Chicago Sun-Times' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
For 4,413 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 75% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 23% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 9.6 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 71
Highest review score: 100 Murderball
Lowest review score: 0 I Spit on Your Grave
Score distribution:
4,413 movie reviews
  1. The movie's story actually does work as a story and not simply as a wheezy Hollywood formula. Sometimes you walk into a movie with quiet dread and walk out with quiet delight.
  2. The plot becomes a juggling act just when it should be a sprint. And there's another problem: Is it intended as a comedy, or not?
  3. Your Highness is a juvenile excrescence that feels like the work of 11-year-old boys in love with dungeons, dragons, warrior women, pot, boobs and four-letter words.
  4. If there's anything I hate more than a stupid action comedy, it's an incompetent stupid action comedy. It's not so bad it's good. It's so bad it's nothing else but bad.
  5. A closing scene, rousingly patriotic, takes place back on the football field. I think I'm beginning to understand why the Chinese were not reckoned to be a prime market for this film.
  6. Chop off the last two or three minutes, fade to black, and you have a decent film.
  7. Not bad so much as inexplicable. You watch in puzzlement: How did this train wreck happen?
  8. They might have been able to make a nice little thriller out of Antitrust if they'd kept one eye on the Goofy Meter.
  9. The characters in these movies exist in a Twilight Zone where thousands of rounds of ammunition are fired, but no one ever gets shot unless the plot requires him to.
  10. None of the action is coherent; shots and shells are fired, people and killed or not, explosions rend the air, SUVs spin aloft (the same one more than once, I think), and there is no sense of strategy.
  11. High School is a pun. Get it? This is one of those stoner comedies that may be funny if you're high - but if not, not.
  12. Assembled from the debris of countless worn-out images of the Deep South and is indeed beautifully photographed. But the writer-director, Deborah Kampmeier, has become inflamed by the imagery and trusts it as the material for a story, which seems grotesque and lurid.
  13. Isn't a bad movie, just a reprehensible one. It presents as comedy things that are not amusing. If you think this movie is funny, that tells me things about you I don't want to know.
  14. Black somehow feels reigned in; shaved and barbered, he's lost his anarchic passion and is merely playing a comic role instead of transforming it into a personal mission.
  15. Monster-in-Law fails the Gene Siskel Test: "Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?"
  16. This is an ungainly movie, ill-fitting, with its elbows sticking out where the knees should be. To quote another ancient proverb, "A camel is a horse designed by a committee." Life or Something Like It is the movie designed by the camel.
  17. All heart and has the best intentions in the world, but what a bore. It's a beat slower than it should be, it makes its points laboriously, and the plot surprise would be obvious even if I hadn't seen the same device used in exactly the same way earlier this year in "Chasing Liberty."
  18. A lot of the dialogue is intended as funny, but man, is it lame.
  19. Now why did I like this movie? It was just plain dumb fun, is why. It is absurd and preposterous, and proud of it.
  20. Exhibiting high spirits and a crazed comic energy. It doesn't quite work, but it goes down swinging--with a disembodied hand.
  21. The secrets of the plot must remain unrevealed by me, so that you can be offended by them yourself, but let it be said this movie is about as corrupt, intellectually bankrupt and morally dishonest as it could possibly be without David Gale actually hiring himself out as a joker at the court of Saddam Hussein.
  22. Winter’s Tale is a good old-fashioned train wreck of a film. This is one of those deals where all the ingredients are Grade A, but the final product is a dud.
  23. Tells the story of a violent sociopath. Since it's about golf, that makes it a comedy.
  24. [Robin Williams] has been ill-served by a screenplay that isn't curious about what his life would really be like.
  25. A disjointed thriller with two many characters rattling around.
  26. It looks great, it hurtles through its paces and is well-acted. The soundtrack is like elevator music if the elevator were in a death plunge. The special effects are state of the art. Its only flaw is that it's disgusting.
  27. The Spirit is mannered to the point of madness. There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material.
  28. Consider for a moment how this movie might play if it took itself seriously. Would it be better than as a comedy? I suspect so.
  29. Utterly clueless about its tone and has no idea how relentlessly it is undercutting itself. By the time we arrive at the obligatory happy ending, which is perfunctory and automatic, I felt sort of insulted. If Chandrasekhar thinks his audience will laugh at his vulgarity, why does he believe it requires a feel-good ending?
  30. The tension between the slimefest milieu and the charm of the performances is maybe what makes Feeling Minnesota work.

Top Trailers
http://www.metacritic.com/publication/chicago-sun-times?sort_options=metascore&filter=movies&num_items=30&dist=neutral&page=139
www.metacritic.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-15
137172
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:A667BUC7XAJJJIK23F2N3VBYSVXZTNYW
<urn:uuid:9a18f6e7-95e3-4d90-b124-a21a14b72982>
2014-04-16T11:12:04Z
23.0.160.10
sha1:NWW2K5S7EV6WKNFQ6O3BGP3QTZXDV6S2
<urn:uuid:a0480fc3-2810-40eb-aa03-eb67182b88e4>
http://www.metacritic.com/publication/chicago-sun-times?sort_options=metascore&filter=movies&num_items=30&dist=neutral&page=139
response
<urn:uuid:b21d425b-5e43-46d8-8687-a60ced144130>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-147-4-33.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-15
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for April 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf