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 Bourne Ultimatum
    This is the most satisfying thriller of the year, capping the Bourne trilogy.
  2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    It's virtually non-stop action, though director David Yates, who has taken good care of these final four, ever-meaner Potter adventures, does a very crafty thing, following adapter Steve Kloves' screenplay.
  3. Take Shelter
    Here's what I most appreciate about Shannon's work with the writer-director Jeff Nichols: the subtlety.
  4. The Salesman
    The acting is wonderful throughout, but Alidoosti creates an especially haunting depiction of one woman's adversities in a country, and a marriage, that may not have her best interests at heart.
  5. You Can Count on Me
    Honest, poignant and very funny, full of memorable, moving moments.
    • Chicago Tribune
  6. The Pianist
    A great movie on a powerful, essential subject -- the Holocaust years in Poland -- directed with such artistry and skill that, as we watch, the barriers of the screen seem to melt away.
  7. Get Out
    It's a little of everything: unnerving, funny in just the right way and at the right times, serious about its observations and perspectives on racial animus, straight-up populist when it comes to an increasingly (but not sadistically) violent climax. That's entertainment!
  8. West Side Story
    Whatever this new adaptation’s popular reception, it’s five times the movie the ‘61 movie was. Spielberg has never made a musical before, but this one looks and feels like the work of an Old Hollywood master of the form — someone who knows when, where and why to move a camera capturing bodies in rhythmic motion.
  9. California Split
    An Altman classic on a subject he knows well.
  10. Amy
    Amy stays above the tabloid fray, up to a point. Kapadia hasn't made a groundbreaking documentary; it's more like a classy, high-end edition of "Behind the Music."
  11. The Edge of Heaven
    It's a vivid ensemble experience, and the acting is wonderful.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Savages
    A bracingly honest, funny movie about death and family that skillfully sidesteps the usual pitfalls of sentimentality and mawkishness. It’s what you might call an awards season miracle.
  13. An Education
    The film version of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” came out in the year in which An Education is set, and beyond the hairstyles, there’s something of the willful, gleeful Golightly reinvention expert about Jenny.
  14. Lebanon
    It's an uncompromising drama, not easy to watch. And it is one of the year's highlights.
  15. Ash Is Purest White
    This is one of Zhangke’s peak achievements: pure cinema, and a story of the underworld unlike anything you’ve seen before.
  16. The Endurance
    If Shackleton's adventure was to be the swan song for those 19th century explorers whose exploits stirred the imagination of young men around the globe, it was a magnificent way to say farewell.
  17. The Rider
    Subtle, elemental and powerfully beautiful, writer-director Chloe Zhao’s The Rider is the Western of the new century, and the most enveloping film experience I’ve had this year.
  18. Eighth Grade
    Eighth Grade works you over, audience wincing followed by audience gratification, narrative tension followed by release, crises leading to just-in-time catharsis.
  19. Exit Through the Gift Shop
    The brilliantly untrustworthy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop reminds us that a film can start out in one direction and then change course so radically, it becomes an act of provocation unto itself.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Sling Blade
    Resonates like the best of Southern fiction.
  21. Offside
    Jafar Panahi of Iran is one of his country's great filmmakers, and Offside is his best movie to date.
  22. El Dorado
    El Dorado is essentially a darker remake of Rio Bravo, with Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Hunnicutt and James Caan as the now archetypal quartet. But, though the situation is the same, the mood is crisper, tenser, with a heightened sense of pain, loss and death underlying the humor and action.
  23. Mona Lisa
    It is precisely that interplay between tenderness and ruthlessness that is the special excitement of Mona Lisa, one of the year's most spellbinding films. [2 July 1986, p.C3]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Easy Rider
    Tune in, turn on and drop out with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda as two down-and-out motorcyclists in this classic road film about the 1960s counterculture. Joining them on their cross-country trip is a young Jack Nicholson, whose charismatic performance keeps the movie rolling through some of its more experimental moments. [22 Jun 2012, p.C6]
    • Chicago Tribune
  25. Knocked Up
    Knocked Up is more verbally adroit than it is visually. But Apatow's awfully sharp as a chronicler of contemporary romantic anxieties.
