San Francisco Chronicle's Scores

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For 9,305 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 2.1 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: 5,161 out of 9305
  2. Mixed: 2,658 out of 9305
  3. Negative: 1,486 out of 9305
9305 movie reviews
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  1. Always
    Always is such a lamentable production _ hardly a moment rings true _ that you almost feel like saying ''pardon me'' when you wonder why it apparently didn't occur to Spielberg or anyone else involved that no chemistry was taking place. Not only are the stars rather uninteresting people, they don't seem to like each other in any way that you can feel. [22 Dec. 1989, p.E1]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  2. You People
    The truth is, “You People” is too confused to be offensive — too inconsequential to merit that level of engagement. But it’s certainly disappointing, virtually from its opening minutes.
  3. The Leisure Seeker
    There’s beauty here — Virzi is too humane to make a movie without beautiful moments. But a scattered eight or 10 minutes of splendor just isn’t worth an almost two-hour investment of time.
  4. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    That was probably writer-director Roman Coppola's main responsibility in "Charles Swan," to give the audience a character worth watching. Get that right, and everything else falls into place. Get that wrong, and the audience finds out just how long 84 minutes can be. The answer: really long.
  5. Knock Off
    The ridiculous complications might have worked if there had been an awareness of how absurd they are.
  6. My Sister Maria
    Intrusive, excessively brooding and narcissistic.
  7. Wassup Rockers
    The result is a well-intentioned mess -- a dishonest fantasy that begins with promise and gets more frustrating with every scene.
  8. Windfall
    In the end, about the only thing that could have saved “Windfall” was a really good ending. But what we get is something gimmicky that makes no psychological sense and that the actors cannot make work.
  9. The Hunting Party
    A complete bust, but the ways in which it fails are interesting.
  10. Pet Sematary: Bloodlines
    First-time director Lindsey Anderson Beer and her co-adapter Jeff Buhler have some nice ideas that never quite gel.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    My Name Is Bruce
    It is exactly as one might imagine it: slapstick humor, gross-out monsters and more self-referential digs per minute than "Arrested Development."
  12. Games People Play: New York
    Flimsy mockumentary.
  13. Women Talking
    Women Talking has a remarkable cast — Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, among others — and it’s grounded in dramatic real-life events. But it’s mannered in its conception and wooden in its execution, and has little to do with living, breathing people.
  14. The Witches
    When it’s not repulsive, The Witches drags, but for one brief yet gripping sequence, in which the boy and his friends sneak into the head witch’s hotel suite.
  15. Max Rose
    About the only time the film emerges from its stupor is when Lewis bares his fangs and shows us that Max has a bilious, acerbic side.
  16. Angela's Ashes
    The effect of the 2 1/2-hour film is deadening.
  17. Made of Honor
    This is a story that should have been, at the absolute most, 20 minutes long.
  18. i'm thinking of ending things
    The movie asks us to wonder what’s real and what’s false, and what it all means. But it goes on for 134 minutes without ever giving viewers a reason to keep watching. Few Netflix customers will make it all the way to the end, and even fewer will be glad they did.
  19. Undead
    At best a little boring and at worst stomach-churningly offensive.
  20. The Benchwarmers
    It's a movie packed with so many idiot characters that Rob Schneider is cast as the cool guy -- and sort of pulls it off.
  21. The Best of Me
    The film is an improvement on previous Sparks moody-doomed-love opuses such as “The Last Song” and “Dear John.” If that is damning with faint praise, the cogs here are the same as in his previous love machines
  22. Gang Related
    A mess of a movie, veering constantly toward the laughable when it isn't being offensive. Its only claim to fame is that it's the last movie featuring the late Tupac Shakur.
  23. Stealing Harvard
    What we have is the case of a movie with a straight man (Jason Lee) who really is funny, but with a comic (Tom Green) who sadly isn't.
  24. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
    [Pedro Almodovar] gives it a nice try, but his approach turns out to be completely wrong for the material he's working with here. [25 May 1990]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  25. Kangaroo Jack
    Lame comedy.
