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. 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
  2. Elegy
    Elegy is a curious example of misplaced good taste.
  3. Francis Ford Coppola Presents: The Legend of Suriyothai
    It's the equivalent of our "Gone With the Wind," Russia's "War and Peace" or, to take a more modest example, South Korea's "Chunhyang." Sheer ambition and grandiose make the film interesting -- up to a point.
  4. Tyler Perry's Acrimony
    Stylistically, Acrimony has moments of genius — slow camera movements that push in on Melinda, emphasizing Henson’s performance and the building pressure — but it’s also hilariously cheesy, and slightly chintzy, which adds to its schmaltzy charm.
  5. Upgrade
    Whannell is learning how forward motion can allow a filmmaker to get away with some pretty outlandish brutality. I wish the talk-dependent sequences weren’t so foreshadowed and clunky; only Gabriel transcends them.
  6. Resident Evil
    One of the few video game movies to truly re-create the gaming experience -- from the three-dimensional maps to the structure of encountering increasingly grisly and dangerous foes at higher levels of play.
  7. Keanu
    The movie is hit-and-miss in an unusually clear-cut way. It's funny for 45-50 minutes. Then it's strained and abrasive and entirely too devoted to action-movie tropes for 45-50 minutes, minus end credits. I can recommend the first half.
  8. Slam Dance
    Mastrantonio, though capable throughout, is never provided with the spark that might ignite her subtle fire. Hulce is firmly the center of events, but, like the dancing habits he displays in flashback, he bounces around this movie like an pinball out of control. [6 Nov 1987, p.48]
    • Chicago Tribune
  9. Chop Suey
    A gentle film, not very controversial despite its gay content, Chop Sue is valuable as a record of beauty and obsession, much less interesting as a human document.
    • 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.
  11. 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.
  12. The Astronaut Farmer
    Wobbles between its comic and dramatic concerns; even those who buy the film more wholeheartedly than I might consider the overall tone uncertain.
  13. Bait
    It's another slick-and-quick muscle car of a movie, racing along for a couple of hours, taking you nowhere as fast as it can.
    • Chicago Tribune
  14. You, Me & Tuscany
    Most importantly, You, Me & Tuscany is sentient. It’s transporting and ridiculous and knows exactly what it is, and therefore, we do too. So go ahead, enjoy a little dolce vita, as a treat.
  15. Bee Movie
    Much of this wordplay is clever, though there’s something off with the plotting.
  16. Wolf Man
    The results are equal parts marital crisis, sins-of-the-father psychodrama and visceral body horror. They’re also a bit of a plod — especially in the second half, when whatever kind of horror film you’re making should not, you know, plod.
  17. Onward
    Does it work? It’s one busy movie, though without much variety in its rhythm or much breathing room in its perils.
  18. The Railway Man
    Even when the film's cheating, Firth refuses to tidy up the fictionalized Lomax's emotional state. The actor, so good at playing stalwart men contending with inner demons, can utter a simple line — "I don't think I can be put back together" — and break your heart, legitimately, without histrionics.
  19. In Her Shoes
    A great big wad of chick-lit gum, In Her Shoes gets by on the skill of its players.
  20. 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.
  21. Beau Is Afraid
    Phoenix acts his ass off, often entertainingly, and from the hoariest of ancient dark-comic tactics, Aster pulls off the occasional little miracle here and there, especially when LuPone and Posey are around.
  22. Canvas
    Canvas is a thoughtful, sweet film that handles its difficult topic--schizophrenia--with tact and tenderness.
  23. Good Boys
    Director Stupnitsky lacks finesse and an eye for framing at this stage of his directorial career. He is, however, well-attuned to catching moments on the fly.
  24. Secret Window
    Koepp, an often ingenious writer, should have followed King's example and covered his tracks better. If he had, Secret Window might have been as good as "Stir of Echoes," and not simply a mini "Misery" and a not-quite "Shining."
  25. 8 ½ Women
    Seethes with cruel lust and brainy fancy.
    • Chicago Tribune
  26. Iron Man 2
    A movie like this can handle a large character roster, but it helps if the story retains clean lines and a sense of propulsion. Iron Man 2 sags and wanders in its midsection
  27. Godzilla 2000
    This is camp, pure and simple, and unless the translators have taken far greater liberties than is apparent, the filmmakers know it.
    • Chicago Tribune
  28. Body Double
    What Body Double lacks is rigorous editing that would have pared down this story to the tight, thoughtful thriller it could be. Instead, in Body Double as it now plays, De Palma runs wild with his own violent flourishes.
  29. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Proves, unhappily enough, how U.S.-style media politics is spreading around the world.
  30. Learning to Drive
    I wish Learning to Drive imagined a fuller, more dimensional inner life for Wendy, but Clarkson develops a push-pull rapport with Kingsley that fills in the blanks — or, rather, mitigates the script's on-the-nose tendencies.
  31. Everest
    A fairly good, extremely grueling movie as far as it goes — tracks the true-life fortunes of a battered group of climbers to the highest place on Earth. Yet somehow it doesn't go far enough.
  32. Fury
    A handful of revisions, tweaks and adjustments, along with a musical score less bombastically grandiose, might've made this a film to remember.
  33. Pearl Harbor
    A movie meant to explode off the screen -- and it's at its best when those explosions are going full blast.
  34. Colossal
    This weird marriage of indie earnestness and matter-of-fact fantasy gives Colossal its moderately engaging distinction.
  35. Rhino Season
    Rhino Season unapologetically favors poetry over prose, layering its images and time frames in elegantly wrought detail. At times the visual landscape feels fussy. [12 Oct 2012, p.C3]
    • Chicago Tribune
  36. Pushing Tin
    One of the most discouraging things about many big studio movies is the way they waste resources, mainly talent and money. Pushing Tin manages to waste an excellent cast, a glossy production and what initially seems to be a bright, funny script. [23 April 1999, Friday, p.A]
    • Chicago Tribune
  37. Lonesome Jim
    As a director, Buscemi is drier than he is as a performer: more quietly funny, less intense and sometimes weirdly compassionate.
  38. Song of the Thin Man
    It just doesn't swing (or bop), but the stars always click. [15 Jul 2005, p.C8]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Tosca
    You would be better off investing in the worthy EMI recording that serves as the soundtrack, or the home video of the 1992 Malfitano-Domingo production.
  40. Basic
    The movie, one of those surprise-twist detective stories, doesn't really stand up to scrutiny in the cold light of the theater lobby.
  41. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
    The tunes are so good, you can’t believe the film itself doesn’t amount to more, especially with the rightness of the casting. Still, a few laughs are better than none.
  42. The Boss Baby
    The Boss Baby is great fun for parents, but it remains to be seen if kids will get it at all.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Apres Vous (After You)
    A sweet, if dramatically overlong trifle.
  44. Absence of Malice
    A wildly overwritten melodrama about the sins of the press. Newman's character is compelling, but Field's reporter is such a lamebrain that we know she would be fired at any major newspaper. [25 Dec 1981]
  45. Reminders of Him
    It’s not always easy to navigate the tonal landmines of a Colleen Hoover yarn. That Caswill, Monroe and Withers do so with aplomb and emotion proves what these films can be: deeply felt, transporting romances to be taken seriously.
  46. Horton Hears a Who!
    Someday, if we’re all good little boys and girls, the world will hand us a Dr. Seuss film half as wonderful as one of the books. Meantime we have the competent, clinical computer animation and relative inoffensiveness of Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! to pass the time.
  47. Airheads
    Airheads loses its guts and spark halfway through.
  48. Mr. Monk's Last Case: A Monk Movie
    If the central mystery is unsatisfying, Shalhoub remains the reason to watch. He imbues this difficult, ridiculous man with so much humanity in a performance that is both clenched and silly.
