San Francisco Chronicle's Scores

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For 9,317 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 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: 5,172 out of 9317
  2. Mixed: 2,659 out of 9317
  3. Negative: 1,486 out of 9317
9317 movie reviews
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  1. The Emperor's New Clothes
    The result is a genre-bending yarn, an entertaining mix of period drama and flat-out farce that should please history fans.
  2. Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
    Though many of Parker's well- known wisecracks make their way into the screenplay, Mrs. Parker ultimately does not give us the Dorothy Parker of legend.
  3. Ambulance
    There’s enough variation and suspense, enough complication in the form of other characters with other concerns, that Ambulance stays fresh until the finish.
  4. Petite Maman
    Petite Maman immerses the viewer in all the things you might have forgotten about childhood — what’s funny to a child, what’s valued, what’s priceless, what will be remembered and valued in years to come. Just watching the almost-identical Sanz sisters play and interact becomes fascinating, like witnessing from the outside some lovely and enclosed world.
  5. Ocean's Thirteen
    A satisfying story of a grand-scale swindle, but it also retains the impishness and charm of "Ocean's Twelve." Even better, it solves the Roberts problem in the most thorough and economical way possible: She's not in the movie.
  6. Sweet November
    Neither a masterpiece nor a remake of one, but its wistfulness is infectious, and its melancholy mood lingers for days.
  7. Food Chains
    This advocacy documentary is never dull, but it tends to wander.
  8. Peter Rabbit
    Yes, the two-minute trailers were an atrocious affront. But it turns out the other 91 minutes include thoughtful characters and some clever humor in between the pratfalls.
  9. The Business of Fancydancing
    Offers a quixotic array of characters and flashbacks that tests patience, but once the viewer understand the movie's cadence and rhythm, the story gets better and better until it builds into a crescendo that's emotional, dramatic and -- best of all, perhaps -- fitting.
  10. Rust and Bone
    A tough movie about tough people for a tough audience. So prepare to get roughed up a little.
  11. A Jihad for Love
    Often fascinating and provocative, although, as a film, it feels a bit long and somewhat repetitive.
  12. The Human Factor
    If nothing else, The Human Factor demonstrates the tall task that awaits President Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken. Good luck.
  13. The Battle of Algiers
    It's back in a handsome new black-and-white print, and it's still powerful stuff -- you can see why Pauline Kael wrote that it was "probably the only film that has ever made middle-class audiences believe in the necessity of bombing innocent people."
  14. Missing Link
    It’s hardly a masterpiece — it’s a fairly simple tale, well-told, with a silly, derivative climax and rather disappointingly brief depiction of the Yeti culture. Yet it is blessedly devoid of the manic, ADD pace of many animated movies, with a winning trio of characters. As Commander McBragg might say, “Jolly good show!”
  15. Clockwatchers
    On the surface, it's a mystery in which someone is going around stealing personal items, and the women are suspected -- and suspect each other. In a larger sense it's about how corporate culture is not only antithetical to individuality and human kindness but also hostile toward these things.
  16. Rampart
    The best thing Harrelson brings is his own sweetness of disposition, which somehow never goes completely into hiding.
  17. The Informant!
    Matt Damon's old-fashioned, brilliantly calibrated character turn as a corporate schnook-turned-whistle-blower; and Marvin Hamlisch's retro-groovy score. For the movie's first hour or so, the pair of them together make for four-star entertainment. The last half hour, not so much.
  18. Springtime in a Small Town
    Only a director who truly knows repression could have made a movie so subtle and so understanding.
  19. Stars in Shorts
    The best of the longer segments is "Steve," a piece of Pinter light starring Firth as a passive-aggressive neighbor from hell who repeatedly turns up at the door of a bickering couple (Knightley and Tom Mison) to register a series of baseless complaints.
  20. Knight and Day
    In the end, Knight and Day isn't really about much of anything besides having a good time or perhaps the meaning of Tom Cruise-ness in the universe.
  21. Palindromes
    Palindromes isn't a wise movie, or a particularly true movie, but it's an honest one and a singular experience.
  22. X-Men: Days of Future Past
    Most important, there is an emotional undercurrent in this installment that the earlier films only aspired to. When for a brief moment, the younger Charles Xavier meets the older, there is the sense of time's mystery - and also of the long, magnificent slog of a purpose-driven life.
  23. The Acid House
    A blast of manic energy in the form of a film.
  24. Naked in Ashes
    An inspirational and cautionary film.
  25. The Light Between Oceans
    As much as Fassbender, Vikander and Rachel Weisz, the feelings of isolation, despair and self-reproach deserve top billing in The Light Between Oceans.
  26. Meet the Parents
    It's a kind of "sex, lies and videotape'' in suburbia.
  27. Purple Rain
    Fresh music and silly dialogue - those aspects of Purple Rain haven't changed over the years. [Review of re-release]
  28. Antarctica: A Year on Ice
    In all, it’s an absorbing, straightforward look at a truly alien environment. The film could be nicely paired with Werner Herzog’s “Encounters at the End of the World” (2007), a much more idiosyncratic view of Antarctic strangeness.
  29. Six Degrees of Separation
    Guare's play is austerely funny and cerebral, and the film stays true to it, neither warming it up nor dumbing it down. [22 Dec 1993, p.E1]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  30. Spirit Untamed
    Whatever its weaknesses, contemporary parents who want a nontoxic Western to show their children could hardly find better than “Spirit Untamed.” It takes the idea at the end of genre master John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”) and virtually rides off in its own, counter-mythic direction with it.
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