Chicago Tribune's Scores

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For 7,601 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 1.2 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:
  1. Positive: 5,106 out of 7601
  2. Mixed: 1,473 out of 7601
  3. Negative: 1,022 out of 7601
7601 movie reviews
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  1. The Guest
    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.
  2. The Maze Runner
    First-time feature director Wes Ball's version of The Maze Runner makes the cliches smell daisy-fresh.
  3. The Skeleton Twins
    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.
  4. The Drop
    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.
  5. Life After Beth
    Aubrey Plaza is so deadpan she's undeadpan, and not just in her new zombie movie.
  6. The Last of Robin Hood
    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.
  7. The Identical
    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.
  8. Frank
    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.
  9. Love Is Strange
    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.
  10. Dinosaur 13
    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.
  11. If I Stay
    Cutler is selling a certain kind of product with If I Stay, but he sells it honestly and well.
  12. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    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.
  13. The Giver
    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.
  14. The Expendables 3
    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.
  15. What If
    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.
  16. Calvary
    Gleeson carries the film with wonderful, natural authority. He's a little better than the movie itself, which is glib to a fault.
  17. Into the Storm
    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.
  18. Get On Up
    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.
  19. Guardians of the Galaxy
    The film owes its relative buoyancy above all to Chris Pratt as the wisecracking space rogue at the helm.
  20. The Killer Inside Me
    Beyond Affleck's, the performances here lack amplitude and dramatic impact.
  21. And So It Goes
    The slapstick is awful; the pathos isn't much better, though it's far more plentiful.
  22. Lucy
    When everything and anything is possible, nothing feels urgent or truly dramatic. The movie devolves into a melange of digital effects and sequences of glamorous slaughter, as Lucy swaggers around, with that big brain, and slouches toward becoming a full-lipped deity.
  23. Happy Christmas
    Swanberg may be one of the few American filmmakers who'd benefit from reading one of those "10 Rules for Mediocre Hollywood Screenwriting" how-to books. Many find a kind of truth and life and rough domestic magic in his films. Here and there, now and then, I see what they're talking about.
  24. A Most Wanted Man
    The events are complicated, though not complicated by cheap thrills or easy politics. It's a film of interest rather than throttling suspense. By the end, however, when Bachmann's future depends on a very simple nonviolent series of events, Corbijn's methodical approach pays off. And we care. We care about the protagonist's outcome.
  25. Magic in the Moonlight
    With this script, Allen isn't working in farce mode. It's more an easygoing nod to W. Somerset Maugham or, in the plot's "Pygmalion"-like relationship between a cynical older man and his desired younger female charge, George Bernard Shaw.
  26. Boyhood
    In completing this simple, beautiful project Linklater took his time. And he rewards ours.
  27. Sex Tape
    Sex Tape settles for violence when violent slapstick, a lot harder to finesse, was the implicit goal of the picture.
  28. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    Whatever audiences think of it, I'd say the latest "Apes" picture is just that: a solid success, sharing many of its predecessor's swift, exciting storytelling and motion-capture technology virtues.
  29. Cinemanovels
    The actors make up for the relative thinness of the material. Smith navigates the emotional terrain with great skill. The script is often funny but just as often cutesy.
  30. Deliver Us From Evil
    Half the time, Deliver Us From Evil is genuinely interested in Sarchie's all-too-human demons, and half the time we're marking time until the big exorcism and an ending that keeps the door open for a sequel, should the market demand it.
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