L.A. Weekly's Scores

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For 3,750 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 8.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 56
Highest review score: 100 A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
Lowest review score: 0 Deuces Wild
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,540 out of 3750
  2. Mixed: 1,542 out of 3750
  3. Negative: 668 out of 3750
3750 movie reviews
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  1. Merci Docteur Rey
    This is less a coming-out tale than a showcase for late-middle-aged hysterical divas in flowing caftans to yell, scream and ride roughshod over the young homosexuals who are nominally the movie's center.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Surge of Power
    Self-conscious camp like this can weather (even requires) a certain degree of amateurishness. But there are limits, and Surge of Power's sloppy writing and talent-show performances quickly exceed them.
  3. Knockaround Guys
    Koppelman and Lieven's toneless, generic direction style is slack, not slick, and they handle actors like livestock. Only John Malkovich, as Matty's psychotic uncle, retains his dignity.
  4. Bangkok Dangerous
    The editing looks like it was done in a blender, and the images of death and grief are so genre-primal that the Pangs hardly bother with dialogue.
  5. Intoxicating
    Flatly directed by Mark David, tediously paced and melodramatic.
  6. Kiss Me, Guido
    That crack in Vitale's storytelling foundation would be forgivable if the writing, acting and character epiphanies . . . well, existed. As it is, not even Scotti's formidable lips can blow life into this stillborn flick.
  7. Snow Falling on Cedars
    The narrative chronology is so heavily hacked about, its tenses so addled and the material so thinly spread across so many characters, one can scarcely keep it straight in one's head without going cross-eyed.
  8. Against the Ropes
    There's not a believable moment in all of it, but for a while the film chugs along on Ryan's innate charisma. Even so, no amount of movie-star twinkle could lighten screenwriter Cheryl Edwards' bizarre character arc, which finds Jackie turning, overnight, into a callous, possibly racist, ninny.
  9. The Postman
    But since Costner canít save his movie, it's something of a stretch to think he might be able to save the world.
  10. The Flip Side
    An intriguing failure that promises more than it delivers.
  11. Kill Me Later
    Shawn is clearly meant to have deep feelings, yet the filmmakers have saddled her -- and Blair -- with a shallow angst that bums out the whole movie.
  12. God's Sandbox
    The pivotal secret of God's Sandbox is no secret minutes into the story, and director Doron Eran doesn't seem to know, or care much, whether he's making feminist agitprop or softcore porn. The two don't mix well.
  13. What Lies Beneath
    At once illogical and insultingly stupid, filled with dead-end twists and the sort of dialogue that makes a mockery of actual adult relations.
  14. Matchstick Men
    Its characters are as flimsy and expendable as the title suggests, while only the most gullible of viewers (i.e., those who've never seen a David Mamet picture) will likely be duped by the painfully et cetera who's-conning-whom antics or the mounds of forced sentimentality under which they're ill-disguised.
  15. The Big Hit
    The television commercials for the movie say something about this being the same team that brought you “Face/Off,” which is about as relevant to this picture as noting that Paul Thomas Anderson got Wahlberg to drop his pants in “Boogie Nights.”
  16. On the Line
    Bass isn't a gifted actor, but he retains his dignity, mostly by keeping his head down and avoiding the eyes of the idiots around him.
  17. $pent
    Lamely engineered and thoroughly exploited tragedy.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker
    It's ostensibly an action movie, and the action is so poorly shot as to be embarrassing.
  19. The Road Home
    By all current standards it's a startlingly ingenuous film.
  20. Joe Somebody
    It all misses the mark emotionally, hindered by one-dimensional characters and telegraphed developments.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    GhettoPhysics: Will the Real Pimps and Hos Please Stand Up?
    It's basically the stuff of a Bill Maher monologue, knocked down a few reading levels and spun into a low-budg gonzo smorgasbord of brashly tacky styles.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bicentennial Man
    With this desperately eager-to-please fable based on a short story and novel by Isaac Asimov, director Chris Columbus clinches his berth as the master of shiny-happy message movies.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The L.A. Riot Spectacular
    This vision of the riots as a kind of Kentucky Fried Movie doesn' lend itself to film the way, say, L.A.'s urban violence does to Sandow Birk’s apocalyptic paintings. Nor does it help that the gags are mortally unfunny.
  24. Black Book
    A viscerally effective thriller ends up a repugnant exercise in moral relativism, delivered with the grandstanding swagger of the self-styled provocateur.
  25. Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School
    It's all a treacly, shoddily assembled, underwritten mess.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Pathfinder
    There is one redeeming skirmish -- the climactic fight involving a snowy cliff and an elaborate pulley system -- but from the guy who's directed videos for Cher, Amy Grant, Billy Joel, and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony? We expected more.
  27. House of 1000 Corpses
    Zombie wants his film to be gleefully demented, but he fails to grasp that loud, inbred evil people torturing stupid, grating benign people isn’t disturbing as much as tedious.
  28. Uptown Girls
    One almost pities the unnervingly twitchy Murphy, whose shiny makeup is dreadful, and who doesn't stand a chance alongside the focused intensity of Fanning, who commands the screen with the precision of a 30-year veteran.
  29. Alex & Emma
    It's like a three-times-too-long sitcom pilot missing the laugh track.
  30. Stay
    A steaming compost heap of high-art pretense and half-cocked psychoanalysis that almost makes you sorry Nicolas Roeg isn't making pictures anymore.
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