Chicago Tribune's Scores

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:
7601 movie reviews
  1. Rogowski's transition from youth-culture poster boy to murderer demands deeper analysis.
  2. The actors had little to work with in this passe social satire, but sharper performances might have saved Marci from total humorless ruin.
  3. Starts out slowly, unfolding a family history through the poetic use of black-and-white photographs -- blending the figures of Rana's ancestors into the frame as if they still watched the family.
  4. A magic-meets-macho cop movie that's more gimmick than actual movie.
  5. This is a movie that boggles the mind: a bad-taste comedy that makes the average effort by the Farrelly Brothers (mysteriously thanked in the credits) look like a Merchant-Ivory film.
  6. An excellent, unforgettable film.
  7. In Uptown Girls Murphy is like a puppy in traffic; you're confident she'll reach the curb but only because the cars are swerving, not because her moves are so deft.
  8. Such a stylistic inconsistency might be bothersome in another film, but here it's just part of the texture.
  9. It's a good small film for intelligent audiences who like to watch the movie camera explore other regions and other communities -- something all our movies should do more often.
  10. A blend of the classical and the trite, the beautiful and tawdry, the genuinely moving and the cornball. Oddly, producer-director-star Costner often can't seem to tell the difference.
  11. This movie is just not cool or hip or in any way extreme. Sitting through Grind is a real grind.
  12. The movie overflows with action, slapstick and cliches, but the cliches never impede the action, and the slapstick is so expertly performed, it doesn't annoy you -- much.
  13. Succeeds as a guilty pleasure, a monster mash that clobbers the recent lackluster sequels plaguing both legacies. If only that were a higher compliment.
  14. Somehow lacks lightness and weight. This is a movie that tries to work a bloody suicide attempt and a murder into a comedy of manners, with almost everything registering in the same narrow spectrum of inconsequence.
  15. Technically clever but emotionally bankrupt...it's an almost laughably opportunistic movie.
  16. As a bonus, "Liquid" also includes eye-popping footage of the top surfers in the world (Taj Burrow, Laird Hamilton, Dave Kalama) -- wave riders who make the impossible look easy.
  17. Freaky Friday commits a lot of sins; luckily, it has Curtis and a few others to cover them up.
  18. A fierce, brilliant film that breaks (and then mends) your heart.
  19. A movie best suited for a lazy afternoon or a languorous night, particularly if you're a Francophile. Charming, glamorous, emotionally suggestive but slight, it's full of beautiful and colorful people.
  20. A surprisingly insightful, non-judgmental meditation on a troubled marriage-with-kids.
  21. The crass sentimentality of American Wedding increasingly fits Norman Mailer's definition: "the emotional promiscuity of the basically unemotional." The jokes are unemotional, uncouth and mostly unfunny.
  22. Put together enough pointless, random details, and you get Gigli, a movie that's less incompetent than bewildering.
  23. A well-told story. It pits a compelling central character against a formidable adversary in an intriguing setting while keeping you riveted to the cat-and-mouse strategizing, surprise turns and a few moments of actual warmth.
  24. The tired and washed-out Spanish town is a fitting backdrop for these men - a place where life moves on around them at an uninspiring pace.
  25. The filmmaker's imagination is too rich for Spy Kids 3-D to be written off as a failure. But it's too bad that while the visuals have gained a dimension, the story has lost one.
  26. Superior to 2001's "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" in almost every way. It's better directed, more consistently acted, and its writing, while at times ridiculous, at least has a modicum of logic at its core. I still had to slap myself to stay awake.
  27. A grand ride. Sleek, beautiful and packed with emotion, not too flashy but full of heart, this is a movie worthy of its unlikely yet glorious subject: Depression-era America's best-loved racehorse and the two races that made him a legend.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What a vivacious-looking, tartly-scored bore of a movie.
  28. Does have heart and enthusiasm. But it might have worked better if it had been glitzed up and energized the way "Fame" was. It's not a script that can survive this kind of minimal, earnest, self-congratulatory treatment.
  29. Hotel might be best described as the art-house version of "Cannonball Run."

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