Chicago Tribune's Scores

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 1.2 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:
7601 movie reviews
  1. Half the time I wasn't sure what Lee was going for in terms of tone, or style, or focus. It was a tricky assignment to begin with, because McBride's novel, and his screenplay, is part socio-historical corrective, part magical-realist folklore, part wartime procedural.
  2. The film itself, which has everything from erection jokes to a computer-generated tornado, comes down to a battle between the interpreters and a screenplay riddled with convenience, cliche and well-meaning contrivance.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A slow starter. But what appears to be the cliched "uptight nerd liberated by flighty sprite" tale--done better in films from "Bringing Up Baby" to "Barefoot in the Park"--evolves into something deeper, darker, more resonant.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    By the end of Forbes' brisk, economical portrait, Atwater has been revealed as a repugnant and pathetic soul--and a political visionary, among the first to fully understand and harness the raw power of voters’ fears.
  3. A welcome surprise: a supernatural romantic comedy that works, graced with a cast just off-center enough to make it distinctive.
  4. With an uneven and overstuffed script you appreciate the corner-of-the-mouth comments as delivered by Steve Buscemi.
  5. One wishes LaBute, a bleak satirist and, at his best, a crudely compelling dramatist, had taken the script and made it his own sort of twisted comedy instead of a routine thriller
  6. It's less a western than a loping buddy picture.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Taken in isolation from the unsatisfying story, the performances are powerful--Knightley’s vivacious, wounded romantic does a great deal to carry the film on sheer personality, while Fiennes is a subtle master at projecting banked menace through his seeming detached ennui.
  7. The film is responsible, earnest, well-intentioned and, as it was in Sundance, maddeningly inconsistent.
  8. Clooney remains as game as ever, but the way he and McDormand push the energy here, you feel the strain. Pitt, just floating through, comes off best. He doesn't judge the moron he's playing; he just is.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    It's a high-powered cast, but it has painfully little to work with, apart from widely varying humor.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    In its 98 minutes, film critic Godfrey Cheshire’s documentary Moving Midway records an amazing architectural feat, and that’s the least of its virtues.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Everything about the film is aggressively provocative, in both senses of the word.
  9. The acting is exceptional. If parts of A Secret veer toward soap opera, the ensemble work reduces the suds to a minimum.
  10. The film disappoints particularly in relation to "Young Adam," an earlier picture about sexual obsession from writer-director David Mackenzie; this one's more in line with the creamy tones and surface readings of "Asylum."
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Allen and Gant are principals in Mythgarden, a movie production company that promotes gay and lesbian storytelling, and Save Me makes a respectable showing as an early effort.
  11. It's a bit schematic and sweet-natured, perhaps to a fault, yet the faces linger. Smith and his mixture of actors and non-actors remind us that an act of generosity is all it takes to change a life.
  12. The mordant wit and paradoxical melancholic bounce you find in a great many Eastern European filmmakers informs every joke and rosy sexual encounter in the work of Czech writer-director Jiri Menzel.
  13. Problems aside, this is a good, twisty, absorbing work.
  14. Nothing in director Paul W.S. Anderson's schlock drawer--prepares you for the peppy, good-time nastiness that is Death Race.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    It's almost always rewarding to watch an underdog triumph--what else could explain why movies exactly like this keep being made?--but Longshots is one underdog that's hard to love and harder still to champion.
  15. The film, which really is sloppy, slips around in terms of tone and goes every which way.
  16. Trouble the Water is so much better and truer and deeper and more illuminating than either of them ("Bowling for Columbine"/"Fahrenheit 9/11").
  17. It works from a specific place and lets audiences relate to that place, and the people in it, like trusted intimates.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Packed with facts, figures and the testimony of policy experts, the film is no wallow in wonkiness, though, but a surprisingly sprightly tough-love lesson in fiscal responsibility.
  18. It's a lot of fun. Its spirit is genuine and, even with the odd vomit gag, fundamentally sweet.
  19. At what point might animators be arrested for doing work so ugly it causes aesthetic blindness in millions of younglings?
  20. I enjoyed it as much as any Allen film of the last 20 years.
  21. Keeps you off-balance as it establishes a world where every conversation is a flirtation, and trouble and heartbreak sneak in on little cat feet when no one's looking.

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