San Francisco Chronicle's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
For 9,316 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:
9316 movie reviews
  1. I laughed hysterically, but in the interest of balanced reporting, I should add that the guy parked next to me at the screening - a boyfriend who was there under duress - emitted a series of low guttural noises suggesting profound psychological anguish.
  2. The Losers is boring. It's predictable. It's so, so active, and yet so, so dead.
  3. Anyone can make a bad movie. But it takes a unique set of circumstances to make a movie so horrible that people are celebrating its badness two decades later.
  4. What we have in this film is a whole lot of nothing, and the little that's there is irritating.
  5. You can get away with almost anything in a farce except failing to be funny, and that's what kills Death at a Funeral.
  6. It brings together several popular strains of contemporary moviemaking and combines them into one big, shameless, audacious, compulsively watchable, irresistibly likable piece of pure entertainment.
  7. The beauty of The Joneses is that the salesmen are as much the victims as the people they're deceiving.
  8. It's all talking heads, clanging music, substandard graphics, long scans of Web-page headlines and Bowdon's heavily cadenced voiceovers.
  9. From the start, we can see where this is headed: a big fat power struggle, with Omar at the eye of the storm. But the storm is more of a drizzle than an apocalyptic downpour, just one snippy conversation after another in languorous settings.
  10. A fascinating and entertaining glimpse into the world of high-level and socially conscious graffiti artists?
  11. The film's minimal story line, propelled by hope but dampened with heartbreak, provides the excuse for a first-rate lineup of bands spanning misty folk rock, crunchy alt-pop and thrashing Persian rap.
  12. A movie for people who value heart and earnestness over technical filmmaking skill, and consider unpredictable plot turns a betrayal.
  13. At times you may be moved as by no other foreign film this year - and then 10 minutes later be leaning forward in the seat just to stay awake.
  14. Best of all, the filmmakers know when to pull the plug. Date Night clocks in at 88 minutes and would not have been as funny at 89.
  15. So many horror conventions are at work in After.Life that either the filmmakers are parodying them or couldn't come up with anything better. I'm betting on the second choice.
  16. It's an impressive achievement: The film reveals things about each person's inner world, and how it looks to the other, without making us feel as if we're lost in a house of mirrors.
  17. The mixed report on La Mission is that writer-director Peter Bratt doesn't really know how to make pictures, but he does know the central character in his movie.
  18. The Square really tightens the screws - it's so skillfully made it makes you shift uncomfortably to the edge of your seat. It's a binge of cringe.
  19. When You're Strange is a remedial Doors class, taught by a professor who sounds as if he's doing voiceovers for car commercials.
  20. Has compelling stretches, but the film's formal concerns overwhelm the storytelling.
  21. The documentary is interesting as a human story. And anyone who loves the Kuchar brothers' films or underground cinema in general will take extra pleasure in it.
  22. Brosnan has never been so opened up, so emotional and yet so precise in his work. It's a lovely performance in a film that only sometimes deserves him.
  23. Fans of this film will some day wear out their DVDs and Blu-rays playing that fantastic battle scene again and again.
  24. Breaking Upwards has its amusing and touching moments, but we're left wondering just what we're supposed to make of it all. In the end, the relationship at the film's core is less absorbing than the filmmakers imagine.
  25. No matter how you dissect it, Clash of the Titans will never, ever be a serious motion picture.
  26. The bottom line here is that Cyrus is ghastly in The Last Song, bad not just in one or two ways, but in all kinds of ways.
  27. Most of its screenplay is far too vulgar to recount. To paraphrase Mary McCarthy, every word is an obscenity, including "and" and "the."
  28. The success of Chloe is largely due to the contribution of screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson.
  29. With apologies to George A. Romero and the impending zombie apocalypse, The Eclipse may be the most realistic film where something dead comes to life and tries to feast on human flesh. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/15/MVST1CTGJ4.DTL#ixzz0lDuetYGS
  30. The multiply authored screenplay is based very loosely on Cressida Cowell's popular children's books, but it owes just as much to "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" and the John Lennon songbook.

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