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 Muppets
    At its best, though, The Muppets cuts back on the '80s-flashback self-consciousness and believes in the dream.
  2. Happy Feet Two
    The sequel's themes of friendship and interdependency fail to generate much momentum.
  3. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    Reveals a flash or two of real filmmaking (mostly in a suggestively grotesque birthing sequence), enough to save it from pure lousiness.
  4. The Descendants
    It's one of the year's most pleasurable American movies.
  5. Jack and Jill
    It's not much to hijack. But playing a lovelorn version of himself, in love with Adam Sandler in a dress, a lisp and breasts, Al Pacino holds a gun to the head of the comedy Jack and Jill and says: I now pronounce you mine.
  6. Melancholia
    Much of Melancholia plays, effectively, like a slice of late 20th century Dogme-style realism, in the vein of the film "Celebration" by von Trier's fellow Dane, Thomas Vinterberg.
  7. Into the Abyss
    The film is a river of pain, weirdly funny in places, as are all of Herzog's filmic essays.
  8. J. Edgar
    I like the way DiCaprio and Hammer capture the little things - the byplay, the moments in which two men are "playing" FBI agents, partly for show, partly for real. At times, DiCaprio's macho posturing recalls a junior G-man version of Marlon Brando's self-hating homosexual in "Reflections of a Golden Eye."
  9. Le Havre
    Does Kaurismaki believe in his own fairy tale? The movie, a humble delight, suggests the answer is yes.
  10. Like Crazy
    It's entirely possible, maybe even inevitable, that Like Crazy will win over a good many moviegoers despite its bouts of semipreciousness. In the end, I was one of them.
  11. Tower Heist
    For what it is - recessionary wish-fulfillment escapism, with a lot of highly skilled familiar faces in its amply qualified cast - it's fun.
  12. A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
    The first "H&K" caught people off-guard with its canny idiocy and zigzagging, picaresque treasure hunt premise. By now, there's no catching anyone off-guard with these two, except by way of the most off-color and off-putting means possible.
  13. In Time
    I like a lot of the film despite its drawbacks; its violence isn't rote or numbing, and there's a simplicity and elegance to the digital-countdown effect.
  14. Anonymous
    Anonymous is ridiculous, and like Oliver Stone's "JFK" it sells its political conspiracy theories by weight and by volume. But dull, it's not.
  15. The Rum Diary
    There isn't a sophisticated or "adult" perspective to be found in The Rum Diary.
  16. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    The acting in Durkin's feature is excellent. Olsen is utilized largely as an object for camera adoration, but not in the usual glamorizing way. Olsen, Hawkes and company play slippery figures with lovely assurance.
  17. The Three Musketeers
    This latest version is le pits.
  18. The Mighty Macs
    The film doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is: a story of one woman overcoming low expectations. Gugino and Burstyn and the young performers playing the young players do likewise.
  19. The Skin I Live In
    The film is an exercise in improbable contrasts. The more extreme the actions of the characters, the more contained and fastidious the director's technique.
  20. Margin Call
    On the facile side, but it's well-crafted and smartly acted.
  21. Paranormal Activity 3
    The films are not works of genius. They are, however, wily reminders of the virtues of restraint when you're out for a scare.
  22. Footloose
    The result is a film that feels hidebound. And nobody ever called a dance-driven movie "hidebound."
  23. The Big Year
    This is a gentle, diffident concoction. But it has barely enough pulse to power a hummingbird.
  24. The Thing
    While I wish van Heijningen's Thing weren't quite so in lust with the '82 model, it works because it respects that basic premise. And it exhibits a little patience, doling out its ickiest, nastiest moments in ways that make them stick.
  25. Take Shelter
    Here's what I most appreciate about Shannon's work with the writer-director Jeff Nichols: the subtlety.
  26. The Way
    Here and there, the actor invests the kind of feeling that makes The Way come alive in human terms.
  27. Real Steel
    I suspect a lot of what I found synthetic and sort of galling in Real Steel will work just fine with the target audience.
  28. The Ides of March
    I would see The Ides of March again just for the way Jeffrey Wright takes command of the screen in the secondary role of a senator who is either a cipher, a sphinx, a two-faced sphinx, a lying sack of D.C. dung or a steely man of principle.
  29. Machine Gun Preacher
    The events of the movie may be a little bit true, or a lot, but hardly any of it plays that way.
  30. What's Your Number?
    Dumb film; smart comedienne.
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