McClatchy-Tribune News Service's Scores

  • Movies
For 601 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 61% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 37% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 60
Highest review score: 100 56 Up
Lowest review score: 25 Blended
Score distribution:
601 movie reviews
  1. Whatever twists this puzzle tosses at us, the film reminds us that a great actor, in close-up, telling a story with just her or his eyes, is still the greatest special effect the movies have to offer. This cast telling this story ensures us that nobody will be dozing off Before I Go to Sleep.
  2. So as much as every generation deserves it’s own Romeo & Juliet, this latest one does nothing to make anyone older than Hailee Steinfeld forget the heat of Baz Lurhmann’s far sexier, noisier and passionate modern dress version of 1996, where Claire Danes and Leo DiCaprio completely convinced us that they knew how to “play Satan’s game.” And how.
  3. It’s a load of horrific hooey.
  4. Gangster Squad is a gang war drama built on Western conventions, a rootin' tootin', Camel-smokin', whiskey swillin' shoot'em up.
  5. The cloying narration and the inclusion of Fonda are just warnings for that moment, 70 minutes in, when this comic chemical train goes completely off the rails. Rockwell, Wilde, Monaghan are worth the price of admission, but “Better Living” would have been better off with more chemistry and less cutesy.
  6. Your enjoyment of Horrible Bosses 2 is almost wholly dependent on your tolerance for clusters of funny actors, babbling, riffing — and in the case of Charlie Day, screeching — all at once.
  7. Daft and sloppy as it is, 3 Days rarely fails to entertain.
  8. No matter how great her ambitions, no matter how little she was able to accomplish, thanks to the strictures of her time, here was a woman history remembers simply through the force of her personality and the simple courage it took to be ahead of her time.
  9. Catch Hell has physical torture and sexually explicit mind games. It has a star who seems resigned to his fate and willing to give up and savage bumpkins straight out of “Deliverance” ready to take out their hatred of Hollywood and Hollywood values on him. That description gives this simple, ferociously feral thriller more depth than it deserves.
  10. Robinson manages some suspense, but the thriller’s ticking clock is a weak one.
  11. Deliver Us from Evil takes a very long time to deliver us from dullness.
  12. The Jason Statham vehicle Homefront is such a generic tough-guy-against-the-odds ’80s style actioner that you’d swear Sly Stallone starred in it. He did, back in the day. Or versions of it. This one, Stallone just scripted.
  13. A perfectly adequate superhero comic-book movie, all explosions, chases, gunfights, sword fights and blood feuds. There’s even a little humor in it.
  14. Mansions is like “Vehicle 19″ or “Takers,” dumb, noisy junk.
  15. Charles Dance is the Nosferatu-garbed monster in the cave, a balding, toothy villain in the great tradition of British vampires — Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman, Michael Sheen and Kate Beckinsale among them. The moment he shows up, all shadowy menace and prophecy, “Dracula” gets interesting.
  16. The quest, which takes our heroes to the Sea of Monsters, aka The Bermuda Triangle, is generic in the extreme. The fights/escapes all lack any sense of urgency and peril.
  17. Rapace is all over the place with her performance — needy, then self-assured, enraged, then in love. The always feral Farrell seems as dismayed by her as the rest of us.
  18. Needed more movie to go with its message.
  19. The cast doesn’t have the sassy swagger of the “Fast & Furious” crew. Paul, surrounded by co-stars of the same modest height, isn’t particularly charismatic in this setting. He’s not a natural “quiet tough guy.” But the actors are second bananas here — to the Koenigsegg Ageras, Saleens and Shelby Mustang that feed America’s Need for Speed, on screen and off. And the cars deliver.
  20. Aftershock then becomes a catalog of most every unpleasant way of dying you can imagine.
  21. It’s more unpleasant than scary, and ever so slow in getting up to speed.
  22. Melissa K. Stack’s script has snap and crackle to go with the pop, making this female wish-fulfillment fantasy an “Eat, Pray, Revenge” that delivers the punches that two “Sex and the City” movies never could.
  23. Tammy, in the end, feels like a pulled punch. McCarthy promises a haymaker she never quite delivers.
  24. Divorce Corp is a lot pointed outrage that damning as its seems, feels suspect.
  25. As horror musicals go, Stage Fright is never more than an out-of-town tryout.
  26. Planes looks, sounds and feels like a direct-to-video project, which in an earlier age when people still bought DVDs it would have been. In theaters, it’s nothing more than a laughless 90 minute commercial for toys available at a retailer near you.
  27. A humorless, muddled, bloody and generally unpleasant thriller.
  28. By the time we reach the third act, which is where the trial we’ve been teased plays out (at great, boring length), The Citizen has exhausted its supply of immigration cliches and our patience.
  29. This generally mild-mannered comedy sinks or swims on Hart’s back. And as one scene makes clear, Little Man can’t swim.
  30. Frozen, undercooked and sorely lacking much in the way of “all the trimmings,” this turkey isn’t ready to serve.

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