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 1.4 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. The Claim
    I liked The Claim -- as much for its stark visual beauty and impassioned performances as its intelligent script and willingness to probe the tragic side of life.
    • Chicago Tribune
  2. Finding Forrester
    It's rare to see a movie that takes such joy in the power of words, not to create lofty works of art but to effect the simple, necessary translation of what's in one's heart and mind.
    • Chicago Tribune
  3. Comedian
    A film that comes close to re-creating the funny-but-serious environment of stand-up comedy.
  4. Off the Black
    There's something very right with Off the Black in terms of pure emotion and performance craft.
  5. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
    Exceptionally clever, hilariously gloomy and bitingly subversive.
  6. Chances Are
    Though the gags make great use of embarrassment, they stop short of actively humiliating the characters, a gesture that these days counts as something fine and noble. [10 March 1989, p.E]
    • Chicago Tribune
  7. All the Old Knives
    All the Old Knives settles for all the old tropes.
  8. Wise Guys
    Big laughs, foul language to the point of absurdity and one hilarious, screaming performance atop another combine to make Wise Guys one of the funniest times you will have at the movies this year.
  9. The Photograph
    The Photograph treats all its characters with some decency and understanding, in a genre where straw villains and cardboard adversaries typically run rampant. The plaintive, jazz-inflected musical score by Robert Glasper establishes the right vibe and level of drama, which is to say: more like life and less like the movies.
  10. Cats Don't Dance
    Cats Don't Dance is a cinematic anomaly: an animated film that could have more appeal for adults than for children.
  11. Maverick
    Too rich, too loaded, Maverick may have misplayed its cards, kept its eyes on the pot instead of the players. In movies, as in poker, you can't always trust a pat hand.
  12. 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."
  13. Despicable Me 2
    It's a reasonably efficient baby sitter, done up in 3-D computer-generated animation of no special distinction. But the first one's weird mixture of James Bond bombast and hyperactive pill-shaped Minions (the protagonist Gru's goggle-clad helpers) had the element of surprise in its favor.
  14. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
    Greenaway's regard is certainly unblinking, though it's hard to see where the seriousness and compassion come in. The thematic oppositions are primitive and are not fleshed out by the characters, who remain flat and puppetlike. [6 Apr 1990, p.G2]
    • Chicago Tribune
  15. The Matrix Reloaded
    For such a rich visual movie, "Reloaded" tells far more than it shows; the pivotal scenes involve people explaining things to Neo. Too many plot turns resemble detours, and even the ever-amusing Smith feels like a red herring in the scheme of things.
  16. Cowboy Bebop the Movie: Knockin' on Heaven's Door
    Magnetic, beautiful stuff.
  17. Ted
    You can find this clever, or you can find it lazy, and this is why MacFarlane is the biggest mixed blessing in contemporary TV comedy: He is both.
  18. The Goonies
    As entertaining as The Goonies finally becomes--and its last hour is mostly one pleasure after another--it's a shame that Spielberg, writer Chris Columbus and director Richard Donner felt the need to take the low road in terms of language. [7 Jun 1985, p.A]
    • Chicago Tribune
  19. Beautiful Boy
    If the key performances in Beautiful Boy were any less honest, the film's half-formed suppositions would undo it utterly.
  20. The Woman in Black
    The film, a handsome nerve-jangler co-produced under the storied Hammer horror banner, amps up the scares without turning them into something completely stupid. Success!
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Santa vs. the Snowman
    The movie has an avalanche of eye-popping visual effects, including a bustling Santa's village, nifty "Jimmy Neutron"-type gadgets and "Stars Wars"-like igloo walking robots - and, of course, the requisite heartwarming happy ending.
  22. The Golden Bowl
    Dances in circles until you tire of admiring it.
    • Chicago Tribune
  23. U-571
    As beautiful as all the film's technology is, it needs more real human beings around - to pull the switches, man the pumps and scuttle through those corridors.
  24. Saved!
    After bravely lampooning an institution so many consider beyond reproach, Saved! chickens out, imparting its most direct and lasting message in its disappointing conclusion: Don't Offend. Amen.
  25. 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.
  26. 5x2
    When you piece it all together, it becomes mildly fascinating.
  27. Last Exit to Brooklyn
    Credit for the triumph of this picture must go to West German director Uli Edel, who works on a canvas as large as Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. [11 May 1990, p.C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  28. The Five-Year Engagement
    As in last year's "Bridesmaids," an authentic, dimensional human element animates the jokes and the characters with whom we spend a couple of highly satisfying hours.
