Chicago Tribune's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. The Station Agent
    For most of the film, Fin is only as odd as Joe and Olivia -- three eccentrics rendered positively normal in a friendship built on the crap we all face every day.
  2. Foxcatcher
    It's meticulous, fastidiously controlled and a tiny bit enervated. I've seen it twice; it's successful enough in what it's attempting to merit at least one viewing. But even after two, you may struggle with what's not there, and should be, or could be.
  3. Autumn Tale
    A film which should gratify any audience starved for intelligent dialogue, realistic portrayals of romance and lovely, non-cliched open-air photography.
  4. Bamako
    Sissako has an unusual camera eye, patient and alert to the ebb and flow of both the courtroom sequences and the outside scenes. The music is wonderful as well.
  5. Beginners
    Just cute enough for some tastes, too cute by half for others.
  6. Bright Star
    In its way Campion’s film is a thing of beauty, but its characters’ inner lives must be taken on faith.
  7. Jackie
    It's an odd, hermetic and fascinating picture.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tropical Malady
    Extremely slow--unbearably so at certain points. And even when there's no action, there's very little dialogue, and we're asked to follow the disjointed and dreamlike story line without the help of anything resembling a narrative.
  9. Happiness
    Sharp, funny, sad and daring as it may be, Happiness is missing something. Its points are often too obvious, its shocks too juvenile. It's impressive but not transcendent. [23 Oct 1998]
    • Chicago Tribune
  10. Raw
    Like all good horror films (though it's more of a psychological thriller with a teeming, festering wealth of body-horror preoccupations), this one takes its central theme — cannibalism — as a way into a variety of other matters, other indicators of a society and a psyche under extreme duress.
  11. Test Pattern
    There are colors that pop throughout film — as if, in a nod to the title, drawn from a TV test pattern — and visually this is what stayed with me, from the yellow of Renesha’s dress, to the aqua benches against the white antiseptic floors of the hospital waiting room
  12. Inherent Vice
    For some of us, Anderson's LA lamentation is a siren song, and there's no more ardent and poetic chronicler of California mythology.
  13. Tina
    The film doesn’t seem particularly interested in who Turner is as an artist, or her creative inclinations and musical instincts.
  14. American Fiction
    The movie we have is a movie that works, blending seriocomic domestic material with the larger, more pointed social observations about white liberal guilt, code-switching Black authors (Issa Rae is most welcome as Monk’s primary foil) and a lot more.
  15. Il Divo
    Instead of a modern classic, able to travel the globe with ease, Il Divo is merely a wonderfully cast, tonally assured achievement, with a uniquely strange tour de force at its core.
  16. Fish Tank
    A remarkable downer-upper paradox: a bruising tale of teenage resilience, honest and emotionally complicated and alive.
  17. Sweetie
    One of the freshest, most exciting first features to appear in a very long time. [19 May 1989, p.1]
    • Chicago Tribune
  18. Little Shop of Horrors
    The songs are joyful, and the plant is a foul-mouthed wonder when it begins to talk. Director Frank Oz deserves credit for staging a musical in classic form, creating nothing less than one of the year's most entertaining films. [19 Dec 1986, p.A]
    • Chicago Tribune
  19. No
    No succeeds, wonderfully, because it knows how to sell itself. It is cool, witty, technically dazzling in a low-key and convincing way.
  20. Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened
    Jim Walton, Ann Morrison and other original cast members talk about what the show meant to them, and how it felt (in a word: lousy) to have their dreams crash into a brick wall of harsh reviews.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The China Syndrome
    It's an archetypal '70s political movie: hard-core melodrama wedded to an important social issue, with slick direction (James Bridges) and big stars (Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas) playing valiant underdogs and reporters. [29 Oct 2004, p.C3]
    • Chicago Tribune
  22. My Architect
    Movies today rarely touch chords that are spiritual or deeply emotional, but Nathaniel Kahn's remarkable documentary My Architect: A Son's Journey does both.
  23. Hot Fuzz
    The best of it is a riot--a "Bad Boys II" fireball hurled with exquisite accuracy at a quaint English town peopled by Agatha Christie archetypes.
  24. Four Weddings and a Funeral
    A better film about love delayed than "Sleepless in Seattle." It's funnier, more credible, more bittersweet and the characters are a whole lot brighter. Naturally, it won't be as big a hit. [18 March 1994, Friday, p.C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  25. Police, Adjective
    It's not for all tastes; it requires some patience. The more your own job involves absurd, time-consuming bits of minutiae, the more familiar (and amusing) it'll seem.
  26. Django Unchained
    By the two-hour mark the fun had oozed out of the movie for me. It's long. Or feels it.
  27. Us
    Jordan Peele’s Us begins so spectacularly well, and sustains its game of doubles so cleverly for most of its two hours, it’s an unusual sort of letdown when the story doesn’t quite hang together and “deliver” the way Peele managed with his 2017 debut feature, “Get Out.”
  28. The Wedding Banquet
    The Wedding Banquet benefits especially from the performances of seasoned Taiwanese actors Sihung Lung and Ah-Leh Gua as Wai-Tung's parents. [27 Aug 1993, p.C]
    • Chicago Tribune
  29. Grin Without a Cat
    This is a movie about the world at war with itself, and the result is riveting, sublime and unforgettable.
  30. The Big Short
    If a film can essentially succeed while also remaining essentially frustrating, here's a prime example.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »