Chicago Tribune's Scores

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For 7,603 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: 5,107 out of 7603
  2. Mixed: 1,474 out of 7603
  3. Negative: 1,022 out of 7603
7603 movie reviews
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    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Stop-Loss
    While Stop-Loss doesn’t pack anything like the emotional wallop of her previous film, the movies do share Peirce’s clear-eyed refusal to answer difficult questions with simplistic answers.
  2. How to Train Your Dragon
    The remake is just like the original, but there’s more of it. And less.
  3. Crazy/Beautiful
    Stockwell deserves kudos for working mental illness into a teen story without making it the explicit focus, as in simplistic exercises like "Girl, Interrupted."
    • Chicago Tribune
  4. September 11
    An often brilliant, always revelatory, deeply interesting omnibus film.
  5. Runaway Jury
    It's suspenseful. Fleder and his able cast deliver a brisk, entertaining story that, despite straining credulity at times, earns a positive verdict -- no undue audience-rigging required.
  6. The Good Shepherd
    It's fitting that a drama trading in classified information would turn out to be such a cryptic bugger.
  7. Big Miracle
    Big Miracle tells its sort-of-true version of events in a democratic and humane fashion, by way of a rangy, lively group of competing interests who actually do on occasion act like real people.
  8. Isle of the Dead
    Among the finest hours of horror star Boris Karloff. [18 Oct 2005, p.C3]
    • Chicago Tribune
  9. Vice Versa
    Shoulders sloping, not quick on the uptake, utterly agog at the adult world of sex and high-powered business, Reinhold's character is a wonder to behold. And Fred Savage is completely inoffensive as the officious boy-man, which is quite an achievement for a child actor. [11 Mar 1988, p.A]
    • Chicago Tribune
  10. Kindergarten Cop
    Kindergarten Cop never feels mercenary in the manner of, say, "Look Who's Talking Too" or "Three Men and a Little Lady." It is, instead, an extremely amiable, good-hearted film, unashamed of its desire to please and quite entertaining for it. [21 Dec 1990, p.B]
    • Chicago Tribune
  11. Vajra Sky Over Tibet
    Too often the film itself simply shuffles the postcards of Tibetan scenery, Buddhist rituals and the Tibetan people (many amazing faces on view, to be sure).
  12. Ice Age
    It's a fast, funny picture, and the worst thing you can say about it is that it's no "Toy Story," no "Shrek." That may be true, but one thing Ice Age proves is that the new digitized cartoons are a form whose time has come.
  13. The Boxtrolls
    The Boxtrolls remains relentlessly busy up through its final credits, and it's clever in a nattering way. But it's virtually charmless.
  14. Norma Rae
    Norma Rae is not a bad film, just one that made me angry for what it might have been. Imagine another, more skillful actor, say Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino, in Leibman's part; then strip away some of the more broadly drawn scenes, and Norma Rae could have been yet another fine film by director Martin Ritt ("Hud," "Sounder," and "Conrack"). [2 March 1979, p.4-12]
    • Chicago Tribune
  15. Meet the Robinsons
    When it enters the future, it's a new-fangled, old-fashioned jim-dandy of a show.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Nina's Tragedies
    Watching Nina's Tragedies, an Israeli film that pocketed 11 of its country's Oscar-equivalents, is a rare but almost perverse experience.
  17. Sunshine Cleaning
    The director, New Zealander Christine Jeffs ("Sylvia"), loosens the plotting as best she can, letting the interactions breathe. Her work, and the film, is strictly about the performers.
  18. The Polar Express
    This movie, which aspires to be a Christmas movie classic on the "It's a Wonderful Life" level, is overwhelming, enjoyable and impressive, without being really entrancing.
  19. Edmond
    Mamet is a writer who turns off some audiences, and almost everything that might bother them is in Edmond: foul language, raging machismo, violence and seemingly bigoted tirades. But almost everything audiences like about him is there too: candor, suspense, ideas, crackling slang, vivid characters.
  20. The Natural
    The Natural is a fairy tale from start to finish, full of wildly implausible scenes that win over our emotions because, frankly, that's the way we'd like life to be. Being a baseball fan involves repeatedly experiencing exquisite pain and exquisite joy. Well, there's a lot of both in The Natural.
  21. Enemy
    It's not a frenzied head-trip, the way Roman Polanski's "The Tenant" was, nor does the movie have half the energy and nightmarish allure of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive." It's best taken, I think, as a jape and a wry male-centric fable on transgression and desire.
  22. The Manhattan Project
    Believe it or not, The Manhattan Project, a thriller about a high school boy who builds an atomic bomb, is a solid, credible action film. It also contains, during this summer of violent films, a welcome pacifistic message.
  23. Drawing Restraint 9
    As visually stunning as it is, "DR9" is also more than two hours and contains, at best, 10 lines of dialogue, an ear-piercing Bjork score and no discernible plot.
  24. Night and the City
    Robert De Niro's characterization is too jokey, a knockoff of his Rupert Pupkin ("The King of Comedy"), and Irwin Winkler's direction is earnest but lethargic. Jessica Lange does better as a barmaid who wants her own saloon. [23 Oct 1992, p.CN]
    • Chicago Tribune
  25. Conviction
    This is an inspirational true story worried less about turning dramatic screws than earning its feeling through character.
  26. Song Sung Blue
    There’s an important lesson at the center of Song Sung Blue, about abandoning self-consciousness in a relentless pursuit of a dream. Despite the obstacles, their age, the setbacks, there is a pot of gold, not at the end of the rainbow but within it, in their shared dream.
  27. Dreams
    The circumstances of the story might be “timely,” but “Dreams” doesn’t help us understand the situation better, leaving us in the dark about what we’re supposed to take away from this story of sex, violence, money and the state. Anything it suggests we already know.
  28. Before You Know It
    It’s a charming and quirky New York tale, if a bit disorganized, finding its voice when it quiets down to just listen to the three women at the center of the story.
  29. Avatar: Fire and Ash
    [Cameron's] anti-colonialist, pro-Indigenous cri de coeur is inspiring, if a bit on the nose, but we can forgive that, because the visual spectacle is just so breathtakingly beautiful, the emotional stakes palpable, and the intention is so earnest. It’s good to be back on Pandora.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Faculty
    All the young actors, especially Joshua Hartnett as the misunderstood drug dealer, deliver fine performances in their diverse group, which forms a kind of horror film equivalent of "The Breakfast Club." [25 Dec 1998]
    • Chicago Tribune
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