  26. Macbeth
    Kurzel and three screenwriters have figured out a way to make Macbeth boring. Now that they proved it can be done, no one need ever do it again.
  27. Australia
    Australia shows all the signs of having been a labor of love for director Baz Luhrmann. One problem: It's his love, and the audience's labor.
  28. Wolf Man
    Wolf Man does not fully compel until it becomes ridiculous, employing a wolf-cam perspective that shows what a werewolf sees when he encounters people: glowing-eyed figures who look like AI-hallucinuted Teletubbies.
  29. Rocketman
    Though the film contains renditions of many of the big hits, they’re so badly performed you’d have every right to wonder what the fuss was all about.
  30. After Earth
    Jaden is not ready for his solo spotlight, and the film is the same action over and over. Another bad movie from Shyamalan.
  31. How to Live Forever
    Wexler gets tired of his own movie near the end of it. The viewer will get tired in 15 minutes.
  32. Evil Dead Rise
    It exists within a franchise but doesn’t add anything to it, ultimately feeling as hollow as the reanimated corpses it centers on.
  33. Black Christmas
    Props to the Weinstein Brothers for having the guts to release a slasher film on Christmas Day. Too bad this one is the cinematic equivalent of tryptophan.
  34. Identity Thief
    Identity Thief is not only not funny. It's negative funny. It's short on laughs, but it will disturb and annoy.
  35. The Dark Tower
    Actually, there is one other thing that’s unforgivable. After building up to the great climactic confrontation for two-thirds of the movie, it’s a letdown.
  36. 10 Things I Hate About You
    It wimped out by blanding down the story and the characters to the point where she isn't really a shrew and he isn't really a maniac.
  37. Beau Is Afraid
    A structure might have inhibited Aster’s impulse for meaningless excess. Instead, we get a movie that’s all talent and no discipline, which, in practice, is even worse than a movie that’s all discipline and no talent. At least the latter tries to please the audience; the former just pleases the filmmaker.
  38. Battleship
    It's loud, it's large, it's stupid, and its best gag involves a chicken burrito.
  39. The Celestine Prophecy
    A big disappointment.
  40. One Direction: This Is Us
    The 3-D 1D movie is aimless, seemingly deceptive and spreads a poor message: that it's OK to act extremely immature, as long as you have millions of blind followers who think it's cute.
  41. American Adobo
    The movie is stiff and schmaltzy and clumsily directed.
  42. I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
    Garlin's directing has little pacing, and many of the borderline gags could have been salvaged with some sharper editing. And there's a shocking amount of jokes and situations that just don't work.
  43. P.S. I Love You
    P.S.: It stinks.
  44. HouseSitter
    The few bright moments in Housesitter are supplied by Martin, who works himself into a sweat trying to make this movie work -- he even squeezes laughs out of a wedding reception scene, when he warbles an Irish melody to his dad -- and by Moffat and Harris, who give their Norman Rockwell stick figures a bumbling, simple charm. [12 June 1992, p.D1]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  45. Corsage
    The worst failing of Corsage is that it makes Sisi boring and unsympathetic when it’s trying to do the opposite. You kind of catch on that there’s something wrong with a Sisi biopic when you start sympathizing with Franz Joseph, who not only was a lousy husband but helped start World War I.
  46. Deliver Us From Evil
    At best, it will be remembered as "that exorcism movie with Eric Bana." More likely, "that exorcism movie where everyone has a bad New York accent."
  47. Mondays in the Sun
    Midway, Mondays in the Sun becomes as dull as a day with nothing to do.
  48. Blumhouse's Truth or Dare
    The game’s repetition quickly gets tiresome.
  49. The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D
    Sharkboy relies almost entirely on 3-D for its kicks. The novelty, however, quickly wears thin with the thinnest of stories to project.
  50. Sugar & Spice
    It means to be knowing and cynical but is just callow.
  51. F/X2
    Gradually, FX2 ties itself into a knot it can't undo even with the most desperate of measures. Everything is left hanging, and by the end the plotting is so clumsy it's embarrassing. [10 May 1991, p.E3]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  52. Yours, Mine and Ours
    A turkey.
