San Francisco Chronicle's Scores

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For 9,303 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: 5,160 out of 9303
  2. Mixed: 2,657 out of 9303
  3. Negative: 1,486 out of 9303
9303 movie reviews
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  1. Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
    Clearly a minor classic, mainly for reasons besides its crime story plot -- namely, the urbane fatalism of its cast and the overall mood of inevitability that hangs over every scene.
  2. Toy Story 3
    Toy Story 3 is a better film than "Wall-E" and "Up" in that it succeeds completely in conventional terms. For 103 minutes, it never takes audience interest for granted. It has action, horror and vivid characters, and it always keeps moving forward.
  3. The Souvenir
    The most passionate love affair in The Souvenir is with film. Hogg utilizes an almost cinema verite style, with a visual look of the grainy kind of 16mm film an ’80s film school student would work with. Her style is reminiscent of early Olivier Assayas or Éric Rohmer’s “The Green Ray” (1986), an acknowledged influence.
  4. Goodfellas
    Ferocious brutality is presented without commentary or judgment, yet with unmistakable moral understanding and vision. [21 September 1990, Daily Notebook p.E-1]
    • San Francisco Chronicle
  5. The Look of Silence
    It’s a testimony to how much this is a live issue in Indonesia that some of the credits are listed simply as “anonymous.”
  6. Tower
    Keith Maitland’s powerful and emotional documentary Tower — easily one of the best films of the year — takes a novel approach for a nonfiction film: Animation.
  7. Burning
    The second-half of Burning is allegorical and intentionally obtuse. It’s intriguing, even. But it all leads to an ending that satisfies no one, especially after 2½ hours.
  8. Drive My Car
    Like Yûsuke’s beloved classic Saab 9000 that Misaki drives ever so carefully, Drive My Car moves ahead with smooth confidence and a fine-tuned reliability.
  9. Moolaadé
    Not always pleasant to watch.
  10. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    It's an endurance test. Though never boring, the movie is a fairly long slog through the snow.
  11. L.A. Confidential
    One of the best crime dramas to come along in years.
  12. Time
    Exquisite and moving documentary.
  13. Lost in Translation
    A delicate, beautifully observed study of impossible romance, Lost in Translation is one of the best films this year.
  14. After Life
    He never indulges in schmaltz or melodrama, as most American filmmakers do when approaching this theme -- think of "It's a Wonderful Life" or the awful "When Dreams May Come" -- but delivers a delicate meditation rich with emotion.
  15. Son of Saul
    Almost too much to bear. But brace yourself and see it anyway. It’s worth it.
  16. Her
    The story is too slender for its two-hour running time, and the pace is lugubrious, as though everyone in front and behind the camera were depressed. But the biggest obstacle is the protagonist (Joaquin Phoenix), who is almost without definition.
  17. Little Women
    So the most noticeable thing about the first minutes of Greta Gerwig’s new screen adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott classic is that the women in Little Women seem just a little bit snooty here, more like privileged actresses from 2019 than like a Northern family living in genteel poverty during the Civil War.
  18. I Am Cuba
    Photographed in lush black and white by Sergei Urusevsky, who worked with the amazingly inventive camera operator Alexander Calzatti, "I Am Cuba" unfolds like a cinematic Olympics of complex, acrobatic camera moves.
  19. The Triplets of Belleville
    Impossible to describe, impossible to forget, The Triplets of Belleville sends audiences tottering out of the theater, dazed and delighted, and wondering what it is they have just experienced.
  20. Repulsion (re-release)
    The cruelty of his methods aside -- and Polanski wasn't the first director to terrorize an actor for the sake of a performance -- Repulsion is a frightening, fiercely entertaining experience that holds up to time. (Review of May 1998 revival)
  21. Tótem
    Grievous, loving, organic and mysterious. What a celebration.
  22. Nickel Boys
    Nickel Boys offers a different way to understand horrors based on true events not that far in the past by plunging viewers into its characters’ humanity.
  23. The Boy and the Heron
    The Boy and the Heron is unquestionably a personal vision, with its own internal logic. It has a direct conduit with the mind of its creator, who happens to be a genius and one of the best to ever do it. If this is it for Miyazaki, well, what a finish.
  24. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    This is a movie that you will admire both for its courage and its creativity.
  25. Ida
    Ida is a rarity, a film both intensely grounded in painful historical reality and genuinely otherworldly.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    A great visual artist documentary has to be more than a series of images set to narration like an art history course. The best films find some compelling reason in the present to spend time with them. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed filmmaker Laura Poitras’ searing, urgent portrait of photographer Nan Goldin finds that in the opioid crisis.
  27. Beau Travail
    Riveting.
  28. Waltz with Bashir
    The best movie of 2008? The most revealing war film ever made? The greatest animated feature to come out of Israel? All these descriptions could apply to Waltz With Bashir.
  29. Hit the Road
    Panah Panahi, making his feature debut with Hit the Road, definitely inherited his old man’s trouble-making genes. His eye for composition is accomplished, but the movie meanders and the pacing sometimes drags. The problem, of course, is the filmmaker holds back the relevant information that would keep a viewer engaged until the end.
  30. They Shall Not Grow Old
    But it would be a mistake to leave the impression that the rewards of They Shall Not Grow Old are in any way akin to that of the usual BBC historical documentary. There is some overlap, to be sure, but by and large this Peter Jackson film does not offer a historical encounter, so much as an encounter of humanity, a psychic linking of hands across time.
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