San Francisco Chronicle's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
For 9,302 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:
9302 movie reviews
  1. Though Meg 2 is by far the biggest production he’s ever helmed, director Ben Wheatley doesn’t appear to be in over his head with this; special effects and stunts are proficiently delivered, no matter how ludicrous
  2. Based on the litany of deep cuts and the intrinsic understanding of the concept in “Mutant Mayhem,” it’s clear Rogen and Goldberg bring a particular love for the franchise to the screen.
  3. Raw, provocative, sometimes humorous and always humane, Kokomo City is an engrossing documentary about four Black trans sex workers who constantly disarm with their outrageous anecdotes and their palpable fears of living in a world that’s often hostile to them.
  4. Before it becomes entirely too Australian, the well-crafted haunted-hand horror movie Talk to Me perfectly captures the one-upmanship of social-media-fueled youth culture.
  5. Kemper is good throughout. Her radiant likability gives her the power to sell weak material, which means she will often be offered weak material. But there’s enough in Happiness for Beginners to make me glad that she did it.
  6. Sympathy for the Devil does the two things that every good Nicolas Cage movie must do: It gives him license to be manic, but it also gives him a realistic context in which his mania can delight and surprise.
  7. Haunted Mansion shouldn’t have been rebooted, but if made, it should have clocked in at a modest 90 minutes.
  8. Amid all the mayhem, a fairly lucid portrait of disturbed child psychology emerges. Although derivative, Chris Thomas Devlin’s script has enough sick, witty ideas to make the fearsome goings-on seem fresh and immediate. At the very least, after watching Cobweb, you’ll never look at a jack-o’-lantern the same way again.
  9. It’s marked by a polished balance of humor, searing emotion, all the information about the toy business you’d ever want to know, and cautionary advice concerning investments in something silly like stuffed animals — or, by extension, NFTs.
  10. In Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan takes an eggheady topic and, without insulting anyone’s intelligence, turns it into a gut-level experience. He shows that the kind of hyper, jacked-up, ultra-modern filmmaking associated with the action and superhero genres can be harnessed in the service of a smart, serious movie.
  11. Although the war in Ukraine is still raging, 20 Days in Mariupol is already a historical document. So much has happened in the war in the 14 months since these events, and graphic, front-lines reporting is now ubiquitous. However, Chernov’s team was among the first to document what many say are war crimes by Russian troops, and it provided an early window into the conflict for Western news media.
  12. Barbie is an impressive and original work of the imagination. Its story holds up most of the time and for most of the way, with the unifying through line being Barbie’s existential crisis.
  13. Theater Camp, a mockumentary about a summer workshop for thespian adolescents, offers plenty of theater and plenty of camp, to the point that it often plays like one, big inside joke. But the film offsets its drama class insularity with a rousing message that the stage will always be a magical place for children to dream — and to discover themselves.
  14. McGann, whose 2016 documentary “Revolutions” explored the women’s roller derby scene in Ireland, spins a compelling yarn about two fascinating people, although she doesn’t go much below the surface.
  15. They Cloned Tyrone can be heavy-handed times and runs a bit long, but the committed performances of its plucky triumvirate of stars go a long way toward the fun.
  16. The Miracle Club won’t rock your world, but it’s a nice movie. There’s always a place for nice movies.
  17. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One may not be a great movie, but it’s a special movie deserving of its own kind of event and worth appreciating. Only Tom Cruise makes movies like this, and you either understand why this is pretty wonderful or you should give yourself the chance to find out why.
  18. If anything keeps “Red Door” going, it’s Autumn Eakin’s exquisite cinematography. The Further looks like a shadow reflection of the real world, and she and Wilson never fail to come up with aesthetically interesting and sometimes ingenious light sources to illuminate portions of it.
  19. The Out-Laws is dead on arrival.
  20. This film never had any business being stretched into a feature, much less one running 106 minutes. At that length, Biosphere is soporific and repetitive and puts viewers in the position of always being two steps ahead of it.
  21. Joy Ride feels like it easily could have been better, but it’s certainly good enough, and it might be remembered as an early milestone in some significant careers.
  22. Leaf applies a documentarian’s dispassion to the telling of this fictional story, and to a large extent that works. One of the virtues of documentaries is also a virtue of this narrative feature — it depicts a kind of person who usually doesn’t get movies made about her and tells the world her story with respect and empathy.
  23. Wham! tells a sweet story, but also a goofy and entertaining one, because these guys were more ’80s than anybody, more even than “Miami Vice” and Duran Duran.
  24. Prisoner’s Daughter is, in a way, a simple movie. It’s also a cleverly (perhaps unconsciously) disguised version of John Wayne’s swan song, “The Shootist.” It’s one of those movies that you’ll enjoy as it goes along, only to realize, a day or two later, that it was even better than you thought.
  25. By the time we get to a kaiju-inspired third-act throwdown involving multiple giant sea monsters and a mystical trident, this story feels like it’s gotten too big for its small frame.
  26. With a zippy soundtrack and breezy editing style, Every Body comes off as an up-to-date declaration that being intersex is something to be celebrated. In the end, we can’t help but share in the enthusiasm.
  27. Will-o’-the-Wisp, a flight of fancy from Portuguese provocateur João Pedro Rodrigues, has a few ideas, a fun little musical sequence and quite a bit of eye candy. But it seems like a series of tonally different short films mashed together — an art installation rather than a movie.
  28. Close to Vermeer is much more than a chronicle of the exhibition. It is a globe-trotting tale of diplomacy, a detective story and a fascinating insight into the insular world of museum curation, research and preservation, which helps keep culture alive through the march of history.
  29. The engaging HBO documentary Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, both a guilty pleasure and meaningful slice of queer history, delivers a loving yet irony-laced tribute to a closeted movie icon whose tragic death from AIDS changed the course of the epidemic and cemented his place in LGBTQ lore.
  30. A distasteful, overlong slog, but at least the filmmaker appears to have put everything he wanted to up on the screen.

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