Chicago Tribune's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 5,117 out of 7614
  2. Mixed: 1,475 out of 7614
  3. Negative: 1,022 out of 7614
7614 movie reviews
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  1. Footloose
    The result is a film that feels hidebound. And nobody ever called a dance-driven movie "hidebound."
  2. The Big Year
    This is a gentle, diffident concoction. But it has barely enough pulse to power a hummingbird.
  3. 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.
  4. Take Shelter
    Here's what I most appreciate about Shannon's work with the writer-director Jeff Nichols: the subtlety.
  5. The Way
    Here and there, the actor invests the kind of feeling that makes The Way come alive in human terms.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. What's Your Number?
    Dumb film; smart comedienne.
  10. 50/50
    Some of it's schematic and on the nose. But the grace notes are what make 50/50 better than simply "good enough."
  11. Love Crime
    Scott Thomas can play these sorts of ice queens in her sleep, but I've long thought she's a more effective and nuanced performer in French-language projects than in English-language ones. The performance is laced with just enough wit to make it sting.
  12. Dolphin Tale
    The best of Dolphin Tale takes it easy. Led by Connick and Judd, plus the crucially empathetic Gamble and Zuehlsdorff, the cast includes Kris Kristofferson as the seafaring old salt of a grandpa. The acting has a nice, low-pressure vibe, in contrast to the film's high-pressure peril.
  13. Killer Elite
    The script is a mess. It's an object lesson in taking a nonfiction book ("The Feather Men," about a cadre of ex-British Special Air Service operatives) and making a hash of it.
  14. Moneyball
    Moneyball is the perfect sports movie for these cash-strapped times of efficiency maximization.
  15. Mysteries of Lisbon
    It's a lot. But if you're at all inclined, it's just right.
  16. Bellflower
    A rewardingly twisted hybrid of low-fi mumblecore and stylized thriller.
  17. Straw Dogs
    It's miscast, barely functional in terms of technique, stupid and unnecessary. Other than that….
  18. I Don't Know How She Does It
    Doesn't know how to do what I think it's trying to do.
  19. Drive
    Drive begins extremely well and ends in a muddle of ultraviolence, hypocrisy and stylistic preening, which won't be any sort of deterrent for those who like its looks.
  20. Circumstance
    The film wages an internal battle between its ripely sensual atmosphere and its often stilted pacing and plotting.
  21. Contagion
    He's the anti-Michael Bay, the un-Roland Emmerich. No fake-documentary "realism" here; Soderbergh values the silence before the storm, or a hushed two-person encounter in which one or both parties are concealing something.
  22. Warrior
    Every time you start resisting, somehow the film makes the sale, again.
  23. Apollo 18
    Many will find Apollo 18 silly and derivative. It is. Yet it's also a break from the usual hyperbolic, down-your-throat brand of silly and derivative scare movies.
  24. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy isn't just not funny, it's totally just not funny.
  25. Higher Ground
    Farmiga's film doesn't state things directly, but we sense what is happening to Corinne, and how some turn to fundamentalism for complex and interconnected reasons.
  26. The Debt
    Director Madden vacillates between treating the issues and historical context of The Debt seriously, and as the story demands, as pure, heavy-handed pulp. The cast does what it can in the service of this assignment. But some jobs simply resist satisfying completion.
  27. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    Both the man and his times resist a compact 93 minutes. This much anguished history, and Aleichem's inspired literary response to that history, has difficulties being confined to conventional documentary feature length. Yet Dorman's touch is sure, his pacing fleet and his chorus of voices marvelous.
  28. Brighton Rock
    Although Joffe appears to be making a Brighton version of the seductively natty evil we find stateside in "Boardwalk Empire," this Brighton Rock remains muffled, half-formed pulp fiction.
  29. Our Idiot Brother
    It's sweet, and low-key. It's very '70s in its vibe, which helps when the script veers in and out of formula.
  30. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    To my taste there's too much of everything. The soundtrack never shuts up with the wind, the murmurings, the shudderings. And while director Nixey has talent, his indiscriminately roving camera tends to diffuse the tension, not heighten it.
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