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 Class
    This is one of the screen's most rewarding explorations of the teacher/student relationship in any language.
  2. Seven Pounds
    Seven Pounds has a heart as big as all outdoors. Unfortunately it's made out of high-fructose bull.
  3. The Wrestler
    The Wrestler works for the same reason "Rachel Getting Married" works. The way they're acted, shot, edited and scored, both films deploy a loose, rough-hewn documentary style to great dramatic advantage. The corn isn't hyped. The performances click without going for the jugular.
  4. Timecrimes
    Timecrimes doesn't end as well as it begins. Then again, writer-director Nacho Vigalondo deliberately fudges the beginning and endpoints of his premise, which involves one of those nutty causal loops so dear to writers and consumers of science fiction.
  5. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    Keanu Reeves plays Klaatu, confining his usual two-and-a-half-note vocal range to half that.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Dark Streets
    Dark Streets lost me early, real early, like still-adjusting-my-eyes-in-a-dark-theater early.
  7. Doubt
    While Streep has a tiny bit too much fun with some of her character's excesses, she's awfully good. So is Hoffman, who walks a fine line between obvious guilt and possible innocence.
  8. Gran Torino
    Eastwood's foursquare directorial aesthetic tends to heighten, rather than camouflage, a screenplay's shortcomings.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Nothing Like the Holidays
    It's what we need at the holidays, and it's the modest goal of a modest little picture like this--to capture something heartfelt and real.
  10. Che
    Che is Soderbergh's most interesting film in years, defiantly eccentric and absorbing at its best.
  11. The Reader
    Can a formidable actress redeem a pile of solemn erotic kitsch? Kate Winslet answers that one as honestly as she can in the film version of Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel "The Reader."
  12. Wendy and Lucy
    If a Warner Bros. social-protest film from the early 1930s somehow got into bed with an American indie from the 1970s, how would the love-child turn out? Like this.
  13. Frost/Nixon
    Frost/Nixon is wholly absorbing.
  14. The Black Balloon
    At its sharpest Elissa Down's feature directorial debut is guided by intense, rough-edged emotional swings that feel authentically alive, even when the script settles for tidiness.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Cadillac Records
    Mos Def makes a terrific Berry, all flash and confidence, and Wright offers a memorably soulful take on Waters, whether he's strutting, singing, suffering or all three. Walker's Howlin' Wolf is a deep-throated, pride-filled bear of a man who dominates the screen.
  16. Hunger
    It's a strength of this carefully composed, almost obsessively controlled picture that it has no interest in the conventional biographical focus on a subject.
  17. Nobel Son
    I enjoyed Eliza Dushku's mad poetess, probably for the wrong reasons, but with a project this meager, you take your artful sneers and scenic diversions where you can get them.
  18. Punisher: War Zone
    The film works a bit better than the 2004 "Punisher" installment, the one starring surly, dislikable Thomas Jane as Frank Castle.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Transporter 3
    The best sequences involve Frank's inventive ability to stay within 75 feet of his car, but otherwise, it's the charismatic unruffled dexterity in the face of impossible odds that rivets.
  20. Four Christmases
    As Vaughn's therapist mother, Sissy Spacek comes off best. But she's a rare bird of whom it truly can be said: She's always good. No matter how grim the material.
  21. Milk
    The story of Harvey Milk is a tragedy, but not since Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" has Sean Penn played such a serenely happy individual.
  22. Bolt
    It's a seriously withholding action comedy, stingy on the wit, charm, jokes, narrative satisfactions and animals with personalities sharp enough for the big screen, either in 2-D or 3-D.
  23. Twilight
    The superfast running effects, with Edward dashing up mountains, or rival, evil vampires swooping here and there at amazing speed, look genuinely cheesy, like the guy running the race in the smart-phone ad. I'm surprised Hardwicke and her colleagues couldn't solve this one more effectively. Set pieces such as a vampire baseball game fall flat as well.
  24. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
    The film isn't much as cinema, but it doesn't really matter. The final half-hour, in particular, generates the sort of suspense you rarely get in a sports documentary.
  25. Australia
    At times the film appears on the verge of morphing into a singing-cowboy musical.
  26. Quantum of Solace
    The way it's shot and cut, it plays like a parody of a car commercial shot in the style of a Bond film.
  27. A Christmas Tale
    Desplechin's films are great, chaotic, unsettling fun. This one's scored, elegantly, to a mixture of standards and classics and original music by Gregoire Hetzel.
  28. Slumdog Millionaire
    After last year's black-hearted "No Country for Old Men," the Oscars may well be in the mood to embrace a fairy tale sampling every imaginable genre, with a note of triumph accompanying even the worst suffering, capped by the snazziest ending money can buy.
  29. Role Models
    Role Models wouldn't be anything without Mintz-Plasse, whose character occasions what may be the cinema's first really funny Marvin Hamlisch joke, and whose camera presence is at once unfailingly modest and distinctive.
  30. JCVD
    The film sags in the middle section, and it's more a novelty item than a fully formed work . But it's very entertaining. And Van Damme proves himself a brave, possibly foolhardy actor, which is more than Steven Seagal ever did.
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