San Francisco Examiner's Scores

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For 927 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 49% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 47% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 60
Highest review score: 100 Big Night
Lowest review score: 0 Luminarias
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 524 out of 927
  2. Mixed: 227 out of 927
  3. Negative: 176 out of 927
927 movie reviews
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  1. The Great Beauty
    If you know Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," you'll be unable to watch The Great Beauty without thinking about it. This gorgeous Italian movie, like its predecessor, balances pungent satire and a more melancholy mood in portraying the dissolute world of the upper crust in contemporary Rome.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Second Skin
    An excellent human-interest documentary that unlike so many others has a genuine appeal beyond someone already interested in the subject matter.
  3. Stephanie Daley
    This is grim material, but director Hilary Brougher -- working from her own script that won a Sundance award -- examines the lives of these two suffering women without sensationalism or preaching.
  4. Starter for 10
    Some nice performances and modest laughs highlight this amiable British comedy.
  5. The Good Shepherd
    A remarkable study of the corrosive effects of fear and power on an establishment insider who puts duty above all else.
  6. My Country, My Country
    A sobering documentary.
  7. The Beautiful Country
    Quiet, moving and beautifully shot.
  8. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
    Leave it to Ron Howard to turn a plaintive Dr. Seuss ditty into a C-grade Tim Burton psychodrama.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  9. Rugrats in Paris: The Movie - Rugrats II
    The journey's a kick.
  10. Non-Stop
    Simply an endurance contest, one almost worth staying the 82 minutes to see who wins.
  11. The Legend of Bagger Vance
    As entertaining, charming and conceited as other Robert Redford joints, but it's also insufferably obvious.
  12. Charlie's Angels
    So phenomenal that Bill Murray can't even steal it. And he tries. So excellent that Murray's MTV progeny Tom Green can't sink it.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  13. Lucky Numbers
    An unsteady stab at noir.
  14. A Time for Drunken Horses
    The welcome hints at emotional excess are compromised by the blunt force of the movie's political point-making.
  15. Kirikou and the Sorceress
    Set in a vivid two-dimensional African village, the animated fable is jerky, odd but redolent somehow of Saturday morning and the night's sleep before.
  16. Sound and Fury
    In 80 minutes, the film accumulates a staggering gravity.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  17. Bedazzled
    The ending is a disappointment, a perfunctory upbeat gesture.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  18. The Yards
    Classic in feel and loaded with sumptuous performances.
  19. Dr T and the Women
    A finely coiffed, cream-cheese "8 1/2" remix with Gere, a Marcello Mastroianni for Oprah Winfrey times.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  20. Billy Elliot
    An adrenaline-pumping, post-musical musical.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  21. Just Looking
    Too smitten with the Eisenhower-era nostalgia.
  22. The Contender
    The sort of smutty scandalmongering the average moviegoer can really get behind.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  23. Two Family House
    De Felitta has taken potentially overripe material and given it real heart.
  24. CyberWorld
    Some delightful surprises, but the sort of heavy-metal, high-definition sci-fi look that dominates the proceedings, plus the relentless pace and endless morphing, are somewhat tiring.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  25. Bamboozled
    Collapses under its own contempt.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  26. Meet the Parents
    What begins as unassumingly dull wanders into disarming chaos.
  27. Requiem for a Dream
    It's one of the most beautifully unpleasant movies ever made - its reverse charge being that it is no fun at all.
  28. Girlfight
    There's a sense of genuineness throughout Girlfight.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  29. Remember the Titans
    A proudly unsophisticated demonstration of racial progress.
  30. Best in Show
    Gets blue-ribbon results from its thoroughbred cast of improvisational comics.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  31. Urban Legends: Final Cut
    You're smarter than this, but occasionally it tricks you into thinking it might be up to something you haven't considered, like an above-average, extra-bloody episode of "Scooby Doo."
  32. Dancer in the Dark
    A movie too smart and too urgent to be categorically awful. Clinically insane may be another matter altogether.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  33. Chutney Popcorn
    The film is alt-schmaltz, and it'll do.
  34. Human Resources
    At its best when it's hovering around the muted dysfunction between a father and a son, who never understood each other to begin with.
  35. Goya in Bordeaux
    Dreamy and elegantly filmed.
  36. Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport
    Misses some creative opportunities to really drive this story home, but it's a naturally haunting story nonetheless.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  37. Paragraph 175
    Soberly, deeply effective.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  38. Almost Famous
    More often than not the film casts an infectious, evocative spell.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  39. Pola X
    A less confrontational, though positively gushing modernization of "Pierre, or the Ambiguities."
  40. Nurse Betty
    Groovy.
  41. Madadayo
    It is an important work, and a very good one.
  42. Bring It On
    An army of rolled abs and their owners give the state of American race relations a beginner's workout.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  43. Solomon & Gaenor
    The film is in the key of "Romeo and Juliet," and it's a one-note tune.
  44. Waga jinsei saiaku no toki
    Kaizo Hayashi's homage to noir B movies, both Japanese and American, is successful as a true labor of love.
  45. Bittersweet Motel
    A crafty, sometimes craven, but hardly worshipful snapshot of an unlikely candidate for biggest rock act on earth.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  46. Love & Sex
    The dialogue is hip, natural and observational.
  47. Place Vendôme
    Overall a well-played chess match of a movie.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  48. The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack
    The ballad as it turns out is a duet between a dad and his girl, who'd often rather accentuate the positive than exploit pain, quietly proving that she is her father's daughter.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  49. The Original Kings of Comedy
    Crassly funny passages.
  50. Cecil B. DeMented
    The shenanigans have been pared into 84 minutes of transgressive, potty-minded farce, that is often Waters at his most cheerful and most thematically focused.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  51. The Opportunists
    An engaging, well-written film that is surprisingly gentle in tone and easily paced.
  52. Aimee & Jaguar
    A guilty pleasure and one of the best films of the year.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  53. The Tao of Steve
    The vibe is acoustic-cafe: cute, catchy and ironic given its wimpy point of view.
  54. Psycho Beach Party
    Overstays its welcome until the jokes curdle and the satire becomes a blunt instrument, but not before Busch throws some priceless one-liners.
  55. Space Cowboys
    From both sides of the camera, Eastwood works the crowd better than he has in years.
  56. Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
    It's a half-life better than Martin Lawrence treading similar, simpler water in "Big Momma's House."
  57. Girl on the Bridge
    Has a silly, insouciant glamour often employed to sell hair conditioners and perfume.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  58. The Wind Will Carry Us
    Kiarostami's genius is elusive. His films may be unknowable, but they are undeniably hypnotic, charismatic.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  59. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    A runny intimate portrait that doesn't trust Tammy Faye Messner and her story to enthrall you. So they've all but spelled it out: k-i-t-s-c-h.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  60. Alice et Martin
    Binoche is the ideal creature for that kind of cosmetic expansion, and, here, her thorough modernity takes on an almost cruddy, Italian sadness.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  61. What Lies Beneath
    Regardless of how cheated out of a full-bodied motion picture you feel, you're still left with the year's sickest bathroom humor.
  62. Rififi (re-release)
    A sweaty-browed exercise in precision filmmaking, but one that doesn't cheat you with wisps of tension and the pretense of attitude.
  63. Les amants criminels
    In Criminal Lovers, the "Bonnie and Clyde" model of killing-as-erotica gets a shrewd, funny, decidedly French workout.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  64. Pokémon: The Movie 2000
    Of course, there's little else of interest about Pokemon beyond the consumption factor. Buy more.
  65. Benjamin Smoke
    It's the hypnotic long-form music video Smoke never got to make.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  66. X-Men
    A mixed bag with the promise of a better sequel.
  67. Water Drops on Burning Rocks
    Through it all, Ozon supplies a sense of pathos that makes fun of its own soullessness, transforming a self-serious suicide note into an existential love letter.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  68. Chuck & Buck
    Comes on like an "After School Special'' psychodrama that's been taken off its medication.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  69. I'm the One That I Want
    Priceless.
  70. Shower
    A warm-hearted valentine to old traditions in China that are being obliterated by modern - and admittedly more efficient - technology.
  71. But I'm a Cheerleader
    It's the year's funniest, most absurd sight gag.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  72. Scary Movie
    Deadly funny.
  73. The Perfect Storm
    An enthralling special-effects tour de force with a lover's nook.
  74. Me, Myself & Irene
    You can see Bobby and Peter Farrelly bent over blowing violently into the sails of this toy boat, trying to get it to move.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  75. Chicken Run
    Imbued with infectious pluck. It's also a lucid, competent, titanically entertaining movie loaded with workable gags.
  76. Titan A.E.
    The glory of the picture is the eye-popping, surreal backgrounds that blast the conventional characters off the screen.
  77. Shaft
    The movie's primary narrative weakness is that its racism plot points seem ripped from the headlines of a "Geraldo" newsletter and stretched into a string of terribly executed car chases.
  78. Jesus' Son
    A dashing fusion of the literary and the cinematic.
  79. Marcel Proust's Time Regained
    Ruiz has made the most ambitious adaptation of a Proust work yet.
  80. The Woman Chaser
    It's the year's best movie sex.
  81. Humanité
    Staggering, gorgeously ambiguous.
  82. Groove
    This is not the addictive, hot-wired movie you want.
  83. Sunshine
    Szabo doesn't bring the film to its senses until just past the halfway point.
  84. Love's Labour's Lost
    The writer-director has come up with a sumptuous, happy piece of fluff.
  85. American Pimp
    Most of American Pimp feels like you've been slipped a Mickey.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  86. Gone in Sixty Seconds
    A film where suspense and exhilaration are incompatible, and a receding plot line is merely the platform for cars to fly through panes of glass.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  87. Big Momma's House
    A high-spirited, big-bottomed Polaroid of the comedian in a fat suit.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  88. Shanghai Noon
    Funny enough that it could make buddy pictures respectable again.
  89. Better Living Through Circuitry
    Fans likely to rave about Living.
  90. Mission: Impossible II
    Woo delivers a vintage breakneck, break-arm, break-face 20-minute finale.
  91. Dinosaur
    Parents should note the PG rating. There's little bloodshed, but several fight scenes, lots of loud roaring and some overwhelming special effects sequences could vex younger viewers.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  92. Small Time Crooks
    Stooge-filled farce offers low laughs but lacks a point.
  93. Road Trip
    Slightly more mature and better assembled, Road Trip goes one better on "American Pie" by teasing out the idiosyncrasies in four guys existing in a personality grab bag.
  94. Shadow Boxers
    What makes Shadow Boxers special is how Bankowsky restores the woman's touch that always seems intentionally excised from coverage of the sport without comprising their participation in the sport.
  95. Center Stage
    Aiming to keep it real, the cast of the new dance casserole Center Stage sweats spunk.
  96. Hamlet
    Hamlet finds in Hawke's greatish performance a Great Dane for this, or any other, modern moment.
  97. La Nouvelle Ève
    Things stay standard-issue French self-analytical from here.
  98. Gladiator
    As formulaic, but occasionally outré multiplex-bound behemoths go, Gladiator is a foaming beast.
  99. Adorenarin doraibu
    This overall good feeling helps smooth over the sometimes shocking lapses in logic.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Frequency
    There's a novel, engaging story trying to transmit through the storm of special effects and convoluted plot twists that mar the movie.
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