Chicago Sun-Times' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
For 3,954 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:
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
3,954 movie reviews
  1. That such intelligence could be contained in a movie that is simultaneously so funny and so entertaining is some kind of a miracle.
  2. Shines with a kind of inspired madness.
  3. Here is the most passionate and tender love story in many years, so touching because it is not about a story, not about stars, not about a plot, not about sex, not about nudity, but about LOVE itself.
  4. One of the greatest of all American films, but has never received the attention it deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many "great movies'' are by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career.
  5. A remarkable film.
  6. As for myself, as Leticia rejoined Hank in the last shot of the movie, I was thinking about her as deeply and urgently as about any movie character I can remember.
  7. Here is a movie that knows its women, listens to them, doesn't give them a pass, allows them to be real: It's a rebuke to the shallow "Ya-Ya Sisterhood."
  8. It is one of the year's best films.
  9. Like Malick's "Days of Heaven," it is not about plot, but about memory and regret. It remembers a summer that was not a happy summer, but there will never again be a summer so intensely felt, so alive, so valuable.
  10. If you are squeamish, here is the film to make you squeam.
  11. This is an uncommonly intelligent film, smart and amusing too, and anyone who thinks it is not faithful to Austen doesn't know the author but only her plots.
  12. One of those entertainments where you laugh a lot along the way, and then you end up on the edge of your seat at the end.
  13. The story of herself (Varda), a woman whose life has consisted of moving through the world with the tools of her trade, finding what is worth treasuring.
  14. Seeps with melancholy, old wounds, repressed anger, lust. That it is also caustically funny and heartwarming is miraculous.
  15. Brilliant and heartbreaking, takes place in the present but is timeless.
  16. A sports documentary as gripping, in a different way, as "Hoop Dreams."
  17. Seductive and beautiful, cynical and twisted, and one of the best films of the year.
  18. This is one of the funniest movies ever made. To see it now is to understand that. To see it for the first time in 1968, when I did, was to witness audacity so liberating that not even "There's Something About Mary" rivals it.
  19. More reverie and meditation than reportage.
  20. Rohmer elegantly seduces us with people who have all of the alarming unpredictability of life.
  21. This is the first film to approach the subject of "undocumented workers" solely through their eyes. This is not one of those docudramas where we half-expect a test at the end, but a film like "The Grapes of Wrath" that gets inside the hearts of its characters and lives with them.
  22. It's a superb film -- funny, insightful and very wise about the realities of political life.
  23. One of the year's best films for a lot of reasons, including its ability to involve the audience almost breathlessly in a story of mounting tragedy.
  24. The most accurate movie about campus life that I can remember.
  25. To look at Bringing Out the Dead --to look, indeed, at almost any Scorsese film--is to be reminded that film can touch us urgently and deeply.
  26. Has no ragged edges or bothersome detours, and flows from surprise to delight. At the end, when just desserts are handed out, it arrives at a kind of perfection.
  27. What a bold, mad act of genius it was, to make Lawrence of Arabia, or even think that it could be made.
  28. Nolte and Coburn are magnificent in this film, which is like an expiation or amends for abusive men. It is revealing to watch them in their scenes together--to see how they're able to use physical presence to sketch the history of a relationship.
  29. I've never seen a movie so sad in which there was so much genuine laughter. The Accidental Tourist is one of the best films of the year.
  30. Scorsese tells his story with the energy and pacing he's famous for, and with a wealth of little details that feel just right.