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. 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."
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Moneyball
    Moneyball is the perfect sports movie for these cash-strapped times of efficiency maximization.
  6. Mysteries of Lisbon
    It's a lot. But if you're at all inclined, it's just right.
  7. Bellflower
    A rewardingly twisted hybrid of low-fi mumblecore and stylized thriller.
  8. Straw Dogs
    It's miscast, barely functional in terms of technique, stupid and unnecessary. Other than that….
  9. I Don't Know How She Does It
    Doesn't know how to do what I think it's trying to do.
  10. 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.
  11. Circumstance
    The film wages an internal battle between its ripely sensual atmosphere and its often stilted pacing and plotting.
  12. 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.
  13. Warrior
    Every time you start resisting, somehow the film makes the sale, again.
  14. 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.
  15. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy isn't just not funny, it's totally just not funny.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. Senna
    The film is a remarkable experience on a purely sensory level, and the best of its archival footage - on the track, in private meetings with drivers before the races, from the white-knuckle, over-the-shoulder perspective of Senna himself - is pure gold.
  23. Conan the Barbarian
    It's mostly noise and splurch and, as I mentioned, aaaaarrrrggggghhhhh!
  24. Fright Night
    Plenty gory, but graced by a jovial sense of humor and an enjoyably guts-centric use of 3-D.
  25. One Day
    What proved tasty in book form comes across a little more like work in the movie.
  26. Point Blank
    Frantic, violent and unrelenting, it is all of a piece, its tightly packed storytelling making cassoulet of its own implausibilities and familiar terrain covering a web of political and institutional conspiracy.
  27. Final Destination 5
    If more of the picture had the inventively grotesque payoff of the scene set at the gymnastics tryout, capped by a female character's inarguably poor dismount, we might have something to puke home about.
  28. 30 Minutes or Less
    The movie ends up being just sharp enough at its peaks to be frustrating in its valleys. But the laughs are there.
  29. The Help
    Davis is reason No. 1 the film extracted from Kathryn Stockett's 2009 best-seller improves on its source material.
  30. The Guard
    Part Joel & Ethan Coen and part John Millington Synge, this grotty little fairy tale casts a deft line and reels you in. I'd see it again just to hear the drug smugglers argue over the use of the Americanism "good to go."
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