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. Ushpizin
    The new Israeli movie Ushpizin, a film about man's clumsiness and God's grace, is a touching and amusing tale that expands our horizon and also should open our hearts.
  2. Domino
    It's not so important to follow plot twists--I couldn't--but the emotional thrust Kelly and Scott want to drive home is plain: Once Domino is asked to use guns and knives and nunchucks for a purpose outside the law, she's alarmed, appalled, aghast.
  3. Elizabethtown
    So many romantic comedies come and go without making the slightest impression. Elizabethtown is not one of them; I found it galling.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Where the Truth Lies
    Entertaining and even affecting, Where the Truth Lies is a failure primarily because it doesn't do justice to its originator, Rupert Holmes' dishy 2003 novel, which shared both of the aforementioned characteristics but also was extremely funny. The film, directed by Atom Egoyan, is not.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    North Country
    A potentially great movie--with talent and plot points to spare--that settles for being just okay.
  6. Innocent Voices
    Quite affecting, even if it doesn't rank with classics like "Open City" or "Forbidden Games."
  7. Loggerheads
    In the third story, set in Asheville, N.C., that excellent actress Hunt guides us steadily through what could be a minefield of sentimentality.
  8. Nine Lives
    A disturbingly frank look at people and relationships in contemporary Los Angeles and a thrilling dramatic showcase for a brilliant cast.
  9. Summer Storm
    A contemporary teen summer romance with a modern sexual twist--though in many ways, it's just the same old malarkey.
  10. Good Night, and Good Luck.
    The result, then, is good, not great. But it is hard to come by good films about media and politics, and why the intersection thereof matters so much in a democracy.
  11. The Gospel
    Is this the modern version of "Going My Way," with those squabbling, heart-warming Irish Catholic priests mixing up pop songs and hymns? Well, in a way it almost is, though its mood is far different and it's set in a far different world that moves to a different tempo and has graver and more troubling social crises.
  12. In Her Shoes
    A great big wad of chick-lit gum, In Her Shoes gets by on the skill of its players.
  13. Waiting...
    Could have been a funny movie. There are a few truths about food-service that McKittrick gets right but doesn't fully exploit.
  14. Before the Fall
    The film is a competent but callow work dealing with a monstrous subject that automatically rejects callowness.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Never Been Thawed
    It has moments of Guest-like faux earnestness that instantly mark it as one of the smartest and most insightful comedies of the year. But imitation only takes you so far, and by the film's sagging final 30 minutes, it's evident "NBT" isn't quite up to the master's standards.
  16. Two for the Money
    It's a compelling drama, if only a little hollow. For my money, Pacino's bark is ultimately better than Two For the Money's bite.
  17. The Squid and the Whale
    Steering clear of phony melodrama and indie pretense, Baumbach captures a crisis in one family's life that, though it shakes the foundation, leaves all four Berkmans drifting toward highs and lows unknown, each of them only dimly aware that, no matter what the movies tell us, we never really come of age.
  18. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    For 40 minutes or so it's really good, in fact, as lovely and daft as the stop-motion animated W&G shorts that preceded it.
  19. Into the Blue
    Mad props to Peter Zuccarini, who headed the team of ocean-bound photographers and captured some remarkably vivid footage, and also to the actors, who spend plenty of time looking cool, calm and collected swimming with the predatory fishes.
  20. Capote
    The movie's excellence, a stylistic world apart from the strikingly photographed but rather hysterical 1967 film version of Capote's masterwork, is in capturing its subject without pinning him down.
  21. Going Shopping
    There's just enough neurotic or sharp badinage and Rodeo Drive realism to make it all go down easy.
  22. MirrorMask
    It's hollow.
  23. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
    No one expects documentary realism in these memoir-to-movie transfers. It's reasonable, however, to expect more vibrant and expressive fictionalized treatment than this.
  24. The War Within
    The War Within has within it a war of its own, one between docudramatic truth and familiar melodrama, however low-keyed.
  25. Three Days of Rain
    A "Chekhovian" movie that's closer to the master's mood than many, it's also a jazzy, rainy day film that makes serious and amusing points about life and people in the midst of its downpour.
  26. The Greatest Game Ever Played
    About overcoming adversity and one's innermost fears. On this count, Paxton hits the ball squarely in capturing the psychology of his characters, but hooks it into the sand trap of effects and thematic overselling.
  27. Serenity
    A brash, funny, action-packed bit of sci-fi ecstasy--and a giant raspberry to the execs who let "Firefly" fall out of the sky.
  28. Flightplan
    A thriller of passive virtues, the steely intensity of Jodie Foster notwithstanding. It's not too violent. It's not assaultive. Even James Horner's music plays it cool.
  29. Roll Bounce
    The movie is a thing of honey and gloss, yet there's just enough heart in the central father/son relationship, and in the teenagers' ensemble interactions, to make it glide by.
  30. Dear Wendy
    It's a long slog, not because what the film says is provocative but because the technique is as slack as the writing.
  31. A History of Violence
    If this all sounds very heavy, well, it is, but it's also very, very funny. Cronenberg may want to say something important about violence, but he's also head over heels for it, ending each gunfight and neck-breaking with a close-up on the victim, blood either pooling behind his head or brains spilling from his face. Big laughs.
  32. Oliver Twist
    Filming on locations in Prague and in various Czech locations serving as London and the English countryside, the director delivers Dickens' tale with some style. The style, however, is that of a more cautious artist than Polanski is at his best.
  33. Proof
    Madden honors the play's roots; he has not made the mistake of opening it up with a lot of obvious visual expansions. But the story's genial unpretentiousness has been darkened and weighed down, and what's left is less than prime.
  34. HellBent
    This isn't a particularly good movie, and it's offensive in the way mid-range low-budget slasher shows usually are. But it works better than some, largely because Etheredge-Ouzts has a more original slant and a deeper sense of character than horror movies usually allow.
  35. Just Like Heaven
    A huge waste of talent (Witherspoon's) and time (ours), a supernatural romantic comedy that is neither romantic, comedic, super or natural.
  36. Lord of War
    Both script and performance, however, waver between black comedy and more routine international-thriller concerns.
  37. Everything Is Illuminated
    And although Schreiber's hip, intelligent eye is a nice match for Foer's hip, intelligent pen, his movie strays from its own history, creating instead a world, as Alex would say, that is "once-removed."
  38. Hard Goodbyes: My Father
    Like the moving 1999 American "A Walk on the Moon," with Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen, Hard Goodbyes juxtaposes a family crisis with the excitement of the period before and during Neil Armstrong's 1969 moonwalk.
  39. Thumbsucker
    It's not a great movie, or one that should preoccupy you much afterwards, but it's certainly a good one. It's a fine debut for first-timer Mills.
  40. The Thing About My Folks
    Felitta and Reiser mean nothing but well with this project, but too many lines sound fraudulent, and Reiser, it must be said, is a hopeless ham in the reaction shot department.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Stupid Boy
    A caveat to viewers: This brand of movie sex, as directed by 30-year-old Lionel Baier, is emphatically not for the puritanical.
  42. G
    Cherot shot G on a tight schedule, but instead of this age-old indie predicament generating a certain scrappy passion, the film just looks cheap.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Venom
    Sadly, the concept of dialogue is totally lost on the makers of Venom, a laughably bad example of teen-scream movies.
  44. Separate Lies
    The writing isn't always up to the actors, who all give the kind of expert, theatrically ingenious performances that often seem director-proof.
  45. Corpse Bride
    If "Nightmare" was a jazzy pop number, "Bride" is a waltz--an elegant, deadly funny bit of macabre matrimony.
  46. An Unfinished Life
    Nothing unexpected happens in An Unfinished Life--the title comes from the engraving on the dead son's headstone--but Canada sure looks lovely, and the acting's pretty solid.
  47. The Exorcism of Emily Rose
    It's hard to get riled up one way or the other by a film about an exorcist who is forced, cruelly and relentlessly, to introduce one flashback after another.
