For 7,614 reviews, this publication has graded:
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62% higher than the average critic
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2% same as the average critic
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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: | Autumn Tale | |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest review score: | Car 54, Where Are You? |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 5,117 out of 7614
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Mixed: 1,475 out of 7614
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Negative: 1,022 out of 7614
7614
movie
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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Reviewed by
Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Oct 2, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Oct 2, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Oct 1, 2014
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Michael Phillips
The Boxtrolls remains relentlessly busy up through its final credits, and it's clever in a nattering way. But it's virtually charmless.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 27, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 25, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 25, 2014
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Michael Phillips
For me Chastain's unerring honesty is the only element keeping The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby above the realm of pure affectation.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 18, 2014
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Michael Phillips
The chief argument regarding his (Smith) "Human Centipede" riff is pretty basic: good trash or stupid trash? I'd say roughly half and half.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 18, 2014
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Michael Phillips
Thing is, Levy is a hard-sell man. He pushes the material so hard, it's as if he were working on commission.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 18, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 18, 2014
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Michael Phillips
First-time feature director Wes Ball's version of The Maze Runner makes the cliches smell daisy-fresh.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 18, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 11, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 11, 2014
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Michael Phillips
Aubrey Plaza is so deadpan she's undeadpan, and not just in her new zombie movie.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 4, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 4, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 4, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 28, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 28, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 21, 2014
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Michael Phillips
Cutler is selling a certain kind of product with If I Stay, but he sells it honestly and well.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 21, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 21, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 14, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 14, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 7, 2014
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Michael Phillips
Gleeson carries the film with wonderful, natural authority. He's a little better than the movie itself, which is glib to a fault.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 7, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 7, 2014
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Michael Phillips
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.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jul 31, 2014
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Michael Phillips
The film owes its relative buoyancy above all to Chris Pratt as the wisecracking space rogue at the helm.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jul 31, 2014
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Michael Phillips
Beyond Affleck's, the performances here lack amplitude and dramatic impact.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jul 27, 2014
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Reviewed by
Michael Phillips
The slapstick is awful; the pathos isn't much better, though it's far more plentiful.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jul 24, 2014
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