San Francisco Examiner's Scores

  • Movies
For 764 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 2.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 59
Highest review score: 100 The Limey
Lowest review score: 0 Whipped
Score distribution:
764 movie reviews
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The best-looking bad movie in years.
  1. Spoof both of P.I.s and independent filmmakers is languidly paced and not very funny.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Just another in a long line of blue-collar-kid-at-prep-school movies, and it may be the worst of the lot. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is original in this movie.
  2. Stupid.
  3. The intention is there, but the needed emotional maturity isn't.
  4. Brainless thriller.
  5. No amount of excellent period costuming and brilliant set decoration can substitute for a good story and decent acting.
  6. SORRY, SALLY. I didn't like it. I really didn't like it.
  7. If only it wasn't such bloody nonsense.
  8. Too dumb to realize that the senselessness is viral.
  9. The movie is an ill-advised work of egomania by someone who clearly has some talent, but not as much as he seems to think.
  10. Big swirls of computer-generated dirt, a bickering couple and the dead certainty that the fiancee will leave and the bickerers will get back together. An exciting night out, or what?
  11. Second-banana material.
  12. Miserable as it crawls for two eternal hours toward being "life-affirming."
  13. Unfortunately, it stars Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz, so it has, more than anything else, a sense of ridiculousness.
  14. Something in Hutton's wounded puppy look always communicates an untapped intelligence or wasted potential, both of which are perfect for this role.
  15. If the idea is to teach us something about the 37th president of the United States, then you would think Stone would resolve to stick to what can be proven about the man's life, or at least indicate when he's speculating. But Stone is the Great Explainer, and facts have an annoying habit of mucking up his explanations.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    As titillating novelty turns into tired cliche, the dyke-psycho-killer genre may soon burn itself out, but in the meantime, we have the grim Brit art-film variation on the gruesome genre, Butterfly Kiss.
  16. Legends of the Fall never makes you think too hard; its woes-of-a-proud-family formula takes a back seat to a self-conscious visual style that strains toward the level of myth.
  17. Wields its Middle America values and moralistic flogging of idiosyncratic lifestyle choices like a flipped bird.
  18. Not much of a plot, but the trouble is that Shana Larsen's script, as directed by Risa Bramon Garcia, isn't very deep. Worse, none of the self-absorbed characters are that likable nor are they funny.
  19. Wesley Snipes runs around a lot shooting people in plotless film.
  20. It's a tale of two missused Academy Award winners trying to justify their participation in a moribund, noisome redux of any disposable prison movie you care to remember by lobbing Oscar clips at each other.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The sudden cranking of the volume that makes us jump, even if we're just watching a cow chew on its cud.
  21. As movies about relic sex machines go, this one lacks mojo.
  22. Too screwy to be really funny.
  23. A football epic on performance enhancers that may be more flagrantly flawed, more shockingly predictable and just plain cornier than its rickety predecessors.
  24. An infuriatingly indulgent piffle of adolescent wish-fulfillment.
  25. There's gangsta rap with funnier insights into the opposite sex.
  26. Stinks from the Earth to the moon.
  27. Painfully unfunny.
  28. An undernourished exercise in pop critique.
  29. It's a movie so foul even the folks at the NAACP Image Awards would have to look the other way.
  30. 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.
  31. The movie equivalent of the fruitcake you get every year from the folks back home. It's brick-heavy and full of nasty bits you don't want to put in your mouth, lovingly wrapped in pink cellophane.
  32. When Annabel Chong sits in front of Gough Lewis' camera and complains about her need to have one of those normal everyday lives, you want to tell her that having intercourse on camera with more than 200 men is probably not the way to get to normal.
  33. Ideological disaster!
  34. Moore can't help but be rotten. She has no grace and little nuance, which is why she's always best as a hard-ass in movies.
  35. Unsalvageable B-movie junk.
  36. Has no intention of taking a more sophisticated path to make its point.
  37. A wildly dull, predictable script whose holes seem to be courtesy of random sniper fire.
  38. Underscores everything that was utterly wrong-headed about the original material.
  39. This is the most-off-the-mark adaptation of a novel since Brian DePalma's what-was-that "Bonfire of the Vanities."
  40. The movie is a dismal and misguided special-effects romp featuring two of the deadest performances recorded this year so far.
  41. There are enough mullets to win this movie a Stanley Cup.
  42. A slick, supercharged popcorn flick of the erstwhile Bruckheimer-Simpson brigade in which the only thing more shameful than the proceedings is a very well-paid male star assigned to make you less aware of that sucking sound.
  43. About a moron - oxy and otherwise.
  44. When a movie is nothing but relentless action, there's little chance for dramatic tension to develop.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    You may have surmised that Americans have held the copyright on turning out awful movies about serious musicians (especially musicians with physical or mental afflictions), but along comes the high-gloss weepie.
  45. A downright dumb movie that, with its breathless pace, lack of character development and uninventive gags, might be torture for even the kids to sit through.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    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.
  46. It's downright boring.
  47. While it may be true that in space no one can hear you scream, groaning should be a perfectly audible way of saying the intergalactic alien-buster Wing Commander sucks.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Lacks genuine magic.
  48. Quickly degenerates into a grueling piece of unpleasantness.
  49. So it's hard to know who gets the blame for Payback. I say we cut Mel some slack and put the hex on Helgeland.
  50. A dimwitted, fill-in-the-blanks horror opus that slanders a fine and useful mammal.
  51. An hour into the picture, Spade offers a pretty funny imitation of belter Neil Diamond, but it's a long 60 minutes for such a pitiful payoff.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    An artificial and hypocritical effort to escape the artistic limitations of teenage slasher flicks.
  52. It should be renamed "Drop Dead Ghetto" and hauled off to the "Jerry Springer" hall of shame.
  53. It's mesmerizing nonetheless for its flagrant disregard for narrative, character, pacing, performance and good lighting.
  54. There are episodes of "Rugrats" with stronger sexual suspense.
  55. 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.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    54
    Offers nothing new, and a lot less. It's a hollow shell of a film, rife with plot twists that go nowhere.
  56. It's simply terrible.
  57. One of the most self-in-dulgent, muddled, badly written, vague and pointless exercises in filmmaking I have ever had to sit through.
  58. The best that can be said about this film is that it's watchable, and that's not the way it could or should be.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    A scary example of bad movies happening to good people.
  59. Dead Man on Campus, a supposed black comedy produced by MTV, is simply awful.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    An amusement park special, screaming from start to finish with no brakes, no plot and no acting to speak of.
  60. It's also troublesome that Murphy, a generally charismatic actor, is downright dull here. He and Goldblum are curiously flat in their line readings; they don't seem convinced by the story they're asked to act out, and with good reason.
  61. Clooney's stiff cornball delivery and tendency to smile during the most tragic moments bring this as close to the cartoonish Batman television series of the 1960s as any of the movies have come.
  62. 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.
  63. Maybe there's a real use for Carrie 2 after all. Stand it up against the original, and you have a pretty good lesson in what's happened to the movies in the last couple of decades.
  64. Flawless is what happens when a filmmaker has no sense of naturalism, no sense of realism and no real natural sense.
  65. Ineptly written and shot like a fashion mag, rings hollow throughout. It's a long, long way from "Jules and Jim."
  66. A particularly egregious array of Kodak moments.
  67. A complete misfire.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Muddled futuristic thriller.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The movie itself simply misses the mark.
  68. Things to do in the movie theater until you mercifully die of boredom sums up this witness' response to the ordeal of sitting through this movie.
  69. A way-below-par golfing comedy.
  70. Tedious, unfunny.
  71. It took four people to write the screenplay for The Relic. All I can say is that I hope these people have not quit their day jobs.
  72. If there is a reason anyone would voluntarily agree to make this movie it probably dwells somewhere in a realm only accessible to the thinking of ambitious actors.
  73. What keeps coming to mind throughout The Jackal is that for what it cost to make this movie you could probably pay some nice hit man to eliminate everyone at Universal who thought making the movie would be a good idea, and still have enough left over to throw one of those hit man parties and have a really great time.
  74. Dante's Peak expands the concept of badness in movies.
  75. The big trouble with the movie is that it's difficult to care whether these two get together. Ultimately I did care - when I realized that their union would presumably represent a chance that the movie might end soon.
  76. My question is, why has director Costa-Gavras taken it upon himself to dissect American cultural foibles when he has so clearly proven himself unequipped for the job?
  77. Otherwise, the movie, which borrows from a dozen pop sources and improves on none of them, is pretty much a washout.
  78. This is my idea of a nightmare.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Schnabel can't decide whether he wants to tell a traditional rise-and-fall morality tale or make an art film. His attempt at telling Basquiat's story straightforwardly collapses under its own banality.
