Chicago Tribune's Scores

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For 7,613 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: 5,116 out of 7613
  2. Mixed: 1,475 out of 7613
  3. Negative: 1,022 out of 7613
7613 movie reviews
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  1. The Blackening
    It’s a comedy with a lot of very big laughs.
  2. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
    You know what’s not bad? Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Dumber than a box of lugnuts, but superior to the Michael Bay-directed schlocktaculars that ran as long as 165 minutes. The new “Transformers” movie clocks in at 117 minutes, a lot of them pretty zippy.
  3. Past Lives
    It’s a rare movie that settles, quietly, into some part of your own experiences and memories without a speck of narrative contrivance gumming up your response to the story on the screen. Past Lives is that rarity.
  4. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    If Across the Spider-Verse falls an inch or two short of the earlier film, it’s because screenwriters/producers Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and David Callaham pack the second half of a pretty long movie (24 minutes longer than “Into the Spider-Verse”) with an increasingly dark and heavy threat level.
  5. The Little Mermaid
    The changes really help. The fleshed-out central romance, the performances of Halle Bailey (Ariel, the mermaid, with songs belted like nobody’s business) and, as her Above World love Prince Eric, Jonah Hauer-King — it all basically works.
  6. It Ain't Over
    The movie itself is more of a square than a circle — straightforward and honorific, peppered with old and newer archival footage.
  7. Master Gardener
    Even when it falters, Master Gardener speaks from a place the filmmaker has always worked, with one foot in the character-building of “slow cinema,” and the other in spasms of violence. It may be hard to buy where this movie lands. But even an unstuck landing isn’t enough to un-recommend it.
  8. Fast X
    My affection for a lot of the earlier F&F movies has everything to do with the people on the screen, and the squealing of the tires. Not so much the world destruction. Outlandish mayhem needs better visual stylists than Leterrier.
  9. The Mother
    The second half of The Mother settles for the usual. But getting there makes for a fairly diverting series of melees in the name of child protection, with services rendered by a tough-love mom who does it all.
  10. The Eight Mountains
    The love story that is The Eight Mountains expresses this ineffable relationship between those who know us best and the places in which we find ourselves with a rough-hewed grace and profound knowingness.
  11. BlackBerry
    BlackBerry doesn’t sermonize or push the comedy or falsify the dramatic dynamics of wildly contrasting personalities. It’s a small but quite beautiful achievement, which you could also say about the smartphone that could, and did. For a while.
  12. Other People's Children
    For some, Other People’s Children may feel a little too smooth. But the film’s success starts and ends with the natural vibrancy of the performances, and Efira leads the way.
  13. Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
    Fox’s resolve, his ever-sharp wit and acuity, more than mitigates what’s not entirely useful in Guggenheim’s filmmaking approach.
  14. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
    The full-on assault on the audience’s tear ducts in much of “Guardians 3″ may be sincere, but the rhythms and pacing of the film never find the beat. We end up waiting for the reductive punchline, or for another round of wanton slaughter.
  15. Peter Pan & Wendy
    The director and co-writer David Lowery has made nothing but interesting features, six so far, and while his latest (co-written by Toby Halbrooks) turns into a bit of a Lost Boy here and there in its brooding investigation of why Captain Hook, played by a happily camp-averse Jude Law, got that way, it’s a stirring adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s fantasy.
  16. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
    This book deserved a really good film version, and writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig (”The Edge of Seventeen,” also really good) captures Blume’s humane wit and spirit, while adding some new emotional and narrative wrinkles.
  17. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
    It’s the best film he’s made in years.
  18. Beau Is Afraid
    Phoenix acts his ass off, often entertainingly, and from the hoariest of ancient dark-comic tactics, Aster pulls off the occasional little miracle here and there, especially when LuPone and Posey are around.
  19. Showing Up
    The movie has a tiny motor of a narrative, but it’s just enough. Nothing is overstated, and a lot of Showing Up isn’t even stated; it’s simply shown, on the fly or with the merest emphasis on what Lizzie goes through as she completes her work.
  20. Mafia Mamma
    This high-concept romp demands an over-the-top and facile narrative, and some of the bits are a bit hackneyed, but Mafia Mamma is much more wacky, funny and violent than the too-tame trailers would have you believe. Collette goes for broke in her performance and Hardwicke juggles the tone, style and genre play with ease.
  21. Renfield
    Mainly, Cage keeps finding the damnedest ways to topspin his line readings so that you never know where a sentence is going. May the next outing with Renfield and Dracula, should the public and Universal decree it, be a little funnier and little less too much.
  22. The Super Mario Bros. Movie
    Fortunately, this loud, hectic movie doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it wouldn’t have the material to last a second longer. It’s bright, busy, inoffensive and exactly the opposite of the weird, dark, edgy 1993 movie adaptation. That may be better for the business of Mario, but it’s not exactly terribly interesting either.
  23. Air
    Air is a good time, as well as a triumph of sports marketing in every conceivable way.
  24. A Thousand and One
    A Thousand and One, this year’s top jury prize winner at the Sundance Film Festival, puts you through it, but with real feeling, real stakes and an authentic vision guided by a fiercely commanding performance by Teyana Taylor as Inez.
  25. 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.
  26. John Wick: Chapter 4
    Too much of “John Wick 4″ mistakes grandiloquence for excitement. But yes, as bloody diversion goes, the audience gets its money’s worth.
  27. Champions
    Disarming one minute, baldly manipulative the next, Champions is a tricky one.
  28. Return to Seoul
    It treats Freddie not as a problem to be solved, but as a peripatetic life to be followed. What begins as two weeks in another town, in search of the past Freddie never knew, becomes a reminder that there are feelings, longings, connections in life that remain not impossible, but certainly elusive, and precarious.
  29. Creed III
    Unlike “Creed II,” which had little visual distinction and a storyline forgettable enough to send me straight to Wikipedia for a refresher, Creed III tries a few things. And it showcases two charismatic stars who are also genuine, ambitious actors.
  30. Cocaine Bear
    Ultraviolence is a funny thing, unless it’s not: Here, watching Martindale’s ranger character getting her face ripped off while being dragged along a gravel road isn’t a sight gag, and it isn’t an effective shock bit. It’s just sour. Composer Mark Mothersbaugh’s consciously ‘80s-vibe score has more personality than what’s on screen.
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