  49. Pixels
    Pixels is a blast of energetic fun.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Closer You Get
    Like sitting through a rerun of a show you kind of liked.
  51. Too Much Sleep
    No revelation, but it’s a more honorable, interesting effort than many of the crass, dopey recent big-studio schlockfests like "Say It Isn’t So" or "Tomcats" that tell similar coming-of-age tales.
  52. 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.
  53. 100 Nights of Hero
    While 100 Nights of Hero sports compelling actors and beautiful visuals (often best seen in montage, animated by editing), its storytelling about the power of storytelling is unfortunately less than riveting. The urgency of the message remains, but the delivery leaves something to be desired.
  54. 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.
  55. Hidden Figures
    A fairly entertaining gloss of a docudrama elevated by its cast.
  56. Just One of the Guys
    Joyce Hyser is fine as the male and female Terry, but since "Tootsie" is now the standard in these matters, the makeup job on Hyser as a guy should have been much more convincing. Not for a minute do we forget she's a girl. [30 Apr 1955, p.4C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  57. Danny Collins
    There's a delayed-secret hitch in the narrative that hijacks the movie, for better or worse. You don't have to believe any of it to enjoy a lot of it, however.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Dogma
    Smith's strongest suit is writing dialogue that slips smart insights in between pop-culture references and raunchy language.
  59. Three... Extremes
    A bloody strange movie--and a surprise. Who would have thought that you could put together an anthology of "extreme" Asian horror featurettes by three cutting-edge Asian directors where the most tasteful, restrained contribution was the one by Japanese mad dog moviemaker Takashi Miike?
  60. The Light Between Oceans
    It ends up more of a study in moral and ethical decision-making, than as an emotional catharsis or release, but it's a worthy journey nonetheless.
  61. The Libertine
    It's a bit too muddy, dismal-looking and smoky to beguile us, too fixated on filth and too dreary-looking to really shock us.
  62. Confetti
    Outlandish weddings aren't much of a satiric target, but Confetti isn't really going for satire; mild-mannered japes are more its style.
  63. Fire in the Sky
    Fire in the Sky would seem more a candidate for a TV movie than a theatrical film. [14 Mar 1993, p.4C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  64. The Soloist
    This is the story of a complicated and fraught friendship, and I'm not sure Wright and his collaborators figured out how much Hollywood baloney and how much naturalistic grunge to apply to it.
  65. Storytelling
    Almost as uncompromising, and sometimes as funny, as "Dollhouse" or "Happiness."
  66. The Grinch
    Beautiful to look at, and diverting enough. The material written to fill out the story is entertaining, but it doesn't resonate. You can't top what Seuss wrote.
  67. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    Bird has serious promise outside the animation realm; in "Ghost Protocol" he errs, I think, by shoving the camera too close to the bodies in the frame, so that the momentum and spatial relationships become awfully hard to parse.
  68. The Girl Next Door
    In the end it's not the tricks that elevate this movie. It's the acting.
  69. My One and Only
    If you have any curiosity at all about how a fellow like George Hamilton became a fellow like George Hamilton, My One and Only answers the question by looking, fondly, at his primary caregiver.
  70. The Beaver
    Director Jodie Foster's film reasserts the feverish, defiant, often gripping talent of actor Mel Gibson.
  71. Sordid Lives
    A train wreck you can't help but watch.
  72. Revenge
    Revenge is quite entertaining in its countdown to the first quivering coupling between Costner and Stowe. He trembles; her nostrils flair. But once they`ve made it, the film turns ugly as Costner foolishly seeks a vacation idyll with her in his small Mexican vacation home. The beatings that follow are plentiful enough to leave no one unscarred.
  73. Restaurant
    Some films, oddly enough, can be too ambitious for their own good, which is the case with Restaurant.
  74. The Mummy
    Packs so much hell-for-leather action, gorgeous Moroccan scenery and eye-popping Industrial Light and Magic visual effects into its two hours that, after a while, I began to get tired of it.