  29. About Last Night
    In a rom-com, there's no rom without the com. Hart and Hall give it their all.
  30. Empire of the Sun
    The film is sober, serious-minded and paced like a funeral march.
  31. I Want You Back
    Director Jason Orley (”Big Time Adolescence”) handles it all well enough. It’s Day and Slate who make the very best of it.
  32. Micmacs
    For me, the mechanics or even the (excellent) designs are not enough. Jeunet's archness keeps conventional empathy or engagement at bay, and by design maintains a tone of artificiality.
  33. Fear of a Black Hat
    If you are offended by jokes about sex, sex organs, sex, bodily functions, sex, the L.A. riots or sex, you should probably stay far away. But if you're up to the challenge, you should find Fear of a Black Hat to be a clever piece of work-a nasty satire with savvy and sass. [17 Jun 1994, p.J]
    • Chicago Tribune
  34. Fright Night
    Fright Night is pleasantly, if effortlessly, well-acted and gently scripted. And when the ghoulish special effects and wry comedy aren't on screen, there's the occasional in-joke for viewer distraction. [06 Aug 1985, p.4C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  35. Plane
    It’s the junky, janky mid-winter Liam Neeson thriller we used to get with that first flip of the calendar, only this one stars Gerard Butler, and is directed by Jean-Francois Richet, whose two-part gangster biopic “Mesrine” was pretty juicy. This one’s more pulp than juice, but it’s enjoyable.
  36. A Man of No Importance
    Director Suri Krishnamma, depends on Finney for its power. His great performance carries the film over its shallow spots, its wish fulfillment, its pull toward caricature. [03 Feb 1995]
    • Chicago Tribune
  37. The Help
    Davis is reason No. 1 the film extracted from Kathryn Stockett's 2009 best-seller improves on its source material.
  38. Back to the Beach
    It's a light, slight premise that seems more suited to a Saturday Night Live sketch than a full-length movie, but it plays pleasantly enough in its video incarnation, where modesty sometimes can be a virtue.
  39. Girls Rock!
    Girls do rock, and the final concert is both wild and cathartic. Too bad we haven’t learned more about these rockers along the way.
  40. 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.
  41. Annabelle: Creation
    It's simply a treat to watch Sandberg's style on display in Annabelle: Creation, filled with circling dolly shots that reveal and conceal evil in torturously teasing ways, effective narrative use of practical lighting for dramatic effect, and heart-pounding sound effects and a score of screaming strings.
  42. Ira & Abby
    The film may be slight, but it is not stupid, and director Robert Cary keeps both stickiness and shtickiness at bay.
  43. Stuck on You
    It's not naughty. It's nice. Naughty is funnier.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rolling Family
    The wedding site at the end of the road offers beautiful vistas overlooking Brazil, but it's hardly worth the trip.
  45. Dragnet
    If the movie has a weakness, it's an over-reliance on Bond-style car chases and mass action scenes, which take away from the much richer and more original character comedy. But Mankiewicz's basic instincts seem admirable. He knows that a movie begins with people, and that`s a very good start.
  46. Bug
    Ashley Judd as Agnes White, and a relative newcomer, the remarkable Michael Shannon, as Peter Evans. They're both spellbinding.
  47. Dream Lover
    Kazan does have his father's fierce erotic curiosity, that sense that once you unravel a story's real lusts and greeds, you've solved it.
  48. Lan Yu
    Wong Kar-wai made a much more dynamic film, "Happy Together," five years ago. Lan Yu suffers by comparison.
  49. Kwik Stop
    This is the debut feature for Columbia College graduate Gilio, and it shows great promise.
  50. Mumford
    On a direct line with the whimsical small-town comedies of the '40s and '50s.
  51. Train of Life
    A fairy tale comedy with the Holocaust as the background, a collision of terror and community, death and beauty.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Unbreakable
    The irony is that although Unbreakable is as compellingly watchable, stylish and intriguing as its predecessor, its ending has almost the opposite effect on the overall picture.
    • Chicago Tribune
  53. Ararat
    This toweringly ambitious picture confronts a brilliant director, Atom Egoyan, with a major historical event and a profound theme.
  54. A Few Good Men
    Works because it's able to draw so many side issues into its central conflict, spreading its concerns culture-wide. [11 Dec 1992]
    • Chicago Tribune
  55. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
    Predictable and dull.
