shampoo, but "Beauty Academy" teaches us that, sometimes, mascara really matters.
  58. Lonesome Jim
    As a director, Buscemi is drier than he is as a performer: more quietly funny, less intense and sometimes weirdly compassionate.
  59. L'Enfant (The Child)
    Like all the Dardenne s' films, L'Enfant embraces a peculiarly ascetic brand of what, in other filmmakers' hands, might seem like cheap melodrama.
  60. The Godfather of Green Bay
    Though the movie is pretty stereotypical and sometimes crude, it also has a sweet laid-back temper. It has amusing moments.
  61. Stoned
    It's a depressing story made even more of a downer by the absence of any Stones-performed music from their prime '60s years.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    American Gun
    The structural sibling to Paul Haggis' race relations opus ("Crash"), but beyond the similarly interwoven vignettes, it's a different animal altogether: messier, more complicated and ultimately more interesting.
  63. Find Me Guilty
    Lumet has retained a lifetime of technique and sharp instincts regarding how to make a courtroom full of people worth watching.
  64. She's the Man
    It's a cute romantic comedy, just as Shakespeare intended.
  65. V for Vendetta
    Finally, a film to unite movie-mad members of Al Qaeda with your neighbor's kid, the one with the crush on Natalie Portman.
  66. Thank You for Smoking
    The first film in a long time with a true gift of gab. A lot of the time people actually talk fast in it. Its wisecracks actually crack wise.
  67. Take My Eyes
    An extraordinarily truthful and piercing drama.
  68. Don't Come Knocking
    There's something a little absurd about this story, but for me, it's endearingly goofy.
  69. Failure to Launch
    Cursed with an honest title, Failure to Launch waves a white flag in scene after scene, declaring surrender. We give up! We do not know how to make a decent mainstream romantic comedy!
  70. The Hills Have Eyes
    The ratings board gets all twisted up about sex and skin, yet it cannot give you or your kids enough ax blades to the cranium. This week's evidence: the remake of the old Wes Craven horror item, The Hills Have Eyes, which should not be rated R. It should be rated NC-17, or ITTS-OW, which stands for Is This Thing Sadistic, Or What?
  71. The Shaggy Dog
    In movies as in life, superior technology doesn't necessarily trump humor, magic or really shaggy dogs.
  72. Ask the Dust
    Eccentric, miscast (though stimulatingly so), not for all tastes but far from flavorless.
  73. Duck Season
    A highly satisfying miniature. Its subject may be adolescence, and some of its pot-smoking, kick-back humor is adolescent too--in a good way. But the film's calm and witty visual rhythm offers a rueful awareness of time passing and of time wasted, in ways that people tend not to appreciate fully until long after they've wasted it.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
    There is some directorial skill here--Argento should be congratulated for a few interesting storytelling choices--but the end result feels grimy and strangely pathetic.
  75. Evil
    Bullying is not easy to watch on screen, even--or perhaps especially--if the viewer had the fortune to avoid either side of the bully/bullied equation.
  76. Shakespeare Behind Bars
    The power of art to redeem the pain and cruelty of life is demonstrated to enormous effect inShakespeare Behind Bars.
  77. The Fallen
    It's an ensemble piece with a dark, salty mood that reminded me of Robert Altman and Robert Aldrich, with a touch of Francis Ford Coppola. It's notably non-"gung ho."
  78. 16 Blocks
    Willis never develops a rapport with Def, and in the end it's not the predictable action but this lack of chemistry and camaraderie that sinks 16 Blocks.
  79. Aquamarine
    Like its title heroine, it's sparkly, pretty and flirty--but often all wet.
  80. Dave Chappelle's Block Party
    An uplifting, funny and engaging star-studded affair.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Deep Sea
    It's all about the pictures. Those images create a vision of nature that even a strip miner would want to conserve.
  82. Merry Christmas
    Though it's not the great film "Grand Illusion" is, and though it may strike some as a little schmaltzy, it still has some of that earlier film's deep feeling and empathy for soldiers trapped in the jaws of war and for the joys of Christmas--for believers and non-believers alike.
  83. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Proves, unhappily enough, how U.S.-style media politics is spreading around the world.
  84. Sorry, Haters
    A preposterous screwball psychological drama.
  85. Tsotsi
    It's compelling material, even if you don't completely buy Tsotsi's transition.
  86. Doogal
    The polite word for all this is "repurposing," a euphemism for "hauling someone else's garbage."
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Madea's Family Reunion
    Gussied up for the big time, Perry now is aiming himself squarely at a mainstream, middle-class female audience -- with some sops for their dates.
  88. Running Scared
    I have a sneaking suspicion that Running Scared could become a cult classic.
  89. Unknown White Male
    Equally fascinating and frustrating.
  90. Workingman's Death
    It's not exactly a good time at the movies, and even as pure education, it's a rather dull film with very little dialogue, but Glawogger does succeed in capturing the images, sounds and even imagined scents (oh, those burning goats) of contemporary hard labor, work that has become nearly invisible to us cubicle jockeys.
  91. Black Orpheus
    A film that art-house audiences in 1959 loved madly. And who can blame them? A buoyant, searingly colorful retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set in Rio de Janiero, writer-director's Marcel Camus' movie is a romance heightened by its backdrop.
  92. Forgiving Dr. Mengele
    In many respects, Forgiving Dr. Mengele is an ordinary documentary, stylistically and technically unexceptional. But its subject enobles the work. So does Kor : determined, indomitable, and by the end of the movie, a symbol herself of both survival and mercy.
  93. Kirikou and the Wild Beasts
    Quite similar to the first film, but this is one time when a reprise is welcome. Ages 7-11, but actually, it's for everyone. [27 Oct 2006, p.C5]
    • Chicago Tribune
  94. Eight Below
    It's formulaic and frequently over the top, 30 minutes too long and altogether too slow, but oh when those gorgeous, graceful pups tilt their heads just so … love.
  95. Freedomland
    First-rate actors bail out second-rate directors all the time, and Freedomland serves as the latest example.
  96. Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    A contemporary Russian movie that you could honestly call revolutionary, more for its style than its politics.
  97. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    Everything about Sophie Scholl screams "martyr" and "saint." Jentsch will have none of it. Hers is a performance of supreme emotional control, yet clear emotional fire. The actress makes the icon human.
  98. Winter Passing
    It's just OK. Not great. Not awful. Not particularly memorable. Not entirely forgettable. Just OK.
  99. Curious George
    A mild off-season cinematic bid for the young and the restless.
  100. Final Destination 3
    Final Destination 3 is a gorefest that should either slake your worst appetites or drive you to the exits.
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