  75. Cosmopolis
    I just wish Cronenberg hadn't adapted the book on his own. Behind the camera, he does remarkable things, turning Packer's limo into what Cronenberg himself has described as an upscale version of "Das Boot." But the playlets constituting the whole are thick, stubbornly undramatic affairs; the verbiage is lumpy, self-conscious.
  76. Just Mercy
    What’s missing, I think, is a sense of human complication within an inhuman judicial sphere. While Foxx works wonders, especially in his scenes with Jordan, Just Mercy rarely gets under the skin or behind the eyes of McMillian.
  77. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
    The Hunger Games has completed its tasks well and met fan expectations.
  78. Tina
    The film doesn’t seem particularly interested in who Turner is as an artist, or her creative inclinations and musical instincts.
  79. A Quiet Place
    My favorite moment, an encounter between Regan and one of the monsters in a cornfield, plays with sound and image and tension, creatively. Other bits are more shameless.
  80. Brubaker
    Robert Redford stars as a reform-minded prison warden fighting for his life against a corrupt prison system. Competent but dreary. [11 July 1980, p.8]
    • Chicago Tribune
  81. Festival in Cannes
    Makes compromises itself, but only because of its small budget and its director's mixed dark-and-rosy vision, at once cynical and sentimental. Yet at least it has a vision -- of both life and cinema.
  82. Red Hook Summer
    It's a scramble, marked by the unruly variety of visual strategies Lee prefers.
  83. The Croods: A New Age
    Because the movie starts at an 11 and doesn’t let up, the runtime feels overly long. However, the voice performances are excellent, especially Cage, who brings his signature sense of yearning pathos to Grug the Neanderthal.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Grumpy Old Men
    Two old people doing old people things, talking about old people stuff, and eating old people food. Sound interesting? Grumpy Old Men is a film that manages to be one of the scariest things I have ever seen. [28 Jan 1994, p.L]
    • Chicago Tribune
  85. Love the Hard Way
    Writer-director Peter Sehr displays obvious directing talent, especially in his use of nonlinear love scenes. He shows the coupling, the approach and release all at once, out of order, mixing the entire seduction ritual into one fluid montage.
  86. Southpaw
    Does it succeed? Sort of. It helps if you don't mind your boxing movies made up of massive granite chunks of previous boxing movies.
  87. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    If Hollywood is really a dream factory, then it's the movie moguls and movie stars who live that dream to the hilt. In the late 1970s few lived quite as large as Robert Evans.
  88. Femme Fatale
    The film is De Palma's tribute to film noir, to Paris and to the cinema itself.
  89. Peter Rabbit
    The animation technology is top-notch, but the gentle spirit of Beatrix Potter's books is subsumed into a chaotic, violent mayhem, manically soundtracked to the day's hits.
  90. The Wedding Guest
    The Wedding Guest ultimately just fails to gel into something captivating.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Barney's Great Adventure
    In what may well prove a Titanic for tykes, Barney's sweetness gets spiked with some welcome wit in Steve Gomer's classy direction of Steven White's screenplay. [16 Apr 1998, p.6]
    • Chicago Tribune
  92. Four Brothers
    Proficiently made trash.
  93. The Descent
    You either go for a movie like this or you don't. But though I didn't like it much, I've got to admit that The Descent is a nerve-jangler.
  94. 3:10 to Yuma
    The acting is its chief strength. Russell Crowe brings a cocky charisma to Ben Wade.
  95. Vengo
    Filled with dazzling moments, Vengo never quite reaches the heights those moments promise.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
    Under normal circumstances, too many comics spoil the show.
  97. Trust
    His (Schwimmer) film deserves some attention for the remarkable performance from Liana Liberato as Annie.
  98. Dark Blue
    Unlike the intrigue and winding switchback of moral mysteries that defined "L.A. Confidential," Dark Blue travels on flat, predictable terrain.
  99. 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.
  100. The To Do List
    Uber-raunchy but pretty interesting as sex comedies go.
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