  48. Cote d'Azur
    At every turn Cote d'Azur settles for tidy, tinny resolutions to seismic family crises--yet, with a message of tolerance and its heart on its sleeve, the film is certainly tolerable in a summer rental-by-the-sea sort of way.
  49. Keane
    The first 10 minutes of Lodge Kerrigan's Keane have a raw, hurtling reality that's as painfully engrossing as anything you'll see in a recent non-fiction movie, a searing portrait of one man's hell, from inside and outside.
  50. Green Street Hooligans
    This is "Fight Club" without the irony or the metaphysical gaming.
  51. The Man
    Both Jackson and Levy are better than director Les Mayfield's ("Blue Streak") meandering comedy.
  52. Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie
    Beautifully shot and filled with gorgeous music.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    A Sound of Thunder
    One redeeming feature of this picture is that it will make great fodder for those make-fun-of-the-movie TV shows.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Underclassman
    What's remarkable is how absolutely every character in the film is a movie cliche.
  55. Transporter 2
    Stands a triumph of stunts over plot, of style over substance--of the wool we pull over our own eyes. It's brainless, high-speed, popcorn fun.
  56. The Constant Gardener
    A sweaty, vital masterpiece that's always one step ahead of its audience.
  57. The Brothers Grimm
    Never calms down for a second. It's the visual equivalent of the "Sabre Dance," and its only oxygen comes from the actors, who are quite good.
  58. The Baxter
    Michael Showalter is a funny man, but … how to put this gently … not a funny movie star.
  59. The Memory of a Killer
    The movie itself is as slick, fast and terrifyingly violent as a top-grade American crime thriller, but a lot smarter than most.
  60. Undiscovered
    There is a good movie here--Strait actually sings the songs that stand on their own, and he's appealing, despite the rock movie cliches.
  61. The 40 Year Old Virgin
    Yes, Steve Carell can carry a movie. Yes, Judd Apatow can direct a movie. Yes, we'll all relate to a middle-aged virgin. And yes, when an aesthetician yells to her assistant "we're gonna need more wax," you best run.
  62. Red Eye
    McAdams, who resembles a more compact and subtle Geena Davis, captures both the strength and the insecurity beneath her sharp-witted heroine's aim-to-please facade.
  63. El Crimen Perfecto (The Perfect Crime)
    It's great fun, propelled by a terrific musical score by Roque Banos that combines the hammering doom of Bernard Herrmann, the antic jollity of Nino Rota and the urgent sprints of Lalo "Mission: Impossible" Schifrin--often in the same crazy scene.
  64. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
    It's all a little ultra-cool for me. Shakespeare was right. Revenge is a dish best served ice-cold, not cool.
  65. Valiant
    It's perhaps the first animated kids' film that can claim to be "based on a true story."
  66. Supercross
    The movie itself has no edge. It barely has a movie.
  67. Reel Paradise
    Since Reel Paradise doesn't make the mistake of lionizing Pierson while it keeps up with him and his family, the results stay with you, like memories of an unexpected and surprising vacation.
  68. The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till
    If you don't believe film can change the world, you haven't seen the documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Skeleton Key
    For all its dark, Gothic intentions and supernatural twists, it lacks the emotional and intellectual punch of similarly themed films, most notably Alejandro Amenábar's "The Others."
  70. Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
    The director is first-timer Mike Bigelow. Nothing's paced or shaped for maximum payoff; the shooting and editing rhythms add only clutter and noise, and the slapstick is strictly of the skull-banging, ear-splitting variety.
  71. Four Brothers
    Proficiently made trash.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Great Raid
    The action is brilliant, the combat sharp and rattling, and the film follows the historical record more closely than most Hollywood films.
  73. Asylum
    Natasha Richardson glides through the film version of Patrick McGrath's novel Asylum in various states of fear, desire and undress, a swan among Yorkshire frumps.
  74. Grizzly Man
    The movie here is Treadwell's footage--some of it beautiful, much of it difficult to watch.
  75. Pretty Persuasion
    Not funny because it's not true.
