McClatchy-Tribune News Service's Scores

  • Movies
Select another publication »
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 4.7 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:
  1. Positive: 363 out of 601
  2. Mixed: 133 out of 601
  3. Negative: 105 out of 601
601 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Rapture-Palooza
    If you’re going to commit to a blasphemous stoner comedy mocking the New Testament prophesy of the coming Rapture, you’d better go all in. Because halfway isn’t funny.
  2. Love Is All You Need
    It works, after a fashion — a romance that isn’t a romantic comedy. But Bier, a wonderful director, proves that “Love” isn’t all you need to make us swoon. You need a lighter touch.
  3. The Purge
    Mostly, it’s just a clumsy lecture about who we’re becoming, haves vs have-nots, with the haves armed to the teeth.
  4. V/H/S/2
    The best of them you could certainly see as full length features, chilling little tastes of a complete vision — story, characters, horrific situations and visual aesthetic. The worst? Simply generic.
  5. Violet & Daisy
    Fletcher and his players never quite hit on a tone that works. Fantastical dream sequences and side trips to the store to get “more bullets” never quite rise to the level of wry commentary. This just isn’t as cute and funny as Fletcher seems to think it is.
  6. Much Ado About Nothing
    A winking comedy with dark underpinnings and some of Shakespeare’s most wicked wordplay.
  7. Now You See Me
    For all its showmanship, Now You See Me has a lot less up its sleeve than it lets on.
  8. After Earth
    An undemanding, childish adventure picture.
  9. The Kings of Summer
    A summer movie that staggers down that fine line between sentimental and snarky, a tale of nature and nurture and first love that manages to charm more than any R-rated movie about horny teens has a right to.
  10. Shadow Dancer
    Owen and Riseborough play their characters awfully close to the vest, not investing in anything that would allow this story to take the romantic or melodramatic turns we expect. But truthfully, that hamstrings the movie.
  11. The East
    It’s too much a movie of “types,” and loses track of story elements that would seem important enough to warrant further exploration. The whole Christian conservative law-and-order mantle feels like a fuzzy afterthought on Jane, forgotten far too soon.
  12. Epic
    Epic isn’t epic, but it isn’t half bad, either. It’s just that as high as the bar has been raised on this sort of animation, this is more evidence that a strong story is worth more than any next generation software.
  13. Fast & Furious 6
    Bad movies are rarely as much fun as these “Fast and the Furious” pictures. And make no mistake about it — they’re bad.
  14. The Hangover Part III
    As "Hangovers" go, Part III isn't challenging or unpleasant, just instantly forgettable. It won't take much to sleep this one off.
  15. This Is Martin Bonner
    The players utterly inhabit their banal characters, but Hartigan only delivers a couple of scenes that merit all this attention to detail.
  16. The English Teacher
    The line between “cute” and “cutesy” is violated, repeatedly, in the sometimes funny, often cloying comedy The English Teacher.
  17. Star Trek Into Darkness
    As our old friend Ricardo Montalban said thirty years ago in “The Wrath of Khan,” still the best of the “Star Treks” — “It is veeery coooooold in space.” “Into Darkness,” for all its dense textures and epic scale, left me cold.
  18. Black Rock
    Rock is a poorly written and ineptly directed genre piece that lacks tension, suspense, fear, all those things that make’ a “thriller” thrilling.
  19. Peeples
    The laughs follow an overly familiar path, but it’s great to see Grier, one of the bright lights of the seminal TV sketch comedy “In Living Color,” button down this judge and find ways to break formula and make him hilarious.
  20. Frances Ha
    Frances Ha turns melancholy and almost painful to watch in its last act as she and we see the dead end dead ahead. And the film doesn’t seem to earn the finale the two of them cooked up for us.
  21. The Painting (Le Tableau)
    It’s a fanciful conceit and a well-animated parable about prejudice, standards of beauty and the shifting sands of the painters’ art.
  22. No One Lives
    No One Lives has to give away its biggest, best secret (the killers have messed with the wrong guy) far too early for its own good.
  23. Aftershock
    Aftershock then becomes a catalog of most every unpleasant way of dying you can imagine.
  24. What Maisie Knew
    Young Onata Aprile makes Maisie a passive wonder, a sweetly poker-faced, nonjudgmental and hopeful child, even as she’s being ditched at bars, forgotten at school or passed back and forth like a prize, or a bad penny.
  25. The Great Gatsby
    This movie hangs utterly on performance, and DiCaprio’s Gatsby is mesmerizing.
  26. Venus and Serena
    The fact that Serena, ranked number one again this year — the oldest woman (31) ever so ranked — means that their story isn’t over, and that if a skeptic wants to finally appreciate their historic impact on the game, he or she still has time to come around.
  27. Kon-Tiki
    Kon-Tiki is a grand old school yarn with enough drama and dramatic incidents to make even Indiana Jones envious at the adventure of it all.
  28. The Iceman
    The dialogue is hard-bitten and Mamet-sharp.
  29. Iron Man 3
    The broad, goofy jokes and one-liners land — even if they feel a little winded, this time.
  30. In the House
    For all its pleasures, as Germaine nudges Claude toward that “ideal” ending that will make the reader say “I never saw that coming” and “It could not have ended any other way” at the same time, one only wishes this absorbing but melodramatic film had taken that advice.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »