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. Wild Bill
    Opening with a wearying series of nasty and violent episodes attesting to Bill's predilection for solving problems by shooting at them, and his nearly comic indignation at having his hat touched (men have died at his hand for committing that transgression alone), the movie quickly establishes a pattern of bad decision-making on the part of the writer-director.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    She's All That
    And once, just once, I'd love to see a teen flick that doesn't send out a message to young girls that to be acceptable, you have to conform. I liked the artist girl much better before.
  3. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
    Austin is funny, extremely funny, because he is so ridiculous, and because Myers is a brilliant mimic who, like Martin Short, knows how to do ridiculous.
  4. The Road to El Dorado
    A lazy, torpid piece of animated tourism.
  5. 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.
  6. Wild Things
    This movie has everything.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Barbarella
    The screenplay - co-written by novelist Terry Southern - is intentionally ludicrous, but the fashions rule.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Heavy Metal
    Like "Rocky Horror Picture Show," Heavy Metal makes most sense as a midnight weekend feature, when many of its viewers are likely to be herbally and chemically addled. Without the help of intoxicants, Heavy Metal comes across as what it is - a wildly sophomoric and stupid cartoon celebrating gore, rape and bad music.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Fear
    Forceful and well-acted. Fear truly lives up to its title.
  10. Mulholland Falls
    Most of the time the audience is two steps ahead of the characters.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    French Kiss
    French Kiss has only a tenuous hold on reality; it is far more fully steeped in the conventions of latter-day movie romance than in the messy actualities of real-life mating.
  12. SLC Punk!
    It's handsome filmmaking that doesn't surface until the final 25 minutes during which Stevo and company's sense of marginalization achieves the palpable, emotional import that's more expressive than anything its characters' have to bitch about.
  13. The Saint
    While the original conception of The Saint gave us a debonair, sophisticated and roguish detective, the new movie, directed stiffly by Phillip Noyce ( "Clear and Present Danger" ), gives us Val Kilmer as a greedy high-tech daredevil thief with the moves of Batman, the clunky disguises of Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible" and the morals of an alley cat.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Varsity Blues
    Half-comedy, half-coming-of-age movie with another half or so of sports film and maybe another quarter of soundtrack that adds up to 175 percent of a bad movie.
  15. Hoodlum
    It is familiarly old-fashioned, complete with montages of newspaper clippings fluttering past and calendar days slipping by. The sets, costumes, old cars and general atmosphere all beautifully recall moviemaking of a bygone era. And for that, hats off to Duke.
  16. 101 Dalmatians
    Dalmatians proves an apt playground for Hughes as one could surmise that his inspiration for treating comic bad guys in his movies so violently comes from a cartoon sensibility.
  17. Now and Then
    Director Lesli Linka Glatter, making her first feature, is another talent to watch. In addition to guiding the young actors to good performances, she sets up scenes knowingly, usually with a punchy comic touch.
  18. 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.
  19. Quest for Camelot
    It isn't as charming as "Beauty and the Beast" or "The Little Mermaid" (especially musically), but it's an easy-to-swallow entertainment.
  20. Flawless
    Flawless is what happens when a filmmaker has no sense of naturalism, no sense of realism and no real natural sense.
  21. A Perfect Murder
    I HATE to whine, but if Michael Douglas is half as tired of playing yuppie scum as I am of watching him do it, then he must be napping on a regular basis by now.
  22. Conspiracy Theory
    The good guys metamorphose into bad guys and back into good guys with dazzling efficiency in Brian Helgeland's disturbing, comic script.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Blast from the Past
    Spacek and Walken are pure comic energy.
  24. Deterrence
    Ludicrously written and appallingly directed by ex-film critic Rod Lurie, seems to pride itself on the fact that it never (ever) leaves the greasy-spoon milieu in which the president and his staff are trapped by heavy snowfall.
    • San Francisco Examiner
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Wide Awake
    A sweet but overly sober look at a child's coming to spiritual grips with the death of his grandfather, Wide Awake occasionally packs an emotional punch. But a meandering script, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, and the candy coating it's wrapped in, undermine its effectiveness.
  26. Mickey Blue Eyes
    As insulting as taking the queen to the Olive Garden.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Where the Money Is
    If you haven't taken your mother to a movie in a while, this is the ticket, with its PG-13 rating, lack of violence and like that.
  28. DragonHeart
    The whole thing seems awfully familiar, not to say boring.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Love and a .45
    It's clever but not often original.
  30. Sleepers
    Sometimes the movie lacks a quietness, an omission most egregiously felt at the end.
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