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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    • 71 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Splash
    This comedy-romance about a mermaid who falls in love with a man does have one thing going for it, the lithe shape and pleasant underwater smile of actress Daryl Hannah. Otherwise, it's a desperately unfunny film that wastes the talents of SCTV favorites John Candy and Eugene Levy. [08 June 1984, p.12]
    • Chicago Tribune
  2. All About Steve
    There’s nothing wrong with All About Steve that a rewrite couldn’t fix, as long as the rewrite involved a different writer, a different character and a different story.
  3. The Good German
    The Good German is just stiff. When Soderbergh tries one of those patented swoop-in-on-the-diagonal moves at a key dramatic moment, the effect is comic. And at that precise moment, the story starts dying a slow, oxygen-deprived death.
  4. The Ridiculous 6
    Strange as it seems, if you choose to set aside the female roles in The Ridiculous 6 reducing women to cleavage or to mute humiliation, the movie is a long, long way from the worst Sandler movie ever made.
  5. The Boss
    The Boss has zero finesse as a comedy.
  6. Woman Thou Art Loosed
    Jakes' characters are points to be made, flesh and blood cautionary tales that don't particularly feel human. His dialogue, even in the mouths of Michelle and her troubled mother, sounds as if it comes straight from the pulpit.
  7. Texas Rangers
    I can only hope that this film was a lot of fun to make. That way, someone will have enjoyed the experience.
  8. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    Reveals a flash or two of real filmmaking (mostly in a suggestively grotesque birthing sequence), enough to save it from pure lousiness.
  9. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    I can't think of much that might happen on a date evening that could be more annoying than this movie.
  10. The Kid
    Falls flat on its face.
  11. Raise Your Voice
    Worst of all, though, is the movie's moral maneuvering.
  12. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
    Now that Smith has gotten these characters and jokes out of his system, here's hoping he can turn to material that doesn't require winking at the audience.
  13. S.W.A.T.
    Technically clever but emotionally bankrupt...it's an almost laughably opportunistic movie.
  14. Torque
    It may entertain you if you don't mind senseless stories and screaming soundtracks.
  15. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
    Outrageously vapid and overdone movie.
  16. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
    The picture only comes alive at the end with Robin and his Moorish helper (Morgan Freeman in a typically strong performance) turning into a medieval Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in hand-to-hand combat with the sheriff. Otherwise, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is an entertainment without a particular point of view.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Signal
    The Signal combines the inconstancy of an omnibus film with the blandness of art by committee. The end result feels less like a blend of distinct styles than an opportunistic hodgepodge, a second-hand premise wedded to an attention-grabbing gimmick.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    He's Just Not That Into You
    Some of the players comport themselves better than others--Barrymore is sweetly wistful in her minor role, while Johansson, as a confident go-getter who sets out to steal her crush object rather than moon over him, is sexier than the whole cast put together.
  19. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
    The wastrel Sparrow ends up both overexploited and underpowered in this fourth outing.
  20. The Perfect Game
    The film is perfectly mediocre, which is heartbreaking, not heartwarming.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Master of Disguise
    A disjointed film that, but for brief flashes of comedic verve, should skip theatrical release and go straight to video.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Car
    A possessed-car film that beat Christine by a few years but is a much inferior version. [02 Feb 1993, p.3C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  23. Basic Instinct 2
    Once the credits are done rolling it's a dour, enervated mystery, selling the old cat-and-mouse games.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Women
    It's a high-powered cast, but it has painfully little to work with, apart from widely varying humor.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Sex Drive
    Sean Anders' derivative gross-out movie Sex Drive is easier to take if you accept that the answer to every baffling plot question is "because it’s a teen sex comedy."
  26. All the Old Knives
    All the Old Knives settles for all the old tropes.
  27. Love Hurts
    It’s such a drag to see Ke Huy Quan undermined so persistently by the script and the role handing him his first lead in a movie.
  28. London Has Fallen
    The film, with its wearying gamer-style rounds of death, is routine at best.
  29. Burlesque
    The choicest dialogue in Burlesque provokes the sort of laughter that other, intentionally funny films only dream of generating.