  26. The Quiet Man
    The most purely enjoyable of all the great Ford films. [18 Sep 1998, p.J]
    • Chicago Tribune
  27. Turtles Can Fly
    A beautiful, intensely moving film.
  28. The Departed
    The Departed exists in a movie-place about as far from personal statements as a storied director can get. Maybe those days for Scorsese are long gone. But Scorsese's sense of craft remains sure.
  29. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
    An exquisitely realized film; a little gem, it keeps its conflicting or varying themes of tranquility and violence, sacred and profane love, recklessness and wisdom, in almost perfect balance.
  30. Festival Express
    The results are spine-tingling. There's only one thing to say about this movie and its rescuers, recovered from the dead--and the Dead: Rock on.
  31. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    This is one of the finest achievements of the year, and while it's easy to lose your way in the labyrinth, I don't think Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is most interesting for its narrative pretzels. Rather, it's about what this sort of life does to the average human soul.
  32. The Wild Robot
    Recently making its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Wild Robot already has been pumped up into the contradictory “instant classic” stratosphere. I understand the enthusiasm, or most of it, I guess, especially given the mellow, less photorealistic, more painterly visual landscapes, and Sanders’ assured tear-duct massage technique.
  33. Harakiri
    Kobayashi's great, laceratingly exciting 1962 Japanese samurai revenge saga, once voted by Japanese critics their country's all-time best film. [03 Mar 2006, p.C5]
    • Chicago Tribune
  34. Support the Girls
    The perfect bait-and-switch of a film. Its light, sweetly frisky exterior and easygoing pace camouflages what a subtle and brilliant piece of bracing social commentary it is; a deft portrait of sisterhood existing under the thumb of capitalistic patriarchy.
  35. Half Nelson
    No halves about it: Half Nelson is a wholly absorbing and delicately shaded portrait of an educator played by Ryan Gosling, a young man harboring an offstage secret.
  36. Cat People
    Cat People is an admirable first entry into the brainy, elegant, spooky world of Val Lewton. [09 Sep 2005, p.C4]
    • Chicago Tribune
  37. The Fabulous Baker Boys
    Smooth and smoky, The Fabulous Baker Boys is an impressive debut for Kloves; he's a filmmaker who will be heard from. [13 Oct 1989, p.A]
    • Chicago Tribune
  38. The Insider
    This is a first-class muckraking melodrama: an admirable picture.
  39. The Sun
    The Sun sheds only so much literal light on its chosen subject; it's a film of shadows and silence, the calm before and after the storm. But everything you see and hear carries weight and an eerie poetic undercurrent.
  40. Domestic Violence
    Be forewarned: The movie lasts three hours and 16 minutes, and nearly all of it deals with subjects that polite society (and even rude society) tends to ignore or evade.
  41. About Schmidt
    This is a superb film and one of Nicholson's great performances, tamped down but magnetic.
  42. Love and Diane
    One of the most searing, heartbreaking and ultimately triumphant mother/daughter stories ever put on film.
  43. The Asphalt Jungle
    One of the great film noirs and a quintessential heist movie, a classic of American hard-boiled storytelling that, though endlessly copied, hasn't been bettered. [27 May 2005, p.C6]
    • Chicago Tribune
  44. Hero
    Swooningly beautiful, furious and thrilling, Zhang Yimou's Hero is an action movie for the ages.
  45. Shane
    Shane is one of those movies that I revisit at least once a year, just to remind myself how stirring a Western can be when the mix of myth and method is just right. [21 June 2002, p.C8]
    • Chicago Tribune
  46. The Taste of Things
    There’s life, lived with serenity and purpose and, yes, plenty of money and property, in the lives depicted in Hung’s film. Binoche and Magimel see to it in every scene, with or without utensils.
  47. Neil Young: Heart of Gold
    Pretty-near pure gold.
  48. Mudbound
    A vividly acted, dramatically rich depiction, harsh and beautiful, of life and death in 1940s Mississippi, following two families of intertwined destinies.
