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. Coco
    Coco is the best-looking Pixar movie since the tonally uneven “The Good Dinosaur.” The colorful afterlife is the centerpiece, but excellence is found in unexpected places.
  2. Heretic
    A mini-masterpiece, with lean filmmaking and lots of surprises.
  3. Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
    A beautiful film.
  4. The Last Seduction
    Directed with playful wit and energy, with steamy sex scenes played as much for laughs as anything else.
  5. My Voyage to Italy
    A great experience, precisely because it's so intimate and unguarded.
  6. Fight Club
    Delivers a sucker punch to the audience and then pulls the rug out from under it. It is sensational. It is also grimly funny.
  7. Love & Bananas
    Lek gives Love & Bananas humanity, but Bell’s personality and enthusiasm is contagious, inviting us into the film. We root right along with her.
  8. Purple Butterfly
    A gorgeously shot, ambitious epic.
  9. Midnight Run
    Midnight Run has thrills, excellent performances, touching moments, slick plotting, lively dialogue, plenty of laughs, beautiful locations and finely detailed direction. It's an across-the-board success, the best new movie I've seen in years. [20 July 1988]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  10. Hilary and Jackie
    Emily Watson is ravishingly good -- and brings an amazing focus and intensity to what could have been a disease-of-the-week picture.
  11. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words
    It serves as a great introduction to an important artist who was ahead of his time.
  12. Bad Lieutenant
    Not only more crazy than “Reservoir Dogs,'' but it also feels more real. [1 Jan 1993, Daily Notebook, p.D1]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  13. Terror Train
    The bloodshed is somewhat less gory than in many slasher films -- with stress on the "somewhat." [26 Sep 2004]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  14. My Neighbor Totoro
    My Neighbor Totoro is drawn in an expansive, naturalistic way that makes an atmosphere of trees, rice fields and hills unraveling in the distance a hypnotic shadow character. In some scenes this nature is so delicious it becomes a poetical presence. [08 May 1993, p.C3]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  15. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    Most important, the relationship between P-Orridge and Lady Jaye comes off as heartfelt, and "Ballad" makes you feel something. Just like art.
  16. The Midwife
    If you want to fall in love with Catherine Deneuve, don’t start with her youth. Start with her here, in her 70s, and then work your way back.
  17. My Summer of Love
    Instantly captivating.
  18. Lincoln
    The experience of watching Daniel Day-Lewis in this role is nothing less than thrilling. This is Lincoln. No need for a time machine, there he is.
  19. Fresh
    The evocative nature of Nelson's stillness is essential to the whole last movement of Fresh, an intricately plotted series of unexpected and related events. In a way, the audience has to read the meaning of the ending in Nelson's face. Fortunately Nelson has a face that can make you believe anything. [31 Aug 1994, p.E1]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  20. Roman de gare
    A brilliant piece of construction, and talking too much about its specifics would only spoil the overall experience.
  21. Outbreak
    In the end this is Hoffman's movie, and it's refreshing, finally, to see him not as an oddball or eccentric but as a decent, capable guy who is ultimately a lot more intense than most people.
  22. Beauty and the Beast
    Beauty and the Beast creates an air of enchantment from its first moments, one that lingers and builds and takes on qualities of warmth and generosity as it goes along.
  23. The Object of My Affection
    Much of that appeal comes from compelling performances by the two main actors.
  24. Guinevere
    Disarms with its sincerity and frankness.
  25. Capote
    A triumph that goes well beyond Hoffman's tour de force performance.
  26. Thirteen Days
    Fascinating in its depiction of presidential leadership in action.
  27. Coming Home
    I’m not sure if there’s room in the new Chinese film world, which like American cinemas is now dominated by big-budget special effects films, for another series of Gong-Zhang films. But they should forge ahead. They’ve recaptured the magic.
  28. Ben Is Back
    What makes Ben Is Back different is that, even if this kind of pain is completely outside your own experience, you’ll feel some of it watching this movie.
  29. Kick-Ass
    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.
  30. Soapdish
    This laugh-out-loud comedy is set in the world of daytime television and is reminiscent of the sex farces that were popular in the early and mid-'60s -- except that Soapdish, unhampered by a desire to be perceived as sophisticated, is actually more sophisticated and much funnier than the movies that were around then. [31 May 1991, p.E1]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
      • Posted Jun 28, 2017
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