Chicago Tribune's Scores

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For 7,609 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 1.5 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: 5,113 out of 7609
  2. Mixed: 1,474 out of 7609
  3. Negative: 1,022 out of 7609
7609 movie reviews
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  1. Little Odessa
    Little Odessa is a portrait of New York subcultures, the Russian immigrant community itself and the orginizatsya, or Russian mafia, that employs Joshua. The cityscapes are wintry and menacing. The characters have a strong pulse.
  2. Hamburger Hill
    With its modest, no-nonsense approach, Hamburger Hill seems, curiously, more like the first film in a cycle than a late entry. After the baroque extravagance of the Vietnam films that have come before it, the movie runs a good chance of being overlooked. But it's an intelligent, craftsmanlike job, with a power of its own; it merits recognition. [28 Aug 1987, p.AC]
    • Chicago Tribune
  3. Pineapple Express
    Around the midpoint, Pineapple Express falls apart and keeps falling, and the comedy, spiced with considerable, unevenly effective violence in that first hour, goes out the window, and in comes all the gore and the bone-crunching.
  4. St. Vincent
    For all the boozed and abusive amusement provided by the great Bill Murray in the good-enough St. Vincent, the moment I liked best was Naomi Watts as a pregnant Russian stripper, manhandling a vacuum across the Murray character's ancient carpet. In movies as in life, it's the little things.
  5. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
    Ynpretentious and efficient, Curtis Hanson`s suspense drama The Hand That Rocks the Cradle suggests, after the monstrous ego trips of this past holiday season, that some sense of professionalism continues to reside in Hollywood.
  6. Cradle Will Rock
    Cradle Will Rock is the masterpiece that wasn't, a magnificent opportunity blown to hell.
    • Chicago Tribune
  7. Appaloosa
    It's less a western than a loping buddy picture.
  8. Fried Green Tomatoes
    It's meant to be uplifting, but the material is so undernourished that bench-pressing a phone book already seems beyond it. None of the characters has been filled out beyond the underlying conventions and the few distinctive mannerisms contributed by the actresses who portray them.
  9. Arctic Tale
    Watching bear cubs and walrus pups struggling to survive against increasingly tough odds, and on ever-slushier ice shelves, has both its shamelessly manipulative side and its dramatically necessary side, as handled here. This proves one thing: Unlike global warming, some stories really do have two sides.
  10. 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.
  11. Downton Abbey
    It’s not a movie, really. It’s a commemorative “Downton Abbey” throw pillow.
  12. X-Men
    Superhero comic book movie with a script so feeble it might have been written with crayons.
  13. Bright Young Things
    A brilliant, giddy satiric romp with a discreetly moralistic viewpoint beneath its high-style wit.
  14. Stage Beauty
    A rich, shining valentine to the British theater and the eternal joys of Shakespeare,
  15. Wedding Crashers
    Walken is an odd choice for a D.C. power player, wasting his creepiness on this straight, respectable role.
  16. Changing Times
    This magnificent pair are the heart of Techine's film, and the sense of frayed, aging beauty and handsomeness they now carry helps project the picture's main theme: the imperishability of true love.
  17. Blood Diamond
    A visually sumptuous, bullet-train-paced thriller with a really provocative theme.
  18. Freedom Writers
    Hilary Swank gives a powerhouse performance as a maverick high school teacher in Freedom Writers, an often gripping and sometimes even inspiring film drama taken from the real-life story of Erin Gruwell.
  19. The Other Guys
    For a good hour, this is the picture Kevin Smith was trying to make with "Cop Out."
  20. Young Bodies Heal Quickly
    Betzer's title suggests a hardy spirit and the resilience of childhood; the story, which unfolds in elliptical but often intriguing chapters, indicates the healing might be a little more complicated and difficult.
  21. The Serpent and the Rainbow
    Mingling a frank trashiness with unexpected ambition, Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow emerges as one of the more commanding horror movies of recent months.
  22. Flight of the Navigator
    The film doesn't have the pace or the scale of Back to the Future, but it does have the same sweet moment when a child declares his love for his parents because he's seen them in a different light. Joey Cramer is quite winning as David.
  23. Gladiator II
    Truly, this is a movie dependent on managed expectations and a forgiving attitude toward its tendency to overserve.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Something New
    Thanks to Hamri's light touch and the considerable chemistry between Lathan and Baker, it's easy to forgive these missteps--leaving the film plenty of goodwill to spare.
  25. Nobody
    Lean, mean and brutish, Nobody is best enjoyed as the juicy piece of pulp that it is. But Odenkirk, stepping into an action hero role for the first time, brings a sense of dolefulness and rue to this performance.
  26. Patriot Games
    Adapted by Australian filmmaker Phillip Noyce ("Dead Calm") from Tom Clancy's best seller, "Patriot Games" is an uncomfortably angry, completely bald-faced fantasy about violence as an answer to middle-class, middle-age ennui. Sadder still, it isn't a very effective one. [5 June 1992, p.C2]
    • Chicago Tribune
  27. Greenland
    If we strip away the comets raining fire on the earth, this film is about how the ways in which how we treat each other can be a matter of life or death. Even in that darkness, it dares to have a little hope.
  28. Kinds of Kindness
    It’s a luxe treatment of some puny satiric ideas, toned up by a cast led by Emma Stone and Lanthimos first-timer Jesse Plemons, who won the best actor prize this year at Cannes. But everything has a chance to go wrong with a movie long before the actors film anything.
  29. Ready Player One
    Spielberg’s control of pacing, rhythm, action dynamics and tonal juggling is so astute that the story of Wade never quite gets lost in all the fly-by jokes and references. Sheridan’s highly skillful, as is Cooke.
  30. It Could Happen to You
    It Could Happen to You is the movie that "Sleepless in Seattle" wanted to be, an old-fashioned Hollywood romantic comedy for the '90s, brought candidly up to date for the post-sexual revolution era, yet shimmering with all the cockeyed satin-and-popcorn glamor of the past.
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