San Francisco Chronicle's Scores

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For 9,302 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 Mansfield Park
Lowest review score: 0 Speed 2: Cruise Control
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5,160 out of 9302
  2. Mixed: 2,656 out of 9302
  3. Negative: 1,486 out of 9302
9302 movie reviews
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  1. Backstage
    Bleak.
  2. Solas
    An extraordinary and heartfelt film.
  3. Nurse Betty
    A wonderfully twisted comedy.
  4. Ça commence aujourd'hui
    This is a film about small victories, huge defeats and finding the will to keep fighting.
  5. The Way of the Gun
    Rotten, pretentious movie full of minimalist dialogue and self-consciously arty cinematography.
  6. Turn It Up
    Never comes alive.
  7. Wildflowers
    Could have used more dramatic energy, maybe at the expense of some of that gorgeous scenery.
  8. Madadayo
    This warm, celebratory and very public film is punctuated by sudden and luminous private visualizations.
  9. Highlander: Endgame
    Numbing.
  10. Whipped
    Ugly. ..and unpleasant -- and clueless on a grand scale.
  11. Titanic Town
    A tense, intelligent and sober film.
  12. The Art of War
    Numbskull entertainment.
  13. Orfeu
    A film one watches at an emotional remove, but from that distance there are sights and moments to appreciate.
  14. Waga jinsei saiaku no toki
    Segues confidently from broad humor to tense drama.
  15. Smiling Fish & Goat on Fire
    An appealing film with a hideous title.
  16. The Crew
    Seems it's never going to reach liftoff.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bittersweet Motel
    There are just enough revelatory moments to recommend the movie.
  18. Solomon & Gaenor
    Told so simply and powerfully that it seems to carry echoes of earlier, timeless tales.
  19. Love & Sex
    It comes down to a pair of appealing performers in a series of bad-relationship skits.
  20. Bring It On
    Jumbled and stupid plot, bad acting and a few predictable gags that fall flat.
  21. Chalk
    Has unusual visual vitality in a John Cassavetes vein. For the adventurous, it's worth checking out.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack
    Ends up musing perceptively on the American dream of wanderlust and its unintended consequences.
  23. Place Vendôme
    Consistently absorbing as the amazing Deneuve reveals, scene by scene, new facets of a fascinating character in a mercantile war that involves equal parts greed and vanity.
  24. The Cell
    Any way you slice it, it is still pointless.
  25. Godzilla 2000
    A strange mix of the campy, at least in the English dubbing, and the awesome.
  26. Steal This Movie
    Won't work until the film comes out on video.
  27. The Original Kings of Comedy
    Can make a person sick in two ways at once -- through its lowdown raunch and through the spasms of laughter that use stomach muscles one might not have known existed.
  28. The Opportunists
    A brilliant performance (Walken).
  29. Aimee & Jaguar
    A lustrously shot, well-acted and immensely moving romantic drama.
  30. An Affair of Love
    The audience, too, will be sorry to see this fleeting, beautifully made French film end.
  31. Autumn in New York
    Turns into one long wallow.
  32. Bless the Child
    A schlocky thriller that might appeal to less discriminating members of the mall crowd.
  33. Cecil B. DeMented
    It's an audacious little comedy with bursts of hilarity and a certain giddy energy.
  34. The Replacements
    Just like a low-budget football comedy, only with money.
  35. The Tao of Steve
    A modest but charming romantic comedy.
  36. The Tic Code
    If it seems to have the ingredients of an after-school special, the performances take it to another level. Gut level.
  37. Saving Grace
    It tries to get by on charm. It doesn't.
  38. Psycho Beach Party
    If it doesn't always come off, enough headlong energy develops to carry it through.
  39. Coyote Ugly
    It's amazing how far a movie can go on nothing but speed and directness.
  40. Hollow Man
    Might be a blast of ridiculous fun -- the way truly bad movies tend to be -- if it weren't so noxious and reprehensible.
  41. Space Cowboys
    Best movie of the summer.
  42. Catfish in Black Bean Sauce
    A comedy of interracial wariness and misunderstanding marked by a refreshing lack of sappiness.
  43. Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
    Frequently hilarious.
  44. Girl on the Bridge
    Paradis, an actress and pop singer, is sensational.
  45. Wonderland
    Loses steam only when it strays from the sisters and attempts to depict their parents' loveless marriage.
  46. The Wind Will Carry Us
    Film is often too subtle and languorous for its own purposes: At times, it's close to soporific.
  47. Thomas and the Magic Railroad
    This land of sweetness and light may appeal to many, but to some it is going to seem like living hell.
  48. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    Demonstrates, if nothing else, that there's a genuine person -- chastened by mistakes and more compassionate, perhaps, for all she's suffered -- beneath the war paint and the stardust.
  49. Les amants criminels
    Straddles a number of genres -- horror film, lovers on the lam, fairy tale -- and gives them all a cool, knowing spin.
  50. Alice et Martin
    Heartfelt and passionate and brave in what it attempts to explore.
  51. Loser
    Loser is just as it sounds.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pokémon: The Movie 2000
    Feels like an extended TV cartoon segment.
  53. What Lies Beneath
    Goes Hitchcock one better by imagining what it would be like if the master had the advantage of digital technology.
  54. The In Crowd
    A glossy piece of trash.
  55. Water Drops on Burning Rocks
    This nasty, provocative comedy comes from a play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
  56. The Five Senses
    A lot more than the sum of its delicately balanced parts.
  57. Chuck & Buck
    It becomes stronger and more honest than most character studies on film.
  58. Shadow Hours
    Cynical to an extreme, it doesn't illustrate its points but blasts them at us -- in italics, boldface and capital letters.
  59. X-Men
    This feast of fantasy is worth it.
  60. I'm the One That I Want
    A wickedly, punishingly funny movie.
  61. But I'm a Cheerleader
    This is one light comedy whose seriousness, hours later, lingers in the mind.
  62. The Kid
    This slight, predictable comedy has appealing moments.
  63. Scary Movie
    The scary thing about this spoof of '90s teen horror movies is how funny it is.
  64. Shower
    Sentiment, the kind bordering on schmaltz and easy tears, is found in Shower, a well-meaning generational drama.
  65. The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle
    So quick that the flat moments are rapidly, inevitably chased by a new gag.
  66. The Perfect Storm
    Does about as good a job of simulating that terror as it possibly could, but it's no competition for what we create in our mind's eye while reading.
  67. Trixie
    The whole movie is like that: cute, dead and endless.
  68. The Patriot
    The film is long, empty and bogus.
  69. Me, Myself & Irene
    The good ol' Jim Carrey we knew and loved is back, rude, crude and unglued.
  70. Praise
    Achieves a rare interweaving of the darkly poetical and raspy, cockeyed comedy.
  71. Chicken Run
    It will be the most talked-about comedy of summer.
  72. Marcel Proust's Time Regained
    Despite its actors, its lush photography and its obvious seriousness of purpose, is as close to a form of torture as any film ever devised. I can't think of any individuals I dislike so much as to force them to see this picture.
  73. Titan A.E.
    It is impossible to take your eyes off the screen.
  74. Shaft
    Shaft has everything --smart writing, shrewd direction and a handful of performances that are first-rate by any standard.
  75. Boys and Girls
    Watching this film is a little like wallowing in warm surf with soft pop music wafting in the breeze.
  76. Butterfly Tongues
    Has a saccharine quality but also offers a memorable performance by famed Spanish actor Fernando Fernan Gomez.
  77. Humanité
    Humanite isn't like any other film: It's uncompromising, eerily affecting and wildly unresolved.
  78. Jesus' Son
    It's so wonderfully silly, coarse and down-to-Earth that its radiance sneaks up only over time.
  79. The Woman Chaser
    A teasy, cogent and funny noir spoof of dime novels and 1960s Hollywood.
  80. Love's Labour's Lost
    A stink bomb of a movie.
  81. Groove
    The music and wizard DJs in Groove are better than the dopey story.
  82. Sunshine
    From the outside, Sunshine sounds like the most boring film on Earth. In fact, it's glorious.
  83. Gone in Sixty Seconds
    The story is unbelievable and phenomenally silly, not a good combination.
  84. American Pimp
    Lushly entertaining, and its subjects are terrific storytellers with style to burn.
  85. Big Momma's House
    When all's said and done, it turns out to be quite sweet-natured. OK. I laughed. So sue me.
  86. Running Free
    It is aimed primarily at children, and its affectionate treatment of animals is certain to please most of them.
  87. Grass
    Rich with statistics and snazzy visuals, but it ignores those larger questions and, as a result, feels a tad naïve.
  88. American Virgin
    A good movie that has been sitting in a film can for two years waiting for a miracle. The miracle came -- Suvari's sudden popularity.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Better Living Through Circuitry
    It's the content that makes this documentary fly. The documentary's only stumbling point is its dearth of historical context.
  90. Passion of Mind
    At its most interesting, and a bit frightening, when Moore starts to get a little loony. Too bad they didn't follow through and make this more of a psychological thriller than a melodrama.
  91. 8 ½ Women
    A surreal comedy about sex that comes as close to charming as Greenaway ever gets.
  92. Shanghai Noon
    This is almost Mel Brooks territory: The frontiersmen think the Chinese are Jews, while the white settlers think it's the Crow Indians who are. Whoosh!
  93. Kikujirô no natsu
    The comic drama is refreshingly anti- sentimental but will break your heart anyway.
  94. Mission: Impossible II
    Woo's aggressive, cartoony attack in the film, which makes for its biggest delights, also wipes out whatever chance it might have had of making an emotional impact.
  95. Small Time Crooks
    A delicious comedy that starts out promisingly as a pleasant gag comedy but then turns unexpectedly into a bright social satire.
  96. Road Trip
    The film's real find is D.J. Qualls, who is very funny as a jug-eared nerd who blossoms into a wild man after three days on the road.
  97. Cirque du Soleil: Journey of Man
    The big screen -- with that 3-D depth charge -- captures the strange magic of the "big top" Cirque in visual gulps.
  98. Dinosaur
    For all the eyepopping splendor and in-your-face reality, this film leaves the viewer unsatisfied and feeling a little cheated out of compelling drama.
  99. Shadow Boxers
    Could use more background and personal detail on Rijker, but Bankowsky's tight, no- frills approach is always compelling.
  100. Kadosh
    Slowly unfolding but liberating film, which is also a rare look inside a circumscribed community.
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