  30. Halloween: Resurrection
    Like its parade of predecessors, this Halloween is a gory slash-fest. It can't escape its past, and it doesn't want to.
  31. Sleepwalking
    Despite honorable work from Theron, Robb and Stahl, Sleepwalking makes good on its title in a not-so-good way.
  32. Crime and Punishment in Suburbia
    Just say no.
    • Chicago Tribune
  33. Whatever Works
    How big a bastard can Woody Allen build a screenplay around and still generate a modicum of audience goodwill? The answer: not this big.
  34. Like a Boss
    Conceived and developed shortly after Haddish scored, deservedly, with “Girls Trip,”” the movie is a mechanical series of witless yeast infection jokes, or thereabouts. While director Miguel Arteta has made some interesting work in the past, including “The Good Girl” and “Beatriz at Dinner,” his way with low physical comedy here is pretty artless.
  35. The Watcher
    Sluggish and preposterous, full of violence and cliches.
  36. The Honeymooners
    The movie suffers from a devastating flaw for a comedy: It isn't very funny.
  37. The Wood
    Nostalgia has no real point to make here. All that Famuyiwa can hope to accomplish is to tell his story well. In this area he is less than competent.
  38. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    A work of ineffable soullessness and persistent moral idiocy.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Deck the Halls
    Nobody expects every holiday film to ascend to classic status; in fact, we're happy to let most fade from memory as soon as the decorations are taken off the trees. We can, however, demand they live up to a certain level of fun, thereby allowing parents to watch along with their kids without plotting the most direct route to the exit.
  40. xXx: State of the Union
    What isn't scary--or exciting, amusing or fun--is XXX: State of the Union, a movie so preposterous, cliché-packed and over the top that it makes the original "XXX" seem as good as the original "State of the Union."
  41. The Little Vampire
    An odd little ghoul too cleaned up to survive, a bloodless vampire movie that's mostly lifeless as well.
  42. Sherlock Holmes
    It's a serious drag to see how Ritchie has turned Holmes and Dr. Watson into a couple of garden-variety thugs.
  43. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    Optimism is nowhere to be found in Ritchie's movie itself. It is a grim and stupid thing, from one of the world's most successful mediocre filmmakers, and if Shakespeare's King Lear were blogging today, he'd supply the blurb quote: "Nothing will come of nothing."
  44. Baywatch
    The movie is all preening and very few laughs, though Daddario and Efron have a few moments, and Johnson remains a supremely likable slab of movie star.
  45. Uncle Nino
    It's all neat and sweet and one-dimensional, more the moral to a story than a story.
  46. Committed
    One more movie comedy about how love can turn you into an idiot. And its major flaw, among many others, is that the idiocy takes over the movie.
    • Chicago Tribune
  47. Woodshock
    Now and then the Mulleavys capture a moment or glimmer of true mystery; more often, and certainly in dramatic terms, Woodshock feels like a movie that never stops buffering.
  48. Three O'Clock High
    A director can get away with stick-figure characterizations in a 30-minute television show, but here it looks like he got Siemaszko to assume a browbeaten expression and Tyson to do his best imitation of a Neanderthal, then told them to "freeze" for the duration of the project. That may be filming, but it's not directing.
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    National Lampoon's Vacation
    There are two, maybe three, good gags in National Lampoon's Vacation, which otherwise is poorly paced, sloppily put together, and full of inept, ill-conceived performances.
  50. Club Dread
    The upside is that they're likable and play well together...The downside is that they're all still communicating roughly the same message, which lies somewhere between a wink and a nudge.
  51. Land of the Lost
    Ferrell may well shoulder the blame for Land of the Lost, even if he doesn't deserve it. He did, however, willingly participate in this coarse, sloppy big-screen version of the old Saturday-morning time-warp adventure.
  52. Transformers: The Last Knight
    The rhythmic assurance of truly bracing screen action, even if it's just a bunch of metal beating up a bunch of other metal, or clobbering humans, never gains traction. The cross-cutting suggests the editors took care of things via group text.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Thomas and the Magic Railroad
    Children's films can be thrilling affairs for parents and kids. Unfortunately, this film is not likely to thrill either group.
  54. Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star
    The best thing about star and co-writer David Spade's Dickie Roberts, Former Child Star is the end-title sequence, a big, sassy sing-along in which dozens of old TV child stars spew out defiant jokes about their old careers and fame's fickle fingers.
  55. Old School
    The movie is never more than the sum of its scattershot jokes; it's sloppily put together, with scenes seemingly cut mid-dialogue.
  56. The Ghost and the Darkness
    It would be a lie to suggest that there aren't some crudely effective moments in Ghost and the Darkness. After all, this is a movie where two man-eating lions pop up every 10 minutes or so, growl and drag off another fresh corpse or two. But crude effectiveness is all the movie has to offer -- and even that is a mark it doesn't always hit.
  57. Because of Winn-Dixie
    Tries hard to be sweet but plays like "Pollyanna" with fleas.
  58. Macbeth
    It's all very "Scarface"--the De Palma remake of "Scarface," not the Hawks original. In other words, it doesn't feel modern at all. It feels about a generation late and 400 years short.
  59. Jawbreaker
    It's not particularly funny or trenchant, and its portrayal of noxious high school cliques never amounts to more than was shown in "Heathers." [19 Feb 1999]
    • Chicago Tribune
  60. Her Majesty
    Against "Whale Rider's" well-acted, intimate story, Gordon's film feels like an endless spiral of sub-par soap-opera acting, mired in trite, predictable dialogue.
  61. Peaceful Warrior
    The cast is quite good. But Peaceful Warrior, which is basically "The Karate Kid" with a bigger kid and a bigger mentor, represents a journey of predictability, rather than a destination worth the trouble.
  62. Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit
    It's like a class reunion in purgatory. All the familiar faces are there, but the air is sulfurous and murky, and hell is just an elevator ride away. [10 Dec 1993, p.A2]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Double Jeopardy
    So nonsensical you don't understand why anyone would actually make it.
  64. The Hustle
    Well, it’s a dud. Nothing quite clicks.
  65. The Wedding Date
    Wedding Date is neither good art, good entertainment nor even good trash.
  66. Iowa
    A flashy-looking low-budget indie about drugs, love and crime in small-town Iowa. But, speaking as an ex-small-town Midwesterner, I found it hard to buy.
  67. Jingle All the Way
    Jingle All the Way has been well shot and imaginatively designed. But somehow that makes it worse. So does the fact that all the actors, Schwarzenegger included, are skilled enough to make you watch them. [22 Nov 1996, p.C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  68. Rollerball
    Some movies should never have been made, and high on that list is the addled new remake of Rollerball.
  69. Gringo
    Everything about Gringo, from the storytelling to the comedy to the cinematography is incredibly lackluster. The film is dark and dim, like everything's covered in a layer of dust. Oyelowo is quite endearing and funny as Harold, but he's given very little to work with.
  70. The Hangover Part II
    Hangover II is more like a spitball meeting, a series of ideas that might, in theory, be good enough for a sequel, than it is an actual movie.
  71. Madhouse
    In Madhouse, writer-director Tom Ropelewski doesn't so much serve up an idea as force-feed it down our gullets. It takes a game bird to sit through the entire movie. [16 Feb 1990, p.K]
    • Chicago Tribune
  72. Expend4bles
    The action is messy, the geography indiscernible, and a few shots seem stitched together with but a single pixel and a prayer.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Dudley Do-Right
    Like an obnoxious uncle desparately trying to amuse the young'uns with poo-poo humor and dum-dum pratfalls.
  74. The Black Dahlia
    Doesn't provoke bittersweet inquiries regarding one poor actress' grisly fate. Nor does it stir up much provocation on the matter of why, as a popular audience, we're still taken with this lurid symbol of sex and dread and desire. Rather, the movie raises a much simpler question: Huh?
  75. Bulletproof
    A fitfully funny retread of "48 Hours," "Fled" and dozens of others.
  76. Green Street Hooligans
    This is "Fight Club" without the irony or the metaphysical gaming.
  77. The Invisible Circus
    When a movie is structured around the unveiling of secrets, you ought to care what the answers are. But writer-director Adam Brooks (Almost You), never offers any compelling reason to do so.
    • Chicago Tribune
  78. Sweet Home Alabama
    This movie is phony, phony, phony -- from its Disneyland version of the Deep South to its pious lessons about the values of simple rural living.
  79. Rock the Kasbah
    Star vehicles this rickety have a way of making the world unsafe for comic democracy.
  80. Mad Money
    Diane Keaton--now there’s a trouper for you. She will not be caught giving less than 110 percent, even in a drab little heist comedy.
  81. Nobel Son
    I enjoyed Eliza Dushku's mad poetess, probably for the wrong reasons, but with a project this meager, you take your artful sneers and scenic diversions where you can get them.
  82. Irresistible
    He (Stewart) bogs down his talented cast with a bewildering plot, tired tropes and embarrassing dialogue. This one, well, it's simply resistible.
  83. Sorority Boys
    The situations and jokes are as predictable and as lowbrow as the endless pratfalls the boys take in their high heels.
  84. Peppermint
    While it's fun to watch Garner return to her action roots, the brute force haymaker that is Peppermint is a far cry from the sophisticated thrills of "Alias."
  85. Herbie Fully Loaded
    If "Mean Girls" was Lohan's debutante ball, "Herbie" sits her back at the kiddie table. She's matured, and no longer fits in the Disney mold.
  86. 3000 Miles to Graceland
    A mind-numbing, bloody, ridiculous experience.
    • Chicago Tribune
  87. Driven
    It's outrageously stereotypical and weirdly personal, so loonily exaggerated it keeps surprising you.
    • Chicago Tribune
  88. All the Queen's Men
    The British intelligence operation at Bletchley Park that cracked the Enigma code is truly the stuff of great drama. But that story doesn't offer Matt LeBlanc in a wig and heels.
  89. Soul Survivors
    One of those frustrating movies that takes forever to get where it's going, and once arriving, the frustration is increased because one realizes how much better it should have been.
    • Chicago Tribune
  90. Midnight Sun
    Despite the ever-present layer of cheesiness, every now and again, some of those emotions are just big enough to land a somewhat effective blow right to the heart.
  91. So I Married an Axe Murderer
    So I Married an Axe Murderer - originally set for a March release - starts out briskly enough, with a nice, dark, off-stride feel, but, like many comedies, fizzles out after the first lap. [30 July 1993, p.C]
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Human Highway
    Carelessly digressive and stylistically muddled. [22 Mar 2016, p.C3]
    • Chicago Tribune
  93. Where's Marlowe?
    Although Where's Marlowe abounds with many supposedly clever ideas, it's about as badly made as anything you'll see anywhere on television.
  94. Blast from the Past
    Blast is just shooting blanks. [12 February 1999, Friday, p.A]
    • Chicago Tribune
  95. Lethal Weapon 3
    They once again trot out the same cynical, numbing formula: bullets, bonding and bravado tempered with self-congratulatory humor.
    • Chicago Tribune
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    O Jerusalem
    As a pocket history of the battles over Jerusalem in the ’40s, O Jerusalem is serviceable enough. But all the melodrama cheapens the real drama, and turns a war-torn region into a soap-opera stage.
  97. The Divergent Series: Allegiant
    It's a pretty dull picture, I must say, because it's my duty to say it. And it's a pretty dull picture, I must say, because something about its particular grade of dullness may cause memory loss.
  98. Confess, Fletch
    Fletch tends to think he’s the smartest guy in the room. So how is that supposed to work when the performance itself is so adrift and unappealing?
  99. Stay Tuned
    The parodies are funnier than any of the dialogue between Ritter and wife Pam Dawber.
  100. Without a Paddle
    Led by a trio of dumb, dumber and dumbest, Without a Paddle is a testosterone comedy that might just as well be titled "Without a Brain Cell."
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