  49. Passing
    A lesser director, working in a clunky-realism vein with less skilled designers and especially performers, might’ve turned Passing into a conventional something or other. In novel form, and in Hall’s beautiful adaptation, it is anything but conventional.
  50. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
    (Mitchell's) Hansel may be small-boned and soft-featured in an androgynous way, but his Hedwig is a force of nature, burned out and jaded yet brimming with compassion and bursting with energy.
  51. Holy Motors
    Lavant is splendid in the film, and he's essentially the entire film - and yet, Holy Motors is somewhat more than a contraption built for a fearless performer.
  52. Unforgiven
    Individual scenes work, but the movie seems overstuffed-why is the Harris character necessary-and halting.
  53. The Wages of Fear (1953)
    One of the most deeply and disturbingly nihilistic films ever made, as well as one of the most heart-pounding thrillers. [06 Mar 1992, p.C2]
    • Chicago Tribune
      • Posted Jul 1, 2020
  54. The Dark Knight
    Sensational, grandly sinister and not for the kids, The Dark Knight elevates pulp to a very high level.
  55. Everybody Wants Some!!
    The film doesn't so much build as glide, in a pleasing, half-stumbling way, to the first day of school, which links Everybody Wants Some!! to Linklater's previous film, the gentle masterwork "Boyhood."
  56. The Past
    The miracle is that even with a bit of dramaturgical clunkiness The Past is fluid, intimate cinema. Few directors today can shoot in such tightly confined spaces, with such a determined control over his actors' movements, and make the drama work so well.
  57. Pillion
    The edgy and explicit Pillion might be set within the parameters of a relationship that many would consider “alternative,” but the heart of it is the same as any love story that becomes a lesson in self-love.
  58. Black Bag
    Black Bag may be modest, and frivolous, but it’s sharp-witted. Every performance feels right.
  59. Cinderella
    Enchanting film.
  60. One Child Nation
    In a very full and riveting 85 minutes, One Child Nation assembles a huge story together from many small, crucial pieces.
  61. 24 Hour Party People
    Jam-packed mishmash of wall-to-wall music, trenchant character study, slick sociology and sly witty-Brit comedy.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Vengeance Is Mine
    Icily brilliant.
  63. The Sacrifice
    As he was dying, Tarkovsky fashioned this great valedictory about a family in the first stages of nuclear apocalypse and a father's ultimate sacrifice. [31 Jan 2003, p.C4]
    • Chicago Tribune
  64. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
    In the end, both Dahl’s stories and Anderson’s movies require a few common but difficult skill sets of the actors. Wit. Technical precision. Verbal facility. Adroit timing. And some fun, even if it’s tightly prescribed and carefully confined to a certain place in a fastidiously arranged, ever-shifting picture frame.
  65. Atonement
    Hampton and Wright have been more than sensible when it comes to Atonement. They’ve responded intuitively to a tale that is half art and half potboiler, like so many stories worth telling.
  66. The Tree of Life
    This may be the most overtly Christian mainstream picture since "The Passion of the Christ." Unlike that one, though, Malick's comes with a generosity of spirit large enough to get all sorts of people (including non-believers) thinking about the nature of faith and what it's all about.
  67. Decision to Leave
    Decision to Leave, director and co-writer Park Chan-wook’s dazzling, confounding, gorgeously crafted variation on a dangerously familiar film trope, takes its component parts and comes up with something no one has ever built before.
  68. Alexandra
    It's unlike any other war film, in any language.
  69. The Fabelmans
    This filmmaker has earned the right to make a movie about why he makes movies the way he does. And with Williams and Dano, especially, he gets performances that can match the technique.
  70. Naked
    even in the notable ranks of Leigh's movie, TV and theater work-an oeuvre embracing high comedy, biting comment and shivering pathos-Naked is extraordinary. In the hands of Leigh and his magnificently gifted, gutsy cast, these days and nights on London's streets burn themselves on our minds.
  71. 'Round Midnight
    My only quibble with the film is that the character of the Frenchman is too precious to be believed. But that's no reason to stay away from this lesiurely but powerful story of not a man and his music, but a music and one of its men. [24 Oct 1986, p.A]
    • Chicago Tribune
  72. The Host
    The tone of The Host is slippery in the best way; you're never sure if you're in for a joke or a shock, yet nothing feels random.