  53. Belly
    The heart of the picture has to do with the heroes realizing the error of their ways and finding redemption, but it takes a lot for an audience to forgive two murderers. Belly comes up short.
  54. The Quiet
    The desperation TV stars must feel to be on the big screen is the only explanation for Edie Falco and Elisha Cuthbert's appearance in The Quiet, a creepy family drama that reeks of pretentiousness.
  55. Diggers
    Sitting through Diggers is so tedious that you might find yourself envying the clam diggers. At least they get to be outdoors.
  56. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    It’s a downer. It’s morally tangled. The characters are as depressed as the scenario, and Michael Giacchino’s music can’t make it better.
  57. Red Tails
    What's missing is any hint of realism. There's no grit to it anywhere.
  58. Big Fish
    A long-winded indulgence in tear-and-a-smile whimsy, elevated above the merely irritating and saccharine by compelling art direction.
  59. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    Smurfs: The Lost Village has the look of a film that was rushed, and made on a tight budget. At best, it’s an adequate cinematic babysitter.
  60. Shortcut
    The monster is kind of cheap looking and not particularly scary, the gore is non existent, the acting is variable and the characters tend to make boneheaded decisions. Yet, for all of that, Shortcut does sport a certain moody charm, and at least it has the good sense, at a brisk 80 minutes including end credits, to not wear out its welcome.
  61. John Dies at the End
    Every single thing wrong with John Dies at the End might have been avoided had John died at the beginning, along with all the other characters, transforming an awful full-length movie into a harmless five-minute short.
  62. Striking Distance
    Its whodunit plot is easily figured out, and its story is a mess. Most surprisingly, its star, Bruce Willis, manages to pull off an entirely uncharismatic performance...Striking Distance passes through boring on its way from indifferent to laughable, with the last 20 minutes the most ridiculous. [17 Sept 1993, p.C1]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  63. Mickey Blue Eyes
    A sour misfire.
  64. Steel
    "Steel" plays like a Saturday morning cartoon -- overdone stunts and hokey chase sequences with the hero on a motorcycle, dodging heavily armed gangsters as well as cops who think he's a bad guy.
  65. The Crew
    Seems it's never going to reach liftoff.
  66. Lost & Found
    Why was the sight of scrawny Woody Allen kissing pretty Diane Keaton never revolting, while scrawny David Spade kissing beautiful Sophie Marceau in Lost & Found is the creepiest cinematic sight of the year?
  67. The Bronze
    There’s a nude scene that comes out of nowhere that’s almost embarrassing. Why is it there? Like the movie itself, it’s almost daring, except it’s not.
  68. Teddy Bears' Picnic
    The satire is unfocused, while the story goes nowhere. Too bad. The material is ripe for satire.
  69. Juwanna Mann
    Women had to struggle for years to launch their own basketball league; it's a shame that the first movie to address their success is a drag comedy, and a lousy one at that.
  70. Poor Boy
    What starts out as a bottom-feeder noir a la “Breaking Bad” or “Hell or High Water” transitions into scattershot ambitions of being a mythic tragedy.
  71. A House of Dynamite
    A House of Dynamite is an attempt to make a white-knuckle thriller, but there’s very little suspense to it. We have a pretty good idea of how it’s all going to end even before the first segment is over. And after that, we really know it, as we’re forced to watch the same events play out two more times.
  72. Brazen
    It’s not boring bad, but flashy bad. It’s not “I’m sick of this, already.” It’s “I can’t believe what I’m looking at.”
  73. The Greatest Showman
    There’s idiotic, and there’s magnificent, but The Greatest Showman is that special thing that happens sometimes. It’s magnificently idiotic. It’s an awful mess, but it’s flashy. The temptation is to cover your face and watch it through your fingers, because it’s so earnest and embarrassing and misguided — and yet it’s well-made.
  74. 27 Dresses
    It gets worse and worse as it goes along and finally ends just as it's becoming unbearable.
