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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    • 57 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Grand
    It’s hard to believe that a lineup so stellar could generate so few laughs, but there it is.
  2. Irina Palm
    It turns out a success, tempering its farfetched scenario with enough restraint and believability to pass for a modest parable of modern manners.
  3. Under the Same Moon (La misma luna)
    An estimated 4 million Latinas leave one or more children behind when they travel north to find work. They deserve a more nuanced film, but this one’s often affecting.
  4. Horton Hears a Who!
    Someday, if we’re all good little boys and girls, the world will hand us a Dr. Seuss film half as wonderful as one of the books. Meantime we have the competent, clinical computer animation and relative inoffensiveness of Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! to pass the time.
  5. Never Back Down
    It’s a little “Karate Kid,” a smidge of “Fight Club” (with none of the ironic ambivalence toward violence that David Fincher brought to that story), a lot of “The O.C.” (evil boy Gigandet played an evil boy on that series), and presto: probable hit.
  6. Sleepwalking
    Despite honorable work from Theron, Robb and Stahl, Sleepwalking makes good on its title in a not-so-good way.
  7. Heartbeat Detector
    A rich, vexing experience.
  8. Funny Games (2008)
    Funny Games is fundamentally a bourgeois exercise in authorial sadism. As the methodical games grind on, the suffocatingly beige and white surroundings start to look like a mausoleum.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Blind Mountain
    Li’s story is lean and economical, but deeply harrowing, as Xuemei--sympathetically played by debuting performer Huang Lu, the only classically trained actor in a cast of non-professionals--clings to her courage and tries again and again to escape.
  10. CJ7
    CJ7 is roughly as grating as that “Flubber” remake.
  11. 10,000 BC
    Emmerich has no time for poetry or magic, even when the director and his digital wizards (here doing wildly variable work) are trying to dazzle. He’s a taskmaster and a field marshall, not a visionary. But I enjoyed 10,000 B.C. more and more, and more than just about anything Emmerich’s done before.
  12. The Bank Job
    Slick, ice-cold and enjoyable, The Bank Job is a bit of all right.
  13. College Road Trip
    As generic as its title, College Road Trip feels like a first draft, the one the studio brings to the rewrite team that, in this case, never got hired.
  14. Girls Rock!
    Girls do rock, and the final concert is both wild and cathartic. Too bad we haven’t learned more about these rockers along the way.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Married Life
    It seems carefully calibrated to shock viewers out of a familiar frame of reference, while leaving nothing behind to take its place.
  16. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
    Style is a tricky, elusive thing, and this film doesn’t so much have it as strive for it, constantly. But something in Watson’s story endures: The wish-fulfillment truly satisfies. And with the war clouds gathering by story’s end, the fairy tale acquires a bittersweet edge, nicely cutting all that whipped cream.
  17. Paranoid Park
    “Elephant” may have won the Palme d’Or at Cannes but it really didn’t have anything to say about anything. Modest and artful, Paranoid Park says a great deal.
  18. Snow Angels
    Green is a rare bird in American filmmaking: a humanist who knows how to tell a story.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Blindsight
    Their story is deeply involving, all the more so because it isn’t simple or straightforward.
  20. City of Men
    Director Morelli and editor Daniel Rezende know how to set up complex lines of action and keep the screws tight.
  21. Chicago 10
    Morgen’s best achievement is the news footage, more detailed looks at events outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel and in Chicago parks than you typically see on TV rehashes.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Other Boleyn Girl
    Eric Bana doesn’t have much to do as Henry VIII except play the monarch as an overgrown spoiled brat. He is, however, awfully nice to look at.
  23. Penelope
    I wish it were truly special instead of an interesting near-miss.
  24. Semi-Pro
    The court scenes are rarely funny, either in the trash talk or the slapstick.
  25. Chop Shop
    Small but sure, the film is like Alejandro himself: quick on its feet, attuned to a harsh life’s hardships and possibilities.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Charlie Bartlett
    Are teenagers really supposed to identify with a clumsy caricature such as Charlie, who, in spite of all his expulsions and school crimes, comes across as a gawping, perpetually surprised infant in an adult body?
    • 63 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Signal
    The Signal combines the inconstancy of an omnibus film with the blandness of art by committee. The end result feels less like a blend of distinct styles than an opportunistic hodgepodge, a second-hand premise wedded to an attention-grabbing gimmick.
  28. Be Kind Rewind
    The film doesn’t hold together. But it’s the work of a real director, however fantastic his sensibility.
  29. The Counterfeiters
    Swift and compelling, winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign-language picture, The Counterfeiters may not be destined for the large international audience that embraced last year’s winner, “The Lives of Others.” But it’s the better, tougher film, with a more provocative moral dilemma at its center.
  30. The Duchess of Langeais
    The performances reveal precisely what Rivette wants to reveal, which is to say, in conventional psychological terms, not a great deal.
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