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. Two of Us
    Sophisticated management of tone makes Two of Us rich and nuanced, complex and utterly heartbreaking. Within the folds of the film, simultaneously a love story, thriller and tragedy, nearly anyone can find an anchor, or a wound. It illustrates with devastating clarity what a mess secrets can make, and how one errant, unpredictable thread can unravel any carefully calibrated lie.
  2. A History of Violence
    If this all sounds very heavy, well, it is, but it's also very, very funny. Cronenberg may want to say something important about violence, but he's also head over heels for it, ending each gunfight and neck-breaking with a close-up on the victim, blood either pooling behind his head or brains spilling from his face. Big laughs.
  3. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
    It balances bloodshed with charm, spectacle with childlike glee. It's a near flawless movie of its kind.
    • Chicago Tribune
  4. Sugar
    This one slice of the American experience amounts to one of the best films of the year.
  5. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
    A beautiful film, harrowing, tough and rife with grief.
  6. Rye Lane
    Rye Lane celebrates Black romantic adventure, simply by finding new avenues (literal and figurative) to explore. Director Allen-Miller works extensively in commercials, and it shows, but her compositional eye is very effective.
  7. To Catch a Thief
    Few Alfred Hitchcock movies are more fun to watch than To Catch a Thief. [15 Jun 2007, p.C7]
    • Chicago Tribune
  8. The Lobster
    Everything within the film connects to neighboring elements, performance to performance to cryptic absurdity (the opening is one of the strangest of the year) to surprisingly heartfelt acknowledgment of the power of love. Whether things work out or not.
  9. Forrest Gump
    Clean up the language, and this little roach of a movie could play the bottom half of a double bill with Rowan and Martin's “The Maltese Bippy.” [26 March 1999, Life, p.9E]
    • Chicago Tribune
  10. The Nightmare Before Christmas
    The movie has a grotesque charm, a pie-eyed magic. With its crack-brained, spidery-limbed, Edward-Gorey-eyed crew of dashing skeletons, Frankenstein ladies, mad scientists with detachable brainpans, swivel-headed two-faced politicians and big bad bug-bag monsters, it comes at you like a Saturday afternoon kiddies' special gone pleasantly berserk.
  11. Paris Is Burning
    A rough-edged, talking-heads documentary, directed with skill if not polish by Jennie Livingston, that has found a topic almost unbelievably rich in cultural paradoxes and interpretive possibilities. [09 Aug 1991, p.C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  12. Breaking the Waves
    A movie about the passions of simple people, and it's done with such extraordinary empathy and commitment that it all but pulls you under. [29 November 1996, Friday, p.A]
    • Chicago Tribune
  13. Winged Migration
    This French documentary gives us unprecedented intimacy and sweep.
  14. The Squid and the Whale
    Steering clear of phony melodrama and indie pretense, Baumbach captures a crisis in one family's life that, though it shakes the foundation, leaves all four Berkmans drifting toward highs and lows unknown, each of them only dimly aware that, no matter what the movies tell us, we never really come of age.
  15. School of Rock
    The movie is the cinematic equivalent of a near-perfect three-minute pop song. It makes you laugh, smile and tap your toes over a brisk 88 minutes, and when it's finished, you're ready to hit repeat.
  16. Life and Nothing More
    It’s full of life, guided by first-time screen performers portraying versions of themselves. And because Esparza’s a dramatist, not a melodramatist, the experience of watching Life and Nothing More becomes truth, and nothing less.
  17. Star Trek
    Breathlessly paced bordering on manic, but propulsively entertaining.
  18. They Live by Night
    It's permeated with a sweetness and vulnerability unusual for any crime movie. [29 May 1998, p.N]
    • Chicago Tribune
  19. The Unknown Country
    There’s a dreamy and poetic side to the visual texture in The Unknown Country, as photographed, often gorgeously, by Andrew Hajek. The Badlands, the snakelike highways, the rippling sunsets step right up and strike their poses, but unselfconsciously.
  20. A Quiet Place
    My favorite moment, an encounter between Regan and one of the monsters in a cornfield, plays with sound and image and tension, creatively. Other bits are more shameless.
  21. The Teachers' Lounge
    What the writing and filmmaking sometimes overdo, the actors mitigate beautifully. Benesch is a powerhouse of subtlety and focus, and the camera stays as close as possible to her watchful, at times disbelieving eyes.
  22. The Namesake
    Brims with intelligence, compassion and sensuous delight in the textures, sights and sounds of life--all the way from the Taj Mahal to Pearl Jam.
  23. Frances Ha
    You may watch Frances Ha relating to little of it, or a lot of it, but this "road movie with apartments," as the director (shooting here in velvety black-and-white, recalling Woody Allen's "Manhattan" in its texture) so aptly put it, is informed by a buoyant, resilient spirit.
  24. C'mon C'mon
    This is a droll and extremely well-acted tale of a family in crisis, and in progress.
  25. Howl's Moving Castle
    Perfect for anyone with a youthful heart and a rich imagination.
  26. Hunger
    It's a strength of this carefully composed, almost obsessively controlled picture that it has no interest in the conventional biographical focus on a subject.
  27. Crimson Gold
    A stark, minimalist near-masterpiece about the creation of a murderer in modern Iran.
  28. Anvil! The Story of Anvil
    I can't imagine Anvil! not appealing to anyone interested in any aspect of showbiz, and the drug of fame, and the lives people lead in pursuit of the next fix.
  29. The Trip
    The Trip isn't much, but it's more than enough.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Marty
    Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the script, has captured the human element deftly. Here are human beings as they really are, refreshingly life-like, piteously real, and often hilariously funny. [16 May 1955, p.15]
    • Chicago Tribune
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