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. Life Itself
    This is a big-hearted, absorbing documentary about a writer who kept on writing until very near the end. Anyone who cared about Roger Ebert will find it necessary viewing.
  2. The Shape of Water
    A sexy, violent, preposterous, beautiful fantasy, co-writer and director Guillermo del Toro’s most vivid and fully formed achievement since “Pan’s Labyrinth” 11 years ago.
  3. Caché (Hidden)
    In this movie, Auteuil ("Jean de Florette") and Binoche ("Chocolat") are such marvelous actors, they can shift us in almost any emotional direction with a speech or a glance.
  4. Adam's Rib
    This is the best of all the Tracy-Hepburn comedies--and one whose unabashedly feminist screenplay seems more incisive with each passing year. [10 Mar 2006, p.C7]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    All About My Mother
    Generous in spirit and always engaging as it demonstrates that no matter how difficult life may become, there's no excuse for being drab.
    • Chicago Tribune
  6. Moneyball
    Moneyball is the perfect sports movie for these cash-strapped times of efficiency maximization.
  7. Rushmore
    A true original: a film that stands apart from the crowd, goes its own way and all but dares you not to like it.
  8. The Wind Will Carry Us
    A film poem of sometimes humbling beauty: a movie that opens up a new world to us - in the mountains of Iranian Kurdistan - with an enchanting freshness and austerity of vision.
    • Chicago Tribune
  9. A Tale of Two Cities
    The first, and best, of the three versions of Charles Dickens' tale of the French Revolution. [05 Dec 2008, p.C5]
    • Chicago Tribune
  10. Force Majeure
    Both funny and sad, often in the same glance-averted instant. See it with someone you'd trust to stick around in an avalanche. It's one of the highlights of 2014.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Tampopo
    It is, in fact, Itami's consistent, subtle intimation of mortality that grants Tampopo a resonance beyond simple satire. [11 Sep 1987, p.A]
    • Chicago Tribune
  12. Diane
    It’s harder than it should be to describe Kent Jones’ Diane in a way that makes it sound distinctive or special, which it is.
  13. The Magician
    Perhaps Bergman's most typical variation on one of his major themes: the clash between raffish theatrical artists and sober rulers. [10 Dec 2005, p.C4]
    • Chicago Tribune
  14. Ten
    A film made by a master, with a simplicity that is really revolutionary. It's a work capable of changing the ways you look at the movies - and at life.
  15. Point Blank
    Point Blank catches the feel of the late '60s and the sunshot, edgy atmosphere of Los Angeles then (the go-go clubs, the used-car lots, the penthouses and the storm drain tunnels) like few movies since. [07 Feb 1997, p.K]
    • Chicago Tribune
  16. sex, lies, and videotape
    Sex, lies, and videotape discovers a distinctive, laconic rhythm right from the start, thanks to Soderbergh's taste for holding his shots just a bit longer than conventional, slick editing technique would allow. [11 Aug 1989, Friday, p.A]
    • Chicago Tribune
  17. The Tillman Story
    It is enraging yet nuanced, an elusive combination for any documentary.
  18. Room
    The parent/child relationship at the movie's core is endlessly fascinating.
  19. The Murder of Fred Hampton
    The Murder of Fred Hampton is a remarkable film in many ways. It keeps alive an incident which has become a symbol of repression to a lot of people.
  20. Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé
    As a visual capture of a tour supporting an album, “Renaissance” may not hold a candle to her remarkable, 65-minute visual album “Lemonade” that appeared, more or less out of nowhere, in 2016. But it’s holding an entirely different sort of candle, or rather two candles. One’s a concert movie; the other’s a how-I-made-the-concert-and-this-movie movie.
  21. The English Patient
    Boasts the elements of something greater than a love story. Too bad it devotes them to something less than a great love story. [22 November 1996, Friday, p.A]
    • Chicago Tribune
  22. Fallen Leaves
    Fallen Leaves, by contrast, strikes an adroit balance between dark and light, stoicism and optimism. There’s a stealth buoyancy at work.
  23. Nebraska
    Much of Nebraska is ordinary prose, but the best parts are plain-spoken comic poetry.
  24. Ordinary People
    Wonderful performances by Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, and Timothy Hutton. [19 Dec 1980, p.2-10]
    • Chicago Tribune
  25. Under the Sand
    It stays in your memory, will not leave you in peace.
  26. Written on the Wind
    The movie, one of Sirk's most popular, is impeccably designed and shot but also gaudy, garish, full of jukebox colors and feverish emotions. It's about the "broken" screen characters Sirk says he loves most--and it really gets to you. [14 Apr 2006, p.C6]
    • Chicago Tribune
  27. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    If Across the Spider-Verse falls an inch or two short of the earlier film, it’s because screenwriters/producers Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and David Callaham pack the second half of a pretty long movie (24 minutes longer than “Into the Spider-Verse”) with an increasingly dark and heavy threat level.