  56. The Mudge Boy
    Simply photographed and well acted, The Mudge Boy captures "Deliverance"-level disturbing images as it takes an unsentimental approach to its characters.
  57. Sleight
    Sleight fuses superhero story with a tough coming-of-age tale, and it enlivens and elevates both genres into something new and different, while heralding the arrival of Latimore as a star.
  58. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
    A comedy that seems to have most everything going for it but the ability to make us laugh.
  59. 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.
  60. The Ice Harvest
    The Ice Harvest is not "Bad Santa" redux. It has comic moments - primarily from Oliver Platt, in fine drunken stupor - but Ramis' tiptoe into film noir isn't really a comedy.
  61. On Chesil Beach
    The ending is very different from the novella, and I was surprised at its shameless, ruthless emotional effectiveness.
  62. The Snows of Kilimanjaro
    Shallow, colorful adaptation of one of Hemingway's best short stories. [08 May 1998, p.M]
    • Chicago Tribune
  63. The Rental
    It starts out good and turns out dumb, ditching a promising, nicely suggestive first half for second-half payoffs (revealed in the trailer) taking director Dave Franco’s feature directorial debut into lame and lamer slasher-film territory.
  64. My Favorite Year
    This overrated backstage TV nostalgia comedy, set in 1954, does boast standout performances by Peter O'Toole and Joseph Bologna as characters modeled on Erroll Flynn and Sid Caesar. [07 Nov 1997]
    • Chicago Tribune
  65. Seven Veils
    It’s a lot. Seyfried, who has worked with writer-director Egoyan before on the super-ripe erotic drama “Chloe” (2009), finesses some zig-zaggy tonal swerves confidently and well. The writing, however, wobbles.
  66. The Interpreter
    As beautifully designed, swift and sleek as a classic sports car, throbbing with emotion and intelligence, it's a neat suspense film that's also dramatically and sociologically potent, with two supremely talented stars, Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, delivering beyond the emotional call of duty.
  67. The Monkey
    While I hope Perkins doesn’t lean into jokey sadism as a dominant creative impulse — we have too many jokey sadists with movie deals as is — The Monkey asserts his stealth versatility as well as his confident technique.
  68. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    The attitudes evinced by most of the characters, and the movie itself, are those of the admiring tourist, and as two-hour tours go, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel goes smoothly.
  69. Restaurant
    Some films, oddly enough, can be too ambitious for their own good, which is the case with Restaurant.
  70. The Abyss
    The Abyss is at its best during such moments of reverie-when the abstract metaphors and the unique physicality of the deep sea setting come together to produce powerful, unvoiced meanings. The film does have its beckoning depths; what it needs is a more polished surface. [9 Aug 1989, Tempo, p.1]
    • Chicago Tribune
  71. The Man Without a Face
    The story is full of good feelings, but as one sits there it all seems so predictable that you can't help but ask the point of it all. [27 Aug 1993, p.C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  72. Lucy
    When everything and anything is possible, nothing feels urgent or truly dramatic. The movie devolves into a melange of digital effects and sequences of glamorous slaughter, as Lucy swaggers around, with that big brain, and slouches toward becoming a full-lipped deity.
  73. Major League
    Major League is a movie that knows what it's up to. It skims along agreeable surfaces, expertly balancing its comedy with melodrama and fulfilling expectations right on schedule. As a movie, it`s a superior industrial product.
  74. The Devil Wears Prada
    It's an occasion for Streep to play against a stereotype, and win. It's a rout, in fact.
  75. Hello I Must Be Going
    There are times when the facile flimsiness of Hello I Must Be Going threatens to float right off the screen. But Lynskey has her ways of surprising us, even when nothing in the script itself is doing so.
  76. The American
    The movie is a paradox. It's ostentatiously restrained. You cannot say Corbijn lacks rigor. You can, however, say that when a talented director's approach too precisely mirrors the tightly calibrated performance strategy of his leading player, a movie risks stalling out completely.
  77. Zoolander
    The main problem is the director-star's choice to play so far beneath his intelligence for so long. Stiller lacks the physical gifts and projected sweetness of, say, Jim Carrey in "Dumb and Dumber," and unlike Peter Sellers in the "Pink Panther" movies, he can't keep a straight face.
