Chicago Tribune's Scores

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:
7613 movie reviews
  1. The Cats of Mirikitani seems all too short; it has enough meat to be turned into an excellent dramatic film.
  2. A wish fulfillment fantasy of staggering silliness, both smirkingly cutesy and gratingly offensive, this is one for the movie ash heap.
  3. Black Snake Moan strikes me as hogwash. It fundamentally does not work; its consciously far-fetched, out-there notions of the things damaged people do in the name of love are reductive and go only so far. It's as if the premise were tethered to a radiator or something.
  4. A film of great spiritual intensity and haunting minimalism that enlarges your concepts of movies and of life. Like the monks of the Carthusian order, it distills something intoxicating through a style that's pure and rigorous.
  5. Wobbles between its comic and dramatic concerns; even those who buy the film more wholeheartedly than I might consider the overall tone uncertain.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    This is not high art. It might not qualify as low art. But it is 90 minutes or so during which people can put their brains on the shelf and enjoy a few laughs.
  6. Apted and his collaborators are so in awe of their subject they neglect to bring him to full human life.
  7. Best of all though, we get to experience the whole fest itself, over four turbulent decades-an era from which Glastonbury, like Woodstock in its day, offers a halcyon "timeout."
  8. Watching Heather Graham, Tom Cavanagh and a stridently adorable Alan Cumming do their wide-eyed, moony thing in the romantic comedy Gray Matters raises the question: Is it possible for a filmgoer to be twinkled to death?
  9. Starter for 10 is cute and smart, just like its star triangle, and it's also well-written, acted and directed.
  10. The most charming comedy in town, writer-director-editor Katsuhito Ishii's 2003 piece is a modern Japanese variation on "You Can't Take It With You," with some lovely fantastical flourishes.
  11. Cooper is the reason to see the film, which was photographed by Tak Fujimoto in the dour tones he brought to a more flagrant realm of evil, and FBI detective work, in "The Silence of the Lambs."
  12. Elaborately mounted, expensively produced and filmed with style and empathy, it's an adaptation of Paterson's Newbery Medal-winning book that manages to expand the original vision, yet preserve much of its intense emotion.
  13. Originally titled "Orchestra Seats," Montaigne takes a page from the "Amelie" playbook, without the fancy visuals or magical realism.
  14. Zbanic, who lived through the Bosnian war in Sarajevo, is an unusual talent. Here, she makes us feel the hell her characters once lived through as well as the leftover, stinging pain of today.
  15. Grant and Barrymore are very enjoyable together onscreen. Who would've guessed that Barrymore would turn into such a deft comedian?
  16. 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.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    A sort-of combination of "Lambs," "Batman Begins" and "The Joy of Cooking," Hannibal Rising ostensibly dramatizes the atrocities that turned Hannibal Lecter from loving child to serial killer. But this film is larded up with so many food references that I'm undecided whether this story belongs in a film compendium or a recipe file.
  17. With his brazen gifts for mimicry, Eddie Murphy may now be the Peter Sellers of blockbuster toilet comedy movies.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The lovely shots of Appalachian vistas are spoiled by cheesy special effects straight from the 1960s Chroma-Key era.
  18. Formulaic romantic junk.
  19. A pleasant, leisurely 71 minutes, frequently beguiling thanks to Gurwitch's soft-sell version of the urbane, Second City-esque female noodge.
  20. Considering how good "Puccini's" middle often is, it's a shame it falls down fore and aft. But Maggenti, who loves Carole Lombard and William Powell in "My Man Godfrey," is tapping a likable vein here. She should open it up again.
  21. The movie, like Smith, is breezy, fun and keeps comin' at ya. [22 Dec 2006, p.5]
    • Chicago Tribune
  22. Mantel and Skrovan's documentary astutely reminds us of why we need the world's Naders. It's a reasonable movie about an often admirably unreasonable man.
  23. Making her feature-film directorial debut, Grant is going for an everyday conversational texture and a sense of life's curveballs. But the results wander and you never really believe them.
  24. This film was not based on a video game, but that's the vibe and the aesthetic at work here: YEAH! KILL!, followed by a few muttered expressions of the horror, the horror.
  25. You could say that Seraphim Falls, was no better than the typical Westerns of the 1950s and '60s--which I think underrates it. But those typical Westerns were pretty darn good, and so is Seraphim Falls.
  26. Becket, now richly restored, is one of those '60s British theatrical spectaculars that we always imagine as a bit better than they were.
  27. Earns its happy ending like few other contemporary dramas concerned with the fate of a child. It puts you through hell for that ending, in fact, hell being modern-day Russia.

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