  28. Heavenly Creatures
    The performances are all superb, but special mention should go to Melanie Lynskey, a first-time film actress, who brings a frightening calm to the role of Pauline, and Sarah Peirse as Pauline's mother, whose main fault seems to be exhibiting too much care and concern for her strong-willed and imaginative daughter. [25 Nov 1994, p.M2]
    • Chicago Tribune
  29. Richard III
    By translating the voluptuous Elizabethan sensibility to the drier post-Edwardian era, and then cutting much of the play's great rhetoric and poetry, McKellen and Loncraine actually flirt with ennui rather than excitement. [19 Jan 1996, p.C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  30. Million Dollar Baby
    Achieves a mellowness and melancholy that recalls the jazzy dissonance of director (and here, composer) Eastwood's best work: "The Outlaw Josey Wales," "Bird," "Unforgiven" and "Mystic River."
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Hard Boiled
    Woo's passion and confidence in guiding his films are shown clearly in the delicate emotional shades the director is able to paint with his actors. [13 Nov 1992, p.F]
    • Chicago Tribune
  32. Last Days in Vietnam
    We need films such as Kennedy's as a corrective.
  33. Krisha
    The naked emotions, when they finally break loose, carry serious weight, akin to a John Cassavetes psychodrama.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rebecca
    Despite Hitch's discomfort at the iron hand of producer David Selznick, it remains one of his best-loved works. [23 Dec 2011, p.C10]
    • Chicago Tribune
  35. The Babadook
    Here's one of the strongest feature film debuts in a long time, in any genre.
  36. Dead Ringers
    It's almost too rich in ideas for its own good: The sense of concentration and proportion isn't there. But it remains an astonishing, magnetic, devastating piece of work. [23 Sept 1988]
    • Chicago Tribune
  37. Little Men
    Any film with Jennifer Ehle, perfect as the tightly wound but loving therapist, tends to be worth seeing in the first place.
  38. Boogie Nights
    A hard-core movie with a soft, light-hearted center and an edge like a knife.
    • Chicago Tribune
  39. The Kids Are All Right
    "All right" doesn't begin to describe it. The Kids Are All Right is wonderful. Here is a film that respects and enjoys all of its characters, the give-and-take and recklessness and wisdom of any functioning family unit, conventional or un-.
  40. The Straight Story
    A great, haunting film; it affects us in ways we're not used to...it is capable of both lifting our hearts and chilling us to the bone.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Great Escape
    Rousing, stirring, with a great cast: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Coburn. McQueen's performance as "Cooler King" Hilts is undoubtedly his most archetypal. [10 May 2013, p.C6]
    • Chicago Tribune
  42. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    The cave exists to provoke awe in mere mortals. The camera pauses at one point to take in a stalagmite reaching up to touch, nearly, a stalactite and the inevitable association is with Michelangelo's Adam and the hand of God.
  43. The Big Sleep
    One of the all-time classic noirs. [06 Nov 1998]
    • Chicago Tribune
  44. Carrie
    A voluptuously shot horror movie, with Piper Laurie (as Carrie's fanatically religious mom) and some nasty teens played by Amy Irving, Nancy Allen and John Travolta.
  45. The Red Turtle
    The grace, elegance, carefully muted color palette and gradual acknowledgment of life's milestones lift The Red Turtle far above the average so-called "family-friendly" animation.
  46. Hope and Glory
    It's a rich, funny, bracing film, one of Boorman's finest.[06 Nov 1987, p.41]
    • Chicago Tribune
  47. How to Survive a Plague
    From a terrible epidemic comes a beautiful documentary.
  48. Showing Up
    The movie has a tiny motor of a narrative, but it’s just enough. Nothing is overstated, and a lot of Showing Up isn’t even stated; it’s simply shown, on the fly or with the merest emphasis on what Lizzie goes through as she completes her work.
  49. In the Bedroom
    It sneaks up on you and shakes you: a tale of the cold hell surging up beneath that windy, sensuous Wyeth landscape.
  50. The Thin Man
    It's a terrific mix of screwball comedy and detective story, full of wit, romance and suspense. [23 Nov 2007, p.C10]
    • Chicago Tribune
  51. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
    It’s an exhilarating cinematic experience, whether you’re an Elvis fan or not — but Luhrmann makes sure you are by the end.
  52. To Die For
    Kidman crafts a characterization of breathtakingly controlled artifice, dead-on timing, dizzyingly precise humor. Her part is a knockout--in every sense of the word. [6 Oct 1995]
    • Chicago Tribune
  53. Museo
    Museo is the work of a genuinely creative directorial talent, and the early family scenes, richly detailed and shrewdly acted, provide just the right emotional context for this squabbling, indecisive gang of two.
  54. Nobody's Fool
    It's a simple-seeming but luminous movie, an intelligent, very funny and dead-on small-town comedy-drama adapted and directed by Robert Benton from Richard Russo's gently humorous 1993 novel. [13 Jan 1995, p.C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  55. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    What you’re left with, finally, is the pleasure of a wily director’s company. In much the same way John Huston defied convention and predictability in the third act of his directorial career, with films as odd and fresh as “Wise Blood” and “Prizzi’s Honor,” Lumet is doing the same, right now.
  56. West Side Story
    West Side Story has a nonpareil set of songs and dances, with ecstatic, exuberant, wonderful music by Leonard Bernstein and witty or heart-tearing lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. [Sing-a-long]
  57. Raiders of the Lost Ark
    Raiders of the Lost Ark is, in fact, about as entertaining as a commercial movie can be. What is it? An adventure film that plays like an old-time 12-part serial that you see all at once, instead of Saturday-to-Saturday. It's a modern "Thief of Baghdad." It's the kind of movie that first got you excited about movies when you were a kid.
  58. Deliver Us from Evil
    Deliver Us From Evil has a few things wrong with it, including an egregious musical score, but without resorting to sucker punches, it takes your breath away while making your skin crawl.
  59. May December
    Yes, May December exists in an uncomfortable realm. Haynes isn’t afraid of that, and American movies are better for it.
  60. Say Anything...
    Complex, knotty and at times even uncomfortable; its world has a weight and heft that makes its ultimate romanticism seem genuinely transcendant, genuinely magical. [14 April 1989]
    • Chicago Tribune
  61. The Great Beauty
    It's a beauty, all right. It's more a style show than a deep philosophical treatise, but with surfaces this sleek and faces this interesting, I'll take style over substance any day.
  62. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
    One of the great, outrageously irreverent American movie comedies. [27 Sep 2005, p.C3]
    • Chicago Tribune
  63. Patton
    The movie holds up far better than its detractors guessed - splendidly, in fact - not only thanks to Scott's spellbinding acting, but to the epic imagery, Coppola's (and Edmund North's) highly intelligent script and Schaffner's lucid, perfectly controlled direction.
  64. The Lost Daughter
    Gyllenhaal’s work with her actors is quietly spectacular, and she takes the best of Ferrante’s fearlessness while letting Colman and Buckley unfold the character’s secrets through action and reaction.
  65. The Big Sick
    The Big Sick has the confidence to let the audience come to Nanjiani and Gordon's fictionalized real-life situation, rather than yank us in, kicking and screaming.
  66. Argo
    In the populist vein of Ron Howard's "Apollo 13," Affleck's rouser salutes the Americans (and, more offhandedly, the Canadians) who restored our sense of can-do spirit when we needed it.
  67. The Grifters
    Huston gives one of her very best performances as a strong lady who can con almost everyone but herself. Her manner on the screen in this picture and in Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors'' marks Huston as the one contemporary actress who comes closest to having the power of classic female dramatic stars of years past. [25 Jan 1991]
    • Chicago Tribune
  68. Traffic
    It's a thriller that really thrills, a drama that really engages, a portrait of a world and system out of joint that is painfully convincing and totally engrossing from the first simmering minute to the last explosive second.
  69. Talk to Her
    Great filmmakers push their ideas and characters to the limit, unafraid of consequences - which is what Pedro Almodovar has done in Talk To Her, his latest film and, I think, his best.
  70. Summer Hours
    It all comes together as formidably detailed and easy-breathing craftsmanship.
  71. The Strawberry Blonde
    The stars are at their best and most rambunctious and so is Walsh. If you have any taste for Warner Brothers Golden Age studio classics--and want to catch a gem you may have missed--this one hits the spot. [17 Nov 2006, p.C6]
    • Chicago Tribune
  72. The Master
    The Master is brilliantly, wholly itself for a little more than half of its 137 minutes. Then it chases its own tail a bit and settles for being merely a fascinating metaphoric father-son relationship reaching endgame. It may not all "work," but most of it's remarkable.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Boys Don't Cry
    A stirring, emotionally true testament to foolish bravery as well as shameful evidence of the severity with which it is so often punished.
  74. The Wild Pear Tree
    The Wild Pear Tree may be the one film out there with the uncanny, gorgeously ruminative ability to take you away from everything cluttering a Chicagoan’s head space right now.
  75. Distant Voices, Still Lives
    A gripping and original piece of work, itself sure to be remembered as one of the finest films of the year.
  76. Aladdin
    Although the film in no way measures up to the features made under Disney's personal supervision, it does contain some far more imaginative and adept animation than the last several post-Walt titles.
  77. This Is England
    A small film that packs a big wallop.
