San Francisco Examiner's Scores

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For 928 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 4.8 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 928
  2. Mixed: 227 out of 928
  3. Negative: 177 out of 928
928 movie reviews
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    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Theeviravaathi: The Terrorist
    The best-looking bad movie in years.
  2. Notting Hill
    The deft, hilarious Notting Hill finds Grant's dour-droll-deprecating affliction at its most dead-on.
  3. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    It's too cryptic and unfulfilled to serve as a tool for anything beyond its own obfuscation.
  4. Gladiator
    As formulaic, but occasionally outré multiplex-bound behemoths go, Gladiator is a foaming beast.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Bottle Rocket
    Several times during this film, you wish you were a bottle rocket so you could explode out of your seat and leave this tedious mess behind.
  6. Summer of Sam
    One of Lee's unsung gifts as a filmmaker is his discovery of that place between eye-popping surrealism and wrenching Greek tragedy.
  7. Manny & Lo
    MANNY & LO grows on you, largely because of the charm of its youngest cast member, Scarlett Johansson, who plays 11-years-old Amanda.
  8. An Ideal Husband
    Leans so heavily on its stars that their performances are marred by their emptiness.
  9. Edge of Seventeen
    The "coming out" genre in gay and lesbian films is really getting stale - the plots are as by-the-numbers as a Bruce Willis action flick - and Edge of Seventeen is hampered by not only predictability but by its shoestring budget (a coup, however, was getting Thompson Twins composer Tom Baily to do the score).
  10. Perfect Blue
    The art direction is reliably vivid and hyperreal, but director Satoshi Kon and company can't articulate how mentally taxed Mima is without confusing us.
  11. Marvin's Room
    Add to that a perfect cast and one's only complaint will be that this is, at heart, another tear-jerker about how good it is to love and be alive and all of that.
  12. Guinevere
    Implausibly dainty.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Enemy of the State
    Everything you would want from a Big Brother film: Good-looking, preachy in an Old West kind of way, wobbling between humor and murder, hellbent and periodically brilliant.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    Flawed but scrappy, confusing yet exhilarating, the Brit-made Lock, Stock is far from a perfect movie. And it's not for anyone squeamish about violence. But it is, like Green Day, a rockin' good time.
  15. Private Parts
    Private Parts is a sparkling, nonstop entertainment written by Len Blum and Michael Kalesniko and directed by Betty Thomas, but sometimes it gives the impression that Stern is nothing short of Nobel Peace Prize material.
  16. While You Were Sleeping
    In general, the script is just slightly above sitcom level, but a few lines, owing to great delivery by terrific actors, raise this a few notches on the comedy scale.
  17. Selena
    You can't help cheering for Selena, but the good feeling is diminished by the sense that her story's been simplified and sanitized.
  18. Ronin
    Ronin shows the mark of a veteran hand and is entertaining in fits and starts.
  19. Fight Club
    It's the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movie to come of out Hollywood this year.
    • 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Two Girls and a Guy
    A great date movie: engaging enough to grab your attention while it's unfolding, thought-provoking enough to fuel cafe and cocktail lounge chatter long after the closing credits roll.
  22. La Nouvelle Ève
    Things stay standard-issue French self-analytical from here.
  23. Chutney Popcorn
    The film is alt-schmaltz, and it'll do.
  24. Emma
    I tried to find in Paltrow what all her admirers in numerous magazine articles have reported. I tried to ignore a less than enchanting English accent and a tendency to be wiped off the screen whenever other actors were given much to do.
  25. Beyond the Clouds
    The least opaque of Antonioni's films, unburdened by stylishness and his imagistic inflammations.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  26. Ever After
    Tennant and company do a fine job of retaining the otherworldliness of a fairy tale while at the same time explaining all the archaisms for a modern audience.
  27. A Map of the World
    For all the blathering, heavy-handed pathos, we might as well be watching the Lifetime cable channel.
  28. Restoration
    Hoffman proves himself a master of complex scenery, crowd control and graceful direction. He succeeds in making a conspicuously lush and rich movie out of what was reportedly a less than kingly budget.
  29. Dark City
    It's full of visual flash, and can be enjoyed as a giddy ride, but you would waste your time trying to puzzle out the nuances of the story.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Strange Days
    Strange Days is an ambitious but ultimately disappointing attempt to assemble the latest in fringe-culture byproducts - distortion-laden torch songs, millenarian fantasies and cyberpunk nightmares - into a Hollywood package. Its failures are those of limited imagination; its brands of strangeness, like the clips its characters replay, never stray far from the familiar landscapes of 1995 pop culture.
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