G. Allen Johnson

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San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner
For 523 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 45% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.7 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

G. Allen Johnson's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Fire of Love
Lowest review score: 0 The Out-Laws
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 345 out of 523
  2. Mixed: 83 out of 523
  3. Negative: 95 out of 523
523 movie reviews
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    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 G. Allen Johnson
    The Way Back
    Director and co-writer/producer Gavin O’Connor’s meticulous drama feels authentic all the way around. The basketball feels real. The high school kids seem real. Jack’s relationship with his estranged wife Angela (Janina Gavankar) is very believable.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 G. Allen Johnson
    Vivo
    Like practically every other animated movie meant for mass consumption, the movie gets lost in the chase — the point where story flow is interrupted so that characters get lost as they try to achieve their objective and a manufactured villain is trying to keep them from their goal.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    The Space Race
    The Space Race is an illuminating, absorbing film about an underreported storyline in our astronaut programs.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything
    Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything begins as a fawning “greatest hits” collection. Then, in the second half, it deepens.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 25 G. Allen Johnson
    Paddington In Peru
    Complete with cliches and culturally cringe-inducing stereotypes — poor but happy villagers, sweaty villains — Peruvians will hardly use this film in their tourist advertising.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 G. Allen Johnson
    Stars at Noon
    Stars at Noon has some interesting ideas, and a general fatalistic malaise creates a perversely appealing Le Carré-esque mood. But it’s so vague — perhaps because Denis doesn’t understand Central America as much as she does West Africa — that its impact melts in the heat of its near equatorial setting.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    Kusama - Infinity
    A fascinating guide to its subject and her work, but the emotional wall Kusama lives behind remains unbroken. She is a loner and a mystery.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    Love Jones
    There is a point of view here, a rather strong one. It may sound like slight praise, but Love Jones is a movie that is exactly what it wants to be, and that's an achievement in a homogenized, test-marketed vanilla-movie landscape.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    Caught Stealing
    Truth be told, the latest Darren Aronofsky film, which Oakland native Charlie Huston adapted from his own novel, is well made and contains terrific performances. It is a true original. But it’s also depressingly soul-killing and nihilistic, with a plot twist that fairly deep-sixes it for this critic.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    The Good Boss
    The cast is uniformly good, but it’s Bardem’s sly, harried performance that powers this overlong, and more amusing than funny, comedy.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    Good Night Oppy
    White structures the documentary as an absorbing adventure tale, and that it is.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    Strange World
    But after two instant classics in “Raya and the Last Dragon” and “Encanto” in 2021, “Strange World,” while pleasing, is a bit of a step down for Walt Disney Animation.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 G. Allen Johnson
    Oh, Canada
    Oh, Canada is about not so much Fife’s artistic growth as his journey to hermetically sealed narcissism.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    Transformers One
    Directed by Livermore-raised Josh Cooley, an Oscar-winner for “Toy Story 4,” “Transformers One” is for the inner child, and unapologetically so. And for the adults in the room, you can read it as a pro-union tale as worker bots unite.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    Eddington
    Phoenix is the perfect instrument for Aster’s bleak and self-destructive view of humanity. Consider “Eddington” a warning.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 G. Allen Johnson
    The Phantom of the Open
    Rylance is always good, but director Craig Roberts, to use a golf term, lays up instead of going for the pin. In other words, he plays it safe.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 25 G. Allen Johnson
    Swallow
    Because there’s nary a situation that seems reality-based and uncontrived in this movie that has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, filled with over-the-top cardboard characters that seem sneered upon by their creator. If Mirabella-Davis doesn’t believe in his characters, why should we?
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    The Fantastic Four: First Steps
    Nostalgia, as mentioned, is a factor. But the key to its success is its focus on family and hope.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    Last Breath
    This is a lean, fast-moving and effective movie, with an undersea world that is as vast and lonely as outer space.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    True Mothers
    Naomi Kawase’s films don’t hammer toward arbitrary plot points but flow like water, so “True Mothers” doesn’t unfold like a Hollywood blockbuster, or indeed, even most arthouse films. It courses along softly and confidently, with unexpected ebbs and estuaries.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    MaXXXine
    MaXXXine, clearly boasting a higher budget, stands as a bloody valentine to Hollywood. It’s a cesspool, all right, but it’s our cesspool, he seems to say, and guess what? Every once in a while true art comes out of it.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    Rental Family
    It wears its heart on its sleeve and is a bit too sentimental, but it is sweet and pleasing.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    Unstoppable
    Jerome and Lopez build an undeniable chemistry that powers the movie, and it wouldn’t work at all unless Jerome wasn’t excellent as well. He is.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 25 G. Allen Johnson
    Ready or Not
    The problem with Ready or Not is that directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (“V/H/S”) don’t know what kind of movie they want to make, or what to do with their heroine. There are constant shifts in tone — is it a comedy, like the trapped-in-a-mansion “Murder By Death”? A satire on the rich? A kick-ass revenge picture?
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things
    The best thing about Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things, other than the music, is the way it evokes an era and reminds us that its subject was one of the great voices of the 20th century.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 25 G. Allen Johnson
    The Traitor
    The biggest betrayal of The Traitor is its crime against the usually compelling Mafia movie genre. This is an offer you can refuse.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 G. Allen Johnson
    The Guilty
    So while Fuqua’s The Guilty is not much different from the original, his direction is crisp, Gyllenhaal’s performance grows on you and Riley Keough (Zola), as the voice of the woman who is abducted, is terrific.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 G. Allen Johnson
    On Swift Horses
    In some respects, this feels like two movies, and the filmmakers couldn’t decide which story should be the focus.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 G. Allen Johnson
    The Beach Boys
    The Beach Boys is a breezy CliffsNotes version of the band’s ups and downs and cultural relevance and should interest established fans — even if they know it all already — and younger music enthusiasts who are looking for a window in.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 25 G. Allen Johnson
    Fingernails
    The problem with Fingernails is it takes itself too seriously. Co-writer and director Christos Nikou takes a clinical, dramatic approach to such a high-concept, over-the-top and ridiculous premise. He seems so enamored by the concept of the movie that he forgot that the movie was supposed to be about relationships and not the testing.
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