  78. Sweet Sixteen
    Loach is a super-realist, and Sweet Sixteen has the disarming feel of a documentary. It's a film that miraculously catches life on the fly, without apparent embellishment, cliche or melodrama.
  79. The Player
    What "M.A.S.H." did to service comedies, what "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" did to westerns, what "The Long Goodbye" did to detective pictures, The Player does the to Hollywood success story. [24 April 1992]
    • Chicago Tribune
  80. The Son
    It's a movie imbued with a fierce intimacy -- a tone and style similar to cinema verite documentary -- but it's not a banal realism, even if the characters and settings in contemporary working-class Liege initially seem mundane.
  81. The Last Detail
    As these three rowdies carouse, bond and then break apart, Towne and Ashby give us an indelible portrait of the moral chaos and bitterness of the Vietnam years, true to the last detail. [14 Aug 1998, p.M]
    • Chicago Tribune
  82. First Reformed
    An act of spiritual inquiry, a coolly assured example of cinematic scholarship in subtly deployed motion and one of the strongest pictures of 2018.
  83. Z
    A '60s landmark. [31 Oct 2003, p.C6]
    • Chicago Tribune
  84. Baby Driver
    It's a thrill to watch it unfold, but the slick filmmaking combined with familiar tropes precludes most spontaneity.
  85. The Bad and the Beautiful
    One of the best-liked backstage dramas, with Douglas shining as egotistical producer Jonathan Shields (said to be based on David O. Selznick) who ruthlessly sheds friends, lovers and colleagues on his way to the top, only to seek them after his fall. [25 Apr 2003, p.C1]
    • Chicago Tribune
  86. The Silence of the Lambs
    Billed as one of the most frightening, depraved films ever made. Would that it were so. Instead, this is a case of much ado about nothing. [15 February 1991, Friday, p.C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  87. Beasts of the Southern Wild
    But even with the great good efforts of Wallis, the results, to some of us, betray a distrustworthy slickness reminiscent of a British Petroleum oil spill clean-up commercial.
  88. Persona
    One of the screen's supreme works and perhaps Ingmar Bergman's finest film, "Persona" is also his most radical in form and technique.
  89. One Fine Morning
    Death, dying, hearts in winter, the thrill of a sexual reawakening: Sandra’s life, as “One Fine Morning” delineates, makes room for it all because it must. Hers is an ordinary life, in the end, full of small, extraordinary grace notes. Thanks to both filmmaker and star, it’s a consistently screenworthy one.
  90. Flight of the Red Balloon
    A gem made by a filmmaker who loves life, and knows how to capture its ebb and flow and sweet complication.
  91. No Other Choice
    Park’s mastery of tone reflects his mastery of cinematic craft, which has only become more surgically refined in the past few years.
  92. The Gleaners & I
    Of all the movies I've seen in the past several years, this is one of the ones I love the most.
  93. A Real Pain
    A Real Pain, shadowed by the Holocaust and the grandmother we never see, may be a modestly scaled second feature, but Eisenberg makes an enormous leap forward, coming off his promising directorial debut, “When You Finish Saving the World.”
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sabotage
    A commercially compromised but often brilliant updating of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. [27 Sep 2013, p.C6]
    • Chicago Tribune
  95. Walkabout
    The transition from cinematographer to director can be a bumpy ride, but few have navigated it as well as British filmmaker Nicolas Roeg. [08 Mar 2002, p.C6]
    • Chicago Tribune
  96. Before Night Falls
    This is an art film in the true sense of the term, engaging the mind, senses and emotions in a way that only movies at their best can do.
    • Chicago Tribune
  97. Waking Life
    The film is truly special, truly different -- a wondrous talky roundelay about and for people who love life.
  98. The Green Knight
    Lowery creates a spiritual cousin to Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, torn between taverns and common folk and his highborn destiny. There’s a lot here, either on the surface or bubbling beneath it. In its Christianity vs. paganism square-off, The Green Knight lands on a note (and an event) very different from the poem’s.
  99. Five Easy Pieces
    What is more striking about the film is that its secondary characters are also real. The acting appears to be non-acting. . . . Karen Black is a letter-perfect Rayette, and Lois Smith, as Robert's sister, gives the most sensitive small performance in the film. (Jack) Nicholson makes it all go. He proves he is more than a character actor with many scenes, especially the confrontation with his father.
  100. From Here to Eternity
    This cast could hardly be bettered and it's a great story as well: a taut, engrossing, highly perceptive scan of the fears, desires, repressions and ugliness boiling under the deceptively quiet surface of pre-war years. Our movies rarely get an American story this rich, evocative and true, and rarely realize it as well. If "Eternity" has dated at all, it's only in a good way; we can only wish our own movies were half as good or reflected American reality half as well. [5 Dec 2003, p.C8]
    • Chicago Tribune
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