  79. Unfortunately, this movie needed an attractive, irresistibly charismatic performer to give us some reason for watching. Madonna is made up to look like Eva, but this is hardly enough to carry the movie.
  80. 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.
  81. Particularly because unlike so many other boring movies one sees, Jarmusch films require many more words to explain the boringness than less certifiably artistic films would.
  82. In stupidity, this movie ranks up there among the greats.
  83. Hush, which is an absurdly bad mixture of "Rosemary's Baby" and any Bette Davis movie from the 1960s, seems to be a classic case of a grasping mother trying to possess her beloved son.
  84. Most of the movie seems stilted and uncomfortably girdled by efforts to work around the cumbersome Brando, who is shot mostly from above the waist, where the full effects of gravity and avoirdupois do not seem so egregious as they do at belt level.
  85. Neeson simply has no spark here. He is good and honest and honorable until your face turns blue. He's just no fun.
  86. With the exception of a couple of inspired moments, Mary Reilly is merely a curious variation of an often-told story.
  87. It just doesn't work.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Imagine if "On the Road" ended with Sal and Dean settling down in the 'burbs. Or if the carnal encounters in Henry Miller's "Sexus" were prefaced with admonitions to the reader not to "objectify" women. The Basketball Diaries is a similar travesty: It turns a celebration of outlaw life into a just-say-no cautionary tale that Nancy Reagan would love.
  88. This is right up there with the dumbest pictures of the year.
  89. My guess is you'll probably have more fun watching a game at the ballpark than you will at The Fan.
  90. What we get are quirky characters who are such cartoons that they undermine the effectiveness of the scare scenes (Brad Dourif's turn as the weird doctor is an example) and well-composed camera angles that mean nothing.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    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.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Korine's trying to offer a radical vision of rotten America, but the whole thing feels warmed over.
  91. One of those truly biodegradable experiences.
  92. Like two hours of outtakes in search of a studio audience.
  93. A depressing show of how truly, madly, deeply outmoded Hollywood can be.
  94. Highfalutin swill determined to pass itself off as a jazzy caper.
  95. It's too cryptic and unfulfilled to serve as a tool for anything beyond its own obfuscation.
  96. Mildly satisfying.
  97. Most of American Psycho just sits there, looking at trouble, rather than looking for it - complacent, overjoyed in fact to exist at all.
  98. If filmmaking has ever been less thrilling and more disengaging, I'd like to see it.
  99. A terribly bad movie, one of the worst of its kind in recent years.
  100. Godawful.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Crude, stupid and unfunny.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    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.
  101. Cult shocker has been turned into throwaway megaplex fodder.
  102. The single worst movie David Lynch never made.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    The entire film rings totally fake and the resulting dishonest sentimentality makes you fidget in your seat and count the seconds until the sweet but completely predictable ending.
  103. Grumpier Old Men certainly isn't relying on its mawkish and hokey story to put warm bodies in the seats. There's no reason to see the picture - a sequel to their 1993 hit, “Grumpy Old Men" - other than to relish the talents of these two veterans, plus Sophia Loren, a newcomer to the series.
  104. It's an experience as frustrating as watching Jeff Gordon drive a stock car through a bowl of oatmeal.
  105. Breaks new ground both as an abominable enterprise in guy-talk and as no-budget hackwork.
  106. Overlong, naggingly pretentious, more absurd than absurdist and a cruel, cruel bore.
  107. Another "Exorcist" bastard -- one with a chick-flick pedigree.
  108. If your name's on the marquee, chances are your agent's already dead.
  109. That Berkley cannot act is indisputable. But her dancing looks like a seizure.
    • 1 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    This film may set an all-time record for shortest time between the big screen and your local video store.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Unfortunately, the contemporary horror movie has ceased being an individual work full of surprises and fresh manifestations of the Gothic imagination - it has, instead, been reduced to the level of an inflexible, repetitious, ritualistic event.
  110. One long offensive treatise on just how vile two human beings can be.
  111. If only director Luis Llosa and his cast could see the joke and seize upon it; instead, like its computer-morphed snake, the film doesn't have a clever bone in its body.
  112. It is a traffic jam of broken hearts, fluxing racial identities and deplorable outfits that has everything but a salsa overhaul of "I Will Survive."
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