  73. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
    With Maura delivering an explosive performance, Almodovar presents Pepa's tale with real gusto--with vibrant colors, gaudy personality, mad jokes and a sexiness that erupts off the screen.
  74. Restrepo
    The film is unusually free of cant and the usual trappings of war docs. There is no voice-over narration and very little dramatic underscoring. Right or wrong, the filmmakers shave matters of political policy and contextual analysis clean off the finished product, which runs a tight 94 minutes.
  75. The Iron Giant
    An animated tale equipped with heart, humor, blazing action and not a sappy song in earshot.
  76. Beanpole
    The film is about bargains made and broken and re-negotiated. You watch it in an anxious, protective state, regarding the fate of these characters, and this fallout.
  77. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    Without undue fawning, Neville’s moving portrait does a lovely job of presenting Rogers as two people, the public figure and the private one, sharing the same closet full of zip-up sweaters.
  78. Meek's Cutoff
    The film is not for the frantic of spirit. Its steady rhythm and even-handed tone threaten occasionally to stultify. But little things mean a lot in this universe, as they should.
  79. The Long Day Closes
    Davies has said that he loves the "poetry of the ordinary." In that sense, he doesn't just wax nostalgic about the good old days, but rather, he makes us question and reevaluate those things we may not remember so readily-not the general, but the specific.
  80. Fruitvale Station
    Fruitvale Station works because Coogler and his leading man present a many-sided protagonist, neither saint nor unalloyed sinner.
  81. I'm Still Here
    Torres is one of those screen veterans with a surgically precise relationship to the camera, never pushing, always searching for emotions expressed even as they’re being hidden, or held in check, because someone’s watching.
  82. Rachel Getting Married
    A triumph of ambience, Rachel Getting Married is the first narrative feature since the 1980s from director Jonathan Demme that feels like a party--bittersweet, but a party nonetheless.
  83. The Last Days
    The Last Days, despite its great subject, is not quite a great non-fiction film. It's too reserved and careful in tone to reach the heights of Alain Resnais' Night and Fog or Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. [12 Feb 1999, p.I]
    • Chicago Tribune
  84. The Circle
    Panahi's simplicity accentuates the movie's power: its sense of life caught unobserved.
  85. Sound and Fury
    By the time the film is over, you may not feel differently about the key issues than you first did, but you will have many more facts (sound) and opinions (fury) to consider.
    • Chicago Tribune
  86. Since Otar Left
    Though Bertuccelli's film orbits around a lie, the story is really less about deception and suspense than it is a moving portrait of female and familial bonds.
  87. Slumdog Millionaire
    After last year's black-hearted "No Country for Old Men," the Oscars may well be in the mood to embrace a fairy tale sampling every imaginable genre, with a note of triumph accompanying even the worst suffering, capped by the snazziest ending money can buy.
  88. Juliet of the Spirits
    A mad, resplendent peacock of a film, a cinematographic riot of color and sensuality that evokes its era -- the swinging mid-'60s -- as much as any movie made during those giddy years.
  89. A Christmas Tale
    Desplechin's films are great, chaotic, unsettling fun. This one's scored, elegantly, to a mixture of standards and classics and original music by Gregoire Hetzel.
  90. Paranoid Park
    “Elephant” may have won the Palme d’Or at Cannes but it really didn’t have anything to say about anything. Modest and artful, Paranoid Park says a great deal.
  91. Out of Sight
    It's a nice mix, an elegantly smoky and dangerous cocktail -- just like the old noirs, but in a more modern, shinier glass. And since the basic brew is Elmore Leonard's, it tickles as it goes down. [26 June 1998]
    • Chicago Tribune
  92. In the Shadow of the Moon
    It has the air of an officially sanctioned tribute rather than a probing study, but it's stirring all the same.
  93. Get on the Bus
    The picture has such a sweet spirit, sly wit and buoyant energy that it seems to disarm potential rancor, fear or contentiousness. [16 Oct 1996, p.1]
    • Chicago Tribune
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