Chicago Tribune's Scores

For 7,599 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 1.5 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:
7599 movie reviews
  1. A scenic, well-behaved account of Potter's life and times.
  2. A brilliant work of the imagination capable of truly seizing and igniting our fantasies.
  3. By the time Perfume arrives at its ridiculous mass orgy, staged at the gallows where Grenouille is supposed to meet his end, you really would rather see him meet his end than endure a ridiculous mass orgy.
  4. The way Moncrieff has structured The Dead Girl, it's catnip for actors: Divided into five chapters, the script affords juicy roles requiring only a few days' work from each member of its impressive ensemble.
  5. The movie--while it doesn't knock you out--doesn't self-destruct either. Besson may never rise to the level of his best American models here, but it's fun watching him try.
  6. It's lively but chaotic and evasive. The period re-creation switches on and off. We get a sense of what the silver-walled Factory was like, but not the rest of swinging Manhattan in the '60s.
  7. A sports bio movie that I really enjoyed about a sport and sports hero I barely knew existed: the World Hour Record competition for bicyclists and its gutsy, tormented and most unusual champion, Graeme Obree.
  8. Leave it to the first-class actors dining out on those roles to make the cat and the mouse interesting and unpredictable.
  9. It is that rare futuristic thriller: grim in its scenario, yet exhilarating in its technique.
  10. It's fitting that a drama trading in classified information would turn out to be such a cryptic bugger.
  11. Stranded in this charmless fantasy, Stiller is reduced to his old halting, squirming tricks.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Surprisingly restrained and undeniably entertaining.
  12. Peter O'Toole, still a British cinematic lion at 74, performs another movie miracle in the Roger Michell-Hanif Kureishi film Venus.
  13. It's a work by cinematic geniuses that reveals beauty and terror in a long-ago time with a virtuoso intensity. You won't soon forget its mad, lovely sights and sounds.
  14. The word masterpiece costs nothing to write and means less than nothing in an age when every third picture and each new Clint Eastwood project is proclaimed as such. After two viewings, however, Letters From Iwo Jima strikes me as the peak achievement in Eastwood's hallowed career.
  15. The Chinese locations ache with beauty. And when Watts and Norton focus, intently, on Maugham's often dazzlingly vindictive characters, The Painted Veil really does feel like a story worth filming a third time.
  16. The movie itself, defying all odds, comes close to a knockout.
  17. Dreamgirls is performed, shot, edited and packaged like a coming-attractions trailer for itself. Ordinarily that would be enough to sink a film straight off, unless you're a fan of "Moulin Rouge." But this one's a good time.
  18. The Good German is just stiff. When Soderbergh tries one of those patented swoop-in-on-the-diagonal moves at a key dramatic moment, the effect is comic. And at that precise moment, the story starts dying a slow, oxygen-deprived death.
  19. One of the more intelligent, better-made new movies around right now, but, despite everything, it doesn't really connect with the nerves and heart. It's a romance without anguish, although the pain of love is really what it's all about.
  20. Now, about the spider. Julia Roberts voices Charlotte in a way that suggests ... not much, I'm afraid. She may be a genuine movie star and can be a good actress, but her voice -- and what she does with it -- never has been one of her strengths.
  21. Eragon is a bit cheesy, but I rather liked it. It's sincere cheese... The special effects -- which include glowing-eyed heroes and villains, and flights over the mythical land of Alagaesia depicted in "dragon vision" -- are refreshing in their slightly out-of-date air.
  22. While the film is roughly half grit and half sugar, it works because Smith sticks to a tougher, more rewarding recipe of 99.9 percent grit and only .1 percent sugar.
  23. A mild and static attempt at sincere camp.
  24. The Holiday is a 131-minute romantic comedy for those who, if they had their way, would still be watching "Love Actually."
  25. A visually sumptuous, bullet-train-paced thriller with a really provocative theme.
  26. With "Braveheart," "Passion" and now Apocalypto, Gibson clearly has established his priorities as a director. History is gore, plus a few hearthside family interludes. The trick is instilling the audience with enough rageful bloodlust to make the story work.
  27. If the writers had the guts (and the jokes) to fashion a bittersweet comedy with a fully earned happy ending, Unaccompanied Minors probably wouldn't have been made. As is, it's a prefab slapstick-'n'-pathos stew that doesn't taste like anything.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Ever Again isn't a subtle film, but then it never pretends to be. More lecture than conversation, it's not designed to delicately challenge opposing viewpoints.
  28. This is a comedy made for people who think, who like smart talk and who, like the Perelmans, know the score.

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