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. [Mitchell’s] celebration of these films is seriously entertaining.
  2. Most films would take pains to spell out the answers, eventually. “Aftersun” works more obliquely and poetically, leaving prosaic touches to other filmmakers.
  3. I do think “Wakanda Forever” has plenty of what the enormous “Black Panther” fan base wants in a “Black Panther” sequel. There’s real emotion in the best material here. The loss of Boseman was enormous. So is the skill level of the actors, returning and new, who make the most of a pretty good sequel.
  4. The movie has a sense of humor, but its sense of dread, micro and macro, overrules it.
  5. Despite the somewhat bland nature of the storytelling — it’s not like this documentary is pushing the boundaries of the form — it’s an incredible true story told with care and skill.
  6. Wendell & Wild may not succeed, but I took heart from this: At least it doesn’t succeed in unconventional ways. That’s a sign of serious talents struggling with two of the most dreaded and unavoidable words in commercial cinema: “story problems.”
  7. Decision to Leave, director and co-writer Park Chan-wook’s dazzling, confounding, gorgeously crafted variation on a dangerously familiar film trope, takes its component parts and comes up with something no one has ever built before.
  8. The result is McDonagh’s most fully realized work since his breakthrough play, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” a generation ago. “Banshees” has its limitations; it’s pretty glib, like everything McDonagh writes, in its mashup of blackhearted laughs and occasional sincerity. He’s akin to the Coen brothers in that regard. He’s also a formidable craftsman and his best lines are pearls.
  9. It’s a premise for a pitch, not a screenplay, at least not a sharp-witted or interesting one. I’m not fussy. I’m not looking for the most interesting romantic comedy in history with this one. But I do wonder if some writers are so determined to stick to a formula so slavishly, they forget to make the characters funny, or to make characters rather than vaguely delineated personae in the Clooney vein or Roberts vibe.
  10. Hawke and McGregor are the kind of actors who hold your attention as the story evaporates around them. Even so, they deserve far more to play with than they get here.
  11. All I can tell you is this: It’s more than movie enough to justify the theatrical experience.
  12. Director Mike Barker’s slick, vaguely pernicious take on the material is a blend of dead-serious anguish and feel-good vindication. While many will find the results effective, others will not simply resist the guessing games and pulp instincts at odds with the trauma, but actively resent them.
  13. David O. Russell’s Amsterdam is very plush in the looks department. Enjoying the costumes and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s lighting and some of Russell’s shot designs will get you through it. But only if you don’t have to listen to it, or track it, or believe in the people on screen.
  14. Eichner makes Bros easy company, even when the character isn’t easy, because he knows there is more than one side to even the most rabid pop culture fiend. And more than one way to score a laugh.
  15. There are some laughs, and director Anne Fletcher — like Kenny Ortega, who did the first one, she’s dance-trained and a veteran choreographer — manages a far smoother amalgam of effects, mood swings, mugging, headless-zombie comic relief and heartstring-yanking that miraculously almost kind of partly works. All in all, it’s twice as good as Hocus Pocus. It’s easier to write that if you didn’t like Hocus Pocus.
  16. Director Reginald Hudlin’s Sidney was made with the full and keenly interested cooperation of the Poitier family, following a template of access many documentaries favor or, in some cases, settle for. This is one of the good ones.
  17. Dominik drains the complication and, saddest of all, the screen wiles, from a plainly complicated legend.
  18. Everything not right with Don’t Worry Darling wasn’t right from the beginning. Even a good director — and Wilde is that, though her hand in developing this material clearly wasn’t without some wrong turns — must deal with script problems if they’re there, in the story, lurking and waiting to mess everything up and send audiences out muttering, wait what?
  19. This is a film driven by what makes its characters and conflicts tick. It’s freely fictionalized, and some of it’s overpacked. But “The Woman King” feels human-made, not machine-learned.
  20. Fletch tends to think he’s the smartest guy in the room. So how is that supposed to work when the performance itself is so adrift and unappealing?
  21. Directed by Tom George from a screenplay by Mark Chappell, “See How They Run” is a throwback with a smirk. Or put more diplomatically: An old school whodunit reconceived as a farce. It’s self-referential (the characters end up snowed in at a country estate, just like in “The Mousetrap”) and simultaneously poking fun at the murder mystery form while also paying homage. If only it were actually funny!
  22. The movie’s a little thin; it’s also on the glib side regarding what, in the case of Wallace’s condition, qualifies as something deeper than a crummy anti-social attitude. But Kline, shooting on film in collaboration with the excellent cinematographer Sean Price Williams, explores a wide range of visual expressivity in Funny Pages.
  23. As with so much of this director’s work, I’m in the middle on Beast, though its efficient running time puts it a notch above. Like many of his previous films, this one has the advantage of modest scale and a passing interest in human resourcefulness under extreme duress. It has also the disadvantage of spectacle that is more technical than artistic.
  24. More than anything, The Princess is a documentary that makes you think about its editing choices. There’s a curious lack of clarity or transparency around many of the unidentified voices (from broadcasters, presumably) that can be heard speaking over the assembled images and you’re left to wonder if this commentary originally accompanied said footage or if Perkins, the director, is mixing and matching.
  25. Emily the Criminal delves only so far into character on the page, but working from what writer-director Ford gives her, Plaza creates a woman defined by incremental degrees of economic stress and simmering resolve.
  26. The folks on the screen are the whole show, and this genial showcase for standup comic Jo Koy has the advantage of showing off a wealth of Asian/Pacific American talent, pretty badly undervalued by establishment Hollywood.
  27. The spirit’s almost there to pull it off. But the movie does grind on.
  28. Rebecca Hall makes Maggie’s past and present states scarifyingly real. The film is often good; never for a moment is Hall’s performance anything less.
  29. Porter and his ingratiating actors do all they can to humanize the material. The movie works because a lot of that material is engaging and genuinely humane to begin with.
  30. The best, eeriest parts of director Jordan’s Peele’s third feature, “Nope,” are as good as anything in “Get Out” or “Us,” and they’re very different from either of those earlier triumphs of imagination. This one is a three-fifths triumph, which means whatever you want that to mean. To me, it means go.

Top Trailers