    • Chicago Tribune
  78. 2 Days in New York
    The comedy works some of the time; the pathos, more so. There's an undertow of grief in 2 Days in New York relating to the passing of Marion's (and Delpy's) mother, who died in 2009.
  79. A Midsummer Night's Dream
    Most of the original play's magical speeches are preserved here, and however far this film may seem to stray from the original text, the delights remain. [14 May 1999, Friday, p.A]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Stop-Loss
    While Stop-Loss doesn’t pack anything like the emotional wallop of her previous film, the movies do share Peirce’s clear-eyed refusal to answer difficult questions with simplistic answers.
  81. How to Train Your Dragon
    The remake is just like the original, but there’s more of it. And less.
  82. Crazy/Beautiful
    Stockwell deserves kudos for working mental illness into a teen story without making it the explicit focus, as in simplistic exercises like "Girl, Interrupted."
    • Chicago Tribune
  83. September 11
    An often brilliant, always revelatory, deeply interesting omnibus film.
  84. Runaway Jury
    It's suspenseful. Fleder and his able cast deliver a brisk, entertaining story that, despite straining credulity at times, earns a positive verdict -- no undue audience-rigging required.
  85. The Good Shepherd
    It's fitting that a drama trading in classified information would turn out to be such a cryptic bugger.
  86. Big Miracle
    Big Miracle tells its sort-of-true version of events in a democratic and humane fashion, by way of a rangy, lively group of competing interests who actually do on occasion act like real people.
  87. Isle of the Dead
    Among the finest hours of horror star Boris Karloff. [18 Oct 2005, p.C3]
    • Chicago Tribune
  88. Vice Versa
    Shoulders sloping, not quick on the uptake, utterly agog at the adult world of sex and high-powered business, Reinhold's character is a wonder to behold. And Fred Savage is completely inoffensive as the officious boy-man, which is quite an achievement for a child actor. [11 Mar 1988, p.A]
    • Chicago Tribune
  89. Kindergarten Cop
    Kindergarten Cop never feels mercenary in the manner of, say, "Look Who's Talking Too" or "Three Men and a Little Lady." It is, instead, an extremely amiable, good-hearted film, unashamed of its desire to please and quite entertaining for it. [21 Dec 1990, p.B]
    • Chicago Tribune
  90. Vajra Sky Over Tibet
    Too often the film itself simply shuffles the postcards of Tibetan scenery, Buddhist rituals and the Tibetan people (many amazing faces on view, to be sure).
  91. Ice Age
    It's a fast, funny picture, and the worst thing you can say about it is that it's no "Toy Story," no "Shrek." That may be true, but one thing Ice Age proves is that the new digitized cartoons are a form whose time has come.
  92. The Boxtrolls
    The Boxtrolls remains relentlessly busy up through its final credits, and it's clever in a nattering way. But it's virtually charmless.
  93. Norma Rae
    Norma Rae is not a bad film, just one that made me angry for what it might have been. Imagine another, more skillful actor, say Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino, in Leibman's part; then strip away some of the more broadly drawn scenes, and Norma Rae could have been yet another fine film by director Martin Ritt ("Hud," "Sounder," and "Conrack"). [2 March 1979, p.4-12]
    • Chicago Tribune
  94. Meet the Robinsons
    When it enters the future, it's a new-fangled, old-fashioned jim-dandy of a show.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Nina's Tragedies
    Watching Nina's Tragedies, an Israeli film that pocketed 11 of its country's Oscar-equivalents, is a rare but almost perverse experience.
  96. 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.
  97. The Polar Express
    This movie, which aspires to be a Christmas movie classic on the "It's a Wonderful Life" level, is overwhelming, enjoyable and impressive, without being really entrancing.
  98. Edmond
    Mamet is a writer who turns off some audiences, and almost everything that might bother them is in Edmond: foul language, raging machismo, violence and seemingly bigoted tirades. But almost everything audiences like about him is there too: candor, suspense, ideas, crackling slang, vivid characters.
  99. The Natural
    The Natural is a fairy tale from start to finish, full of wildly implausible scenes that win over our emotions because, frankly, that's the way we'd like life to be. Being a baseball fan involves repeatedly experiencing exquisite pain and exquisite joy. Well, there's a lot of both in The Natural.
  100. Enemy
    It's not a frenzied head-trip, the way Roman Polanski's "The Tenant" was, nor does the movie have half the energy and nightmarish allure of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive." It's best taken, I think, as a jape and a wry male-centric fable on transgression and desire.
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