  75. Coffee and Cigarettes
    Flat and uninspired.
  76. Loaded Weapon 1
    Unfortunately, the best jokes in Loaded Weapon were in the coming attractions. What's left amounts to just a lot of flailing around in search of a handful of half-hearted laughs. [5 Feb 1993, p.D5]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  77. Seraphim Falls
    A Western short on dialogue and long on pomposity, is little more than an extended chase scene down a snow-filled mountaintop to a desert floor.
  78. The Reaping
    Although The Reaping' borrows elements from classics of the genre -- rips them off might be more accurate -- it fails to build the psychological tension that made them so creepily good.
  79. Equilibrium
    Super- violent, super-serious and super-stupid.
  80. The Grey
    A handsome but gabby take on the standard survivalist thriller that's more concerned with lofty metaphysics than which poor blockhead is about to bite it next.
  81. Outlander
    In its second half, Outlander falls apart completely, becoming nothing but a violent, mindless monster movie along the lines of "Alien vs. Predator."
  82. Career Opportunities
    Career Opportunities is a real strange one, a tasteless and completely off-key comedy that has the elements of the much-more serious and more interesting picture it could have been -- if only the film makers had a clue as to what sort of movie they were making. [30 March 1991, p.C3]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  83. King Kong
    On its own terms, the film is overlong, repetitive and lacks impact. Even if this were the first gorilla-in-love movie ever made, audiences would come away vaguely dissatisfied, suspecting there was an intriguing idea buried somewhere in here, but it didn't quite come off.
  84. Drop Dead Fred
    Billed as a comedy, it's draped over dreary gags and irritating manic overacting on the part of its co-star, British comic actor Rik Mayall. [24 May 1991, p.E7]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  85. Ghosted
    Ghosted is repellent without ever quite being obnoxious and worthless without ever being boring.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Deadfall
    Deadfall is dreadful -- pretentious story, bad acting, off-kilter direction, disgusting violence and irrelevant sex. [06 Dec 1993, p.D2]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  87. Bird Box
    The effort behind Bird Box was to make something better than a standard horror movie, but the result is dull and half-hearted. It’s not serious enough or important enough to transcend the horror genre, but neither is it visceral enough to hold up as a regulation horror movie.
  88. Surveillance
    The most enjoyable way to watch Surveillance - "enjoyable," in the relative sense - is to take its awfulness for granted and pay attention to everything Bill Pullman does.
  89. Avatar: The Way of Water
    Avatar: The Way of Water is a one-hour story rattling around in a 192-minute bag.
  90. Once Upon a Crime...
    Few pictures that start this well go so bad so fast. [7 March 1992, p.C3]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  91. Proof of Life
    A hostage drama that oscillates between soap opera and action flick.
  92. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    “Avoiding unhappiness is not the road to happiness,” Hector writes in his book. But avoiding this movie might be a good start.
  93. Arkansas
    Most of Arkansas — Duke’s home state, by the way — just falls flat, despite individual scenes here and there that work.
  94. Mansome
    So you get comments from the likes of Paul Rudd, Adam Carolla and Judd Apatow, all trying to be funny, but not one says anything remotely amusing or worth hearing.
  95. The Man
    Arrives in theaters today with a sheet over its head and a tag on its toe. So to speak. What we have here is a complete systemic failure, a comedy that's not funny, with action that's not thrilling.
  96. Date Movie
    A lame pastiche of Hollywood romances.
  97. Beowulf & Grendel
    Imagine the worst "Deadwood" episode ever, and you'll get an idea of the general tone of Beowulf & Grendel, which is full of anachronistic cursing, tortured syntax, dark humor and lots of hairy, homely, filthy-looking people.
  98. Marty, Life Is Short
    Blows an opportunity to be as great as its subject.
  99. Serious Moonlight
    Serious Moonlight is a tonal disaster, distasteful and sentimental by turns. It was probably a mistake to have Hines try to walk that same delicate line that took Shelly her entire career to master.
  100. Marmaduke
    It's harmless.
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