  76. Pulse
    It's a horror movie for aficionados. But it's also for people who don't usually like horror movies at all, who regard them as cheap, crude and over-obvious.There's nothing cheap or crude in Pulse," a fine, shivery movie about the terror of solitude and emptiness.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Clean
    Clean is above all a movie about making peace with uncertainty and doubt and living with the aftershocks of the choices we make. Not the easiest task, but it may be what redeems us in the end.
  78. Chaos
    A loathsome shocker... Watching it almost turned my stomach.
  79. The Dukes of Hazzard
    Commenting on performances here is like critiquing the production design of a porno--it's beside the point. Briefly: Knoxville, bad choice, man. Reynolds, you make a good villain. Simpson, lovely posing. Scott, you're from Minnesota and it shows--but I bet stunt driving school was fun.
  80. Broken Flowers
    A dark subject certainly, but in Murray's bouquet-bearing hands, it can still hand us a laugh.
  81. 2046
    iIt's a film for art- and foreign-movie devotees. But it's also a movie for audiences who simply want to get turned on.
  82. Duma
    Duma, at its best, reminded me exactly why we loved movies as children: because they told stories like this, with images just as rhapsodically colorful and exciting.
  83. My Date with Drew
    Viewed through the right lens, "My Date…" succeeds as a warm, heartfelt story about childhood crushes and the pursuit of lifelong dreams. (Through another, it's downright unnerving.)
  84. Secuestro express
    Exploits the epidemic of kidnapping in Venezuela without offering solutions or insight--only sophomoric platitudes. Jakubowicz's talents as a filmmaker are many, but crafting an articulate, well-examined social theory isn't among them.
  85. Junebug
    Sometimes one performance makes a film worthwhile, and Junebug has one: an astonishing, moving portrayal of down-home innocence and optimism by Amy Adams.
  86. Must Love Dogs
    Writer-director Gary David Goldberg's script is full of complex and lively love patter, which Cusack especially rattles off with sometimes breakneck speed.
  87. Stealth
    Though Stealth's strengths are obvious -- high-tech marvels and a good cast -- so are its flaws. At its worst moments, a mad robot seems to have taken over the movie, too.
  88. The Aristocrats
    But though you'll laugh your head off, the whole film kind of morphs into a blur, with one poop/sex/abuse joke after another. It's exhausting, really. And save for the very best tellings, you do start to wonder: What's so funny?
  89. Tony Takitani
    It's a film for specialized tastes, quiet, delicate. But it suits those tastes beautifully.
  90. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
    An oddity: an adaptation of a popular novel co-written and directed by the novelist himself. It's also a fine, gentle film love story and a cinematic tribute to the power and manifold benefits of communications between different cultures and nations.
  91. Sky High
    Sky High doesn't aim for the highbrow and doesn't employ lowbrow toilet humor. Instead, it hits the exact middle -- a bull's-eye worthy of a superhero.
  92. Hustle & Flow
    Brewer achieves near perfection in this tense, intimate meeting between two lifelong hustlers.
  93. The Island
    Classic Bay, except it's missing the crass director's fine-tuned rhythm, his feel for adrenaline, his breakneck edits and sense of humor.
  94. Bad News Bears
    The new Bad News Bears may not make you cheer, but it should provide laughs and a good time. Isn't that what some movies are all about?
  95. 9 Songs
    Ingenious with his use of music and hypnotic pacing, Winterbottom keeps us in his world as usual. But this time that world feels ever more gratuitous, meandering and puzzling, with sex that's less and less authentic even though it's real.
  96. The Edukators
    For a film that points out so much wrong with German society and shows such dubious, dangerous behavior, it leaves the audience with high spirits and a sense of crazy exhilaration.
  97. Last Days
    The poetry of Last Days has a stoned grandeur.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    November
    The fact is, neither Harrison or scriptwriter Benjamin Brand is very honest with the audience.
  99. The Devil's Rejects
    Evil isn't this boring.
  100. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
    A peach of a story delightfully imagined by Dahl and lushly realized by Burton. It's full of witty or awesome scenes, flights of fancy and characters either totally, lovably sweet or outrageously, humorously rotten.
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