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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  1. Agnes Browne
    The jokes run hot, cold and tepid.
    • San Francisco Examiner
  2. 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
  3. 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.
  4. Surviving Picasso
    A big, silly movie about the famed goatish painter that stars the nearly perfect Anthony Hopkins.
  5. City of Angels
    City of Angels will probably work better for some people than it did for a crusty fellow like me. I feel guilty that I don't like this movie more. I think the devil got the better of me.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Higher Learning
    Still, Singleton's willingness to take risks makes this a worthy, thoughtful film. Especially noteworthy: His sensitive handling of a love triangle between Kristen and her boyfriend and Kristen and another woman.
  7. Volcano
    Congratulations to director Mick Jackson and writers Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray for liberating themselves from the tedious demands of believability.
  8. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
    By casting model-turned-actress (and his now-estranged wife) Milla Jovovich as the Maid of Orleans, Besson gives us an over-amped spectacle with an annoying, sometimes ridiculous cipher at its heart.
  9. Deep Blue Sea
    Unsalvageable B-movie junk.
  10. The Substance of Fire
    In the case of Jon Robin Baitz's script, adapted from his play, in spite of the fact that he made considerable alterations in the text to open it up to cinematic possibilities, the movie disappoints in much the same way the play did.
  11. Groove
    This is not the addictive, hot-wired movie you want.
  12. Angela's Ashes
    The author calls the movie "perfect" - reassurance that the director hasn't tried to pull any fast ones.
  13. Batman Forever
    Except for the casting, it would be difficult to find any substantial difference between this movie and the previous ones, or this movie and any number of high-tech adventure movies of the last decade.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Brady Bunch Movie
    Once you've embraced a show for its stupidity, you might as well go all the way and applaud its dullness, triviality and bad taste.
  15. A Walk in the Clouds
    With a distractingly cute Quinn, a cartoonishly stern Giannini and woozily romantic Reeves and Sanchez-Gijon, this movie is overflowing with ditsy good will. But it just won't be everyone's cup of Chardonnay.
  16. Return to Me
    Crammed with such earnest belief in the power of love - even if it happens in the Chicago Zoo - it almost doesn't matter that O'Connor and Loggia have better chemistry than Duchovny and Driver.
  17. Julien Donkey-Boy
    Feels like it could go blow up at any time. It implodes instead, and the meltdown, though visible in one of the final sequences, is still corrosive.
  18. U Turn
    The standard noir trappings are here: the femme fatale, double-crossing, fatalism, broken dreams, innocence betrayed and the rest of it. But Stone pushes it all so far and so relentlessly that it becomes absurdist comedy.
  19. Copycat
    Copycat is as steady and reliable as a pulse and as exhilarating as a surge of adrenalin.
  20. A Time to Kill
    Director Joel Schumacher and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman seem incapable of emphasizing what's important and relegating the rest to secondary status.
  21. Mousehunt
    Lane, with his extensive stage experience, is acerbic, profoundly cynical and endlessly disgruntled. As the foil, Evans strike the right comic nice-guy note; he has fun with the character's sweetness and refuses to degrade him.
  22. The Siege
    At some point, the movie itself crosses the line, from a modestly thoughtful attempt to extrapolate a drama from real and urgent events to a generic action piece with predictable good and bad guys and pat, civics-book morals.
  23. The Basket
    Earnest and kid-friendly -- also simplistic and dramatically creaky.
    • San Francisco Examiner
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Rounders
    In spite of how hard everything is to believe, you believe what Damon is doing.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Tigger Movie
    Sad but still bouncy.
  26. Crash
    Cronenberg has said that he made the film to find out why he was making it. You may watch it for the same reason.
  27. In Too Deep
    Crime-by numbers-cop drama.
    • San Francisco Examiner
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Multiplicity
    Multiplicity satisfies the need for a dumb summer comedy while remaining fairly smart.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood
    Poking fun at such hit films as Boyz N the Hood, Menace II Society and Poetic Justice, the Wayanses parody the neo-blaxploitation craze so savagely that no filmmaker will ever be able to make another film about the drugs, guns and ho's of South Central L.A. without figuring out how to work around the genre's well-worn conventions.
  30. Tea with Mussolini
    Cher is an inspired bit of casting, while the talented Dench is underused. Smith seems to be going through the motions as the fatuous and deluded aristocrat, while Tomlin has a ball as Georgie. But what really stays with you is the work by Plowright - she is a beacon of good sense (both as actor and character) and plucky as you please.
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