Chicago Tribune's Scores

For 7,614 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:
7614 movie reviews
  1. Cage is going for manly, if conflicted, family-guy confidence in this role, but somehow it comes off as nuttier than the events surrounding him.
  2. Each time a character gets tossed in the air by some manifestation or another, the effect is cheesy. Still, I've seen worse. For the record, the violence in Annabelle is far less copious and sadistic than the stuff in the Denzel Washington movie everybody's going to.
  3. David Fincher's film version of the Gillian Flynn bestseller Gone Girl is a stealthy, snake-like achievement. It's everything the book was and more — more, certainly, in its sinister, brackish atmosphere dominated by mustard-yellow fluorescence, designed to make you squint, recoil and then lean in a little closer.
  4. The Boxtrolls remains relentlessly busy up through its final credits, and it's clever in a nattering way. But it's virtually charmless.
  5. Wasikowska is wonderful here, unaffected and affecting, but then she has long been a young actress conveying a rich and shadowy interior life on screen. She humanized the Tim Burton "Alice in Wonderland," so clearly she can do nearly anything.
  6. For an hour or so The Equalizer glides along and works; in the second hour, plus change, it turns into a shameless slaughter contrivance with a flabby sense of pace. I did like one line: "When you pay for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too." Washington's the rain; by the end, the movie is the mud.
  7. For me Chastain's unerring honesty is the only element keeping The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby above the realm of pure affectation.
  8. The chief argument regarding his (Smith) "Human Centipede" riff is pretty basic: good trash or stupid trash? I'd say roughly half and half.
  9. Thing is, Levy is a hard-sell man. He pushes the material so hard, it's as if he were working on commission.
  10. When the secrets of David's circumstances and motives start spilling into the daylight along with more and more blood, The Guest does a strange thing. It becomes flat-footed and a bit dull.
  11. First-time feature director Wes Ball's version of The Maze Runner makes the cliches smell daisy-fresh.
  12. And it's too bad The Skeleton Twins settles for tidy, slightly hollow narrative developments. The performers are ready to rip. For many they'll be enough.
  13. As a performance vehicle The Drop does the job. As a story, and an uncertainly padded script, the movie lurches and lets us get out ahead of its developments.
  14. Aubrey Plaza is so deadpan she's undeadpan, and not just in her new zombie movie.
  15. Kline took on Douglas Fairbanks in Richard Attenborough's "Chaplin" and Cole Porter in Irwin Winkler's "De-Lovely"; he's the go-to biopic ace for roles requiring some fizz, a certain droll elevation and hair parted and slicked-back just so.
  16. Playing the title role as well as the Dream role, real-life Elvis tribute artist Blake Rayne is more convincing when he's singing than when he isn't. But he has little to explore beyond bashful smiles.
  17. A functioning, funny, weirdly touching fable of artistic angst and aspiration, a meditation on fame and its terrors and the metaphoric usefulness of masks and huge fake heads.
  18. Do not expect dynamic filmmaking from Love Is Strange. It's about other things, and Lithgow and Molina are splendid, their eyes full of wisdom and experience.
  19. Sue wins out, and the film is worth seeing, if only for the reminder of how badly justice can miscarry if enough millions are spent by the U.S. government.
  20. Cutler is selling a certain kind of product with If I Stay, but he sells it honestly and well.
  21. If Rodriguez had any selectivity as an action director and a purveyor of garish thrills, the violence might have an impact beyond benumbing the spectator. "Sin City 2" keeps piling on, flipping the visual pages and selling the same ancient lessons in misogyny that real noir, or neo-noir, exploited yet transcended.
  22. It's not a lousy experience. Taylor Swift shows up in a glorified cameo. Thwaites has promise; Rush has more than that. But for a movie decrying the concept of societal "sameness," The Giver is a hypocritical movie indeed.
  23. The best thing about this self-mocking affair, which runs a leisurely two-plus hours and affords plenty of time for an insane body count, is Antonio Banderas' manic gusto in the role of a gabby mercenary.
  24. What If brings up the distinctions among wit, jokes and robotic banter, and this new romantic comedy has a bit of the first and a few of the second, but it's largely a case of the third.
  25. Gleeson carries the film with wonderful, natural authority. He's a little better than the movie itself, which is glib to a fault.
  26. Nobody watches a disaster movie starring digital tornadoes expecting Oscar Wilde. But Into the Storm, directed with bland efficiency by Steven Quayle of "Final Destination 5," reminds us that unless a movie establishes certain base-line levels of human interest, it runs the not-unentertaining risk of coming out squarely in favor of its own bad weather.
  27. Get on Up hits all these high points. But the Butterworths fracture the order, fruitfully. They're more interested in making musical and dramatic connections across time and space — something in the '70s triggering a childhood memory, for example — than in laying them out predictably.
  28. The film owes its relative buoyancy above all to Chris Pratt as the wisecracking space rogue at the helm.
  29. Beyond Affleck's, the performances here lack amplitude and dramatic impact.
  30. The slapstick is awful; the pathos isn't much better, though it's far more plentiful.

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