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 4.7 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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    • 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.
  2. Jade
    The hiccupping inelegance of this movie's narrative and direction makes it impossible to empathize with or even really comprehend any of the characters.
  3. Kicking and Screaming
    Baumbach is obviously a bright man, but this material is too thin for anything more than a slight New Yorker short story about thoughtful screw-ups.
  4. Devil in a Blue Dress
    Franklin juggles it all with wit and style, and suddenly you feel fine that this is only Mosley's first Easy Rawlins novel. Several more are just waiting to be adapted.
  5. To Die For
    Half snappy, sardonic and incisive and half slow-moving, goofy and dense.
  6. Seven
    While the premise is intriguing, the movie is gluey, bumbling and singularly un-thrilling.
  7. Showgirls
    That Berkley cannot act is indisputable. But her dancing looks like a seizure.
  8. Hackers
    The one outstanding ingredient in this exercise is Miller, an English actor who is not only irresistibly adorable and a good actor, but also speaks in a perfect American accent.
  9. Unstrung Heroes
    Unfortunately, the movie never really goes anywhere. It's all pleasant enough to watch, but you never feel that Danny and Arthur's craziness (eventually Danny is committed), Sid's stoicism, Selma's selflessness and Steven's despair coalesce to mean anything significant or illuminating.
  10. Clockers
    Lee seems to think that all his major characters are basically good people who deserve another chance, and so for the sake of an inappropriate happy ending, everyone important gets one.
  11. To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar
    Douglas Carter Beane's script is so wickedly clever (the title refers to an autographed photo the drag queens carry with them), you come away from this film with the impression that you've had a much better time than you've actually had.
  12. Kids
    They have created a strange document about the unmaking of young lives, but it is a movie made without comment. Clark has stepped back into objectivity so far that he has neglected his role as interpreter for us.
  13. Desperado
    During this movie, every few moments the theater fills with the appreciative guffaws of 18-year-old young men. How old are you?
  14. The Usual Suspects
    This movie has everything but Humphrey Bogart, and I'm sure he's sorry he was unavailable.
  15. Dangerous Minds
    It's all quite inspiring, but despite the fact that this is based on someone's actual experiences, the whole thing has an unfortunate Hollywood ring to it.
  16. 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.
  17. Babe
    A film that can be enjoyed by all ages and that insults no one's intelligence.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Virtuosity
    Watching movies like this strain to fit new technologies like VR into old genres and plot conventions, you can't help wondering whether the real artificial intelligence experiment these days isn't Hollywood itself. Plug the psychological profiles of 200 hit movies into its hive-mind, and out comes one plastic-bodied, loop-brained clone after another.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Something to Talk About
    As light comedy, Something to Talk About has some effective moments - including Eddie's interview with a hilariously cynical divorce lawyer, and virtually all the scenes with Sedgwick's Emma Rae. But director Lasse Hallstrom glazes the film with too much faux bluegrass music, and the equine fantasy-world of the King Ranch is so enveloping that it suffocates all aspirations to more serious drama.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Waterworld
    Sublimely ridiculous.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Operation Dumbo Drop
    Even the most vigorous tear-duct manipulation, and a few funny scenes, cannot save Dumbo from its dominant tone of stilted corniness and prefab sentimentality.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Living in Oblivion
    Constructed as a sequence of deepening, worsening bad dreams, Living in Oblivion sometimes runs the risk of feeling arbitrary, and the film loses some steam in its final section. But mostly it's a smart, funny send-up of the trials and joys of filming on big egos and low budgets - subjects that writer-director Tom DiCillo and his collaborators presumably know first-hand.
  23. The Indian in the Cupboard
    Passably entertaining with moments of Grimm fairy tale gruesomeness.
  24. Under Siege 2: Dark Territory
    This sequel is much better than the original "Under Siege"...The real coup here is the discovery that when you eliminate dialogue, and thus eliminate Seagal's efforts to act in that rather high voice of his, the movie takes on a surprising gravity. When Seagal doesn't talk, he verges on the dignified. It's kind of scary.
  25. Species
    The direction by Roger Donaldson is facile and understated, as is, for the most part, the script by Dennis Feldman. Even the actors pitch in to play down the silliness of it all.
  26. First Knight
    First Knight has all the elements of a crowd-pleaser.
  27. Apollo 13
    With no frills and no commentary, Howard and company have made the kind of absorbing thriller we have in mind when we wistfully sigh, "They don't make movies like they used to."
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie
    This movie is bad on a galactic scale.
  29. Pocahontas
    With an original score by Alan Menken and Gilbert and Sullivan-ish songs by Menken and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, the movie is the cartoon equivalent of a full-scale, high-quality Broadway musical.
  30. 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.
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