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 1.5 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:
  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 Paperboy
    To say The Paperboy doesn't work is one thing; to say it's dull is a lie. This movie is berserk, which is more interesting than "eh."
  2. Taken 2
    Revenge is a dish best served cold, as some Albanian dramatist once said, but Taken 2 isn't good-cold, as in steely and purposeful; it's cold as in "lost the scent."
  3. Frankenweenie
    The entire project is carefully wrought in visual terms and more than a little familiar. Sometimes even a well-applied pair of jumper cables can't do the trick.
  4. Won't Back Down
    Davis, in particular, manages to create a fully dimensional character in the midst of a highly polemical screenplay.
  5. Hotel Transylvania
    Dominated by Adam Sandler's D-minus Bela Lugosi impression, the 3-D animated feature Hotel Transylvania illustrates the difference between engaging a young movie audience and agitating it, with snark and noise and everything but the funny.
  6. Looper
    For about an hour Looper really cooks. Its second half is more of a medium boil, and less fun. But watching it, I realized how few commercial entertainments hold up straight through to the end-point.
  7. How to Survive a Plague
    From a terrible epidemic comes a beautiful documentary.
  8. Detropia
    The oddly beautiful documentary made by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Gray is subtler and richer than its blunt title suggests.
  9. Dredd
    Calling Dredd 3D a movie is sort of a lie. It's a premise, and there are levels to reach, and always there's another grimy hallway to stalk, and then you turn right or left, and then kill some more.
  10. Hello I Must Be Going
    There are times when the facile flimsiness of Hello I Must Be Going threatens to float right off the screen. But Lynskey has her ways of surprising us, even when nothing in the script itself is doing so.
  11. End of Watch
    The drawback of the film's visual approach, however, is a considerable one. The relentless first-person shooting in End of Watch - figurative and literal - is less about YouTube factuality than it is about Xbox gaming reconfigured for the movies.
  12. Trouble with the Curve
    Wholly predictable yet serenely enjoyable.
  13. The Master
    The Master is brilliantly, wholly itself for a little more than half of its 137 minutes. Then it chases its own tail a bit and settles for being merely a fascinating metaphoric father-son relationship reaching endgame. It may not all "work," but most of it's remarkable.
  14. Arbitrage
    Part "Law & Order" morality play, part "Wall Street" with a dash of the more recent and topically pertinent "Margin Call," Arbitrage hums along, complicating its narrative without tying itself in knots.
  15. Samsara
    Samsara is gorgeous. And sometimes, depending on expectations, looks are enough.
  16. The Words
    It's more or less a grown-up picture, and not bad at that, though its muted and patient style has both its merits and its drawbacks. Still, as I say: not bad.
  17. Sleepwalk with Me
    With a refreshing lack of fake glamour, the film captures what it's like to be an initially unpromising comedian on the road.
  18. Compliance
    The very antonym of "fun," writer-director Craig Zobel's new film Compliance is one of the toughest sits of the movie year 2012. But it's an uncompromising and, in its way, honorable drama built upon a prank call that goes on and on.
  19. For a Good Time, Call...
    Even if the film should be retitled "For a Fairly Good Time, Call ..." at least we're not back on the couch with another variation on the same old group of arrested-development young adult males, hanging on to their adolescence with as much determination as their marijuana intake allows.
  20. Lawless
    This should've been a really good picture, especially with Hillcoat's crack ensemble. Instead it's a stilted battle waged between the material and the interpreters. It's up to you, the thirsty customer, to decide who won.
  21. Red Hook Summer
    It's a scramble, marked by the unruly variety of visual strategies Lee prefers.
  22. Cosmopolis
    I just wish Cronenberg hadn't adapted the book on his own. Behind the camera, he does remarkable things, turning Packer's limo into what Cronenberg himself has described as an upscale version of "Das Boot." But the playlets constituting the whole are thick, stubbornly undramatic affairs; the verbiage is lumpy, self-conscious.
  23. Premium Rush
    Premium Rush is great fun - nimble, quick, the thinking person's mindless entertainment.
  24. Hit and Run
    Hit & Run is pretty rancid as comedy. Worse, the chases are strictly amateur hour, all shortcut editing and no gut satisfaction.
  25. 2 Days in New York
    The comedy works some of the time; the pathos, more so. There's an undertow of grief in 2 Days in New York relating to the passing of Marion's (and Delpy's) mother, who died in 2009.
  26. ParaNorman
    What works about ParaNorman is its subtle interweave of the stoical and the heroic. The voice work is inspired, without a lot of theatrical flourish. The low-key musical score by Jon Brion, one of the year's best, teases out the macabre humor in each new challenge faced by Norman.
  27. Sparkle
    Most of the stuff that's new in the new Sparkle, written by Mara Brock Akil (who is married to the director), is shrewd and cleverly considered. The stuff that's old is what people responded to back in '76.
  28. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    Hedges is a determined romantic and a bit of a saphead. He's also humane.
  29. Searching for Sugar Man
    At 85 minutes, it's a tight, sharp achievement, yet one of the things I love about it is simple: It moves to a relaxed rhythm, in sync with its slightly otherworldly subject.
  30. Celeste and Jesse Forever
    Jones is first-rate (and her fellow writer McCormack is fun as the wild-eyed pot dealer, Skillz). The film has a conventional fake-documentary look, but underneath it is an honest concern about how to learn to treat people well and kindly after the end. Or to get to an ending, or a new beginning, in the first place.
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