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. It's a dense, winding tale with all of Sayles' razor-sharp dialogue and intrigue. But instead of tracing character paths, Sayles sacrifices solid storytelling in favor of forwarding a political (and environmental) ideology.
  2. Like "Blade Runner," it's dense enough to be rewarding on multiple viewings, the hallmark of a classic.
  3. Slickly produced, well cast and very excitingly made, it's based on plot hooks so silly, most of them blow up in your face.
  4. Criminal is an exercise where viewers are likely to ponder not "How did the characters do it?" but "Who cares?"
  5. The entire film is poorly lit, and the melancholy music, much of it from the wonderful Wilco spin-off band Autumn Defense, gives us the sense that things are getting heavy. But in the end, we observe more than feel.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The kind of movie that produces a particular series of questions: How the heck did this get made? Who needed a tax shelter? Who had money to burn?
  6. Campbell and her character are willing to take chances. But Toback's tangled noirish plot, with Vera as a post-feminist femme fatale, isn't particularly clever or original.
  7. Might be justified as "mindless fun" if it weren't for the acute lack of fun in its 93 minutes.
  8. To work, it has to make us feel crazy with love, like "Vertigo" did. Instead, it often just makes us feel crazy for believing any of it.
  9. Belongs to that brand of sweeping, conflict-era drama epitomized by "Saving Private Ryan," "Gone with the Wind" and TV miniseries "North and South."
  10. Graced with Nair's loving direction, Witherspoon's radiance and that great cast, it is a treat, if somewhat less so than the novel.
  11. The kind of fascinatingly bad film only a really gifted and fearless moviemaker could make: a 92-minute long raggedy-raunchy vision of sex, transit and alienation in which Gallo focuses on himself so obsessively, it's as if he'd become his own stalker.
  12. Swooningly beautiful, furious and thrilling, Zhang Yimou's Hero is an action movie for the ages.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    To be fair, it's little better or worse than the original. But, to be honest, the original--minus its nascent stars--wasn't very good.
  13. The script isn't really good enough to worry about whether it's being over-directed; in fact, E. Elias Merhige's over-direction is one of the best things about this movie--along with Ben Kingsley's grimly unstoppable killer-of-killers, Benjamin O'Ryan.
  14. Even if the movie's only goal is to preach to the choir, its fondness for hyperbole and lack of discernment is more insult than rallying cry.
  15. Another of his (McElwee) beguiling "personal chronicle" movies.
  16. Led by a trio of dumb, dumber and dumbest, Without a Paddle is a testosterone comedy that might just as well be titled "Without a Brain Cell."
  17. The movie goes too far on too little motivation - and the middle section, with its maggoty villains, roiling skies and native revolts, seems almost barmy. Yet Exorcist: Beginning does score a small victory. It's not as bad as you'd think.
    • Chicago Tribune
  18. Like the work of an expert tailor, it's done with unobtrusive skill, essential warmth and seamless grace.
  19. A brilliant, giddy satiric romp with a discreetly moralistic viewpoint beneath its high-style wit.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Much to their credit, filmmakers Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields leave almost all the talking to band members and their inner circle. That gives this documentary--their first film--a brisk authority, humor and directness true to the band's scrappy story.
  20. The sights, sounds and traffic in Red Lights are oppressively ordinary; the people are unnervingly real. That reality doubles the suspense we might feel in a more slickly made but thinly plotted thriller.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    As entertainment, Nicotina manages a bracing balance. It arrests with violent bursts and anxious pauses until its three plots merge in a satisfying resolution; its laughs caught in my throat like smoker's cough.
  21. If Estes' future efforts can offer us such potent, character-centered Molotov cocktails, Mean Creek may well signal the rise of America's next auteur director.
  22. It's a murky, empty-headed dive into the depths of the Antarctic and the heart of monster movie cliches that leaves you praying for most of the cast to get killed off fast, to put them (and us) out of our misery.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Shallow and repetitive.
  23. Usually American marital problems are left to the soap operas; it's nice to see them tackled by experts, piercing personas and peeling open hearts.
  24. Sumptuous and beautiful, suffused with a serene melancholy and deeply ambivalent love for a long-vanished past, Luchino Visconti's 1963 The Leopard is one of the greatest of all historical costume epics.
  25. Sweet-tempered, good-looking, goofy and not too sharp. The movie doesn't make much sense and neither does Danny, played by Welsh heartthrob Rhys Ifans.

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