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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    • 49 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bohemian Rhapsody
    As with a concert or favorite record, sometimes it's best not to overthink things but simply let the visceral power take over. That is what made Queen and Freddie Mercury so special and that is why Bohemian Rhapsody will rock you, if you let it.
  2. Happy as Lazzaro
    Rohrwacher’s work unites a passionate interest in social realism, in the hardships faced by people on the streets and in the fields, with a daring refusal to be held by the rules of narrative realism.
  3. United Skates
    Often, a scene-survey doc that takes on so much — cultural history, present-day portraiture, regional distinctions, celebrity interviews, fly-on-the-wall reportage — can play as scattershot. That’s not so with United Skates. Round and round it flows — why not jump on in?
  4. The Mercy
    Firth is all panicked reserve in the role of Crowhurst, and Rachel Weisz invests the familiar stay-at-home role with antsy, agonized spirit as the wife of the doomed man, facing the truth that her family’s lives will never be what they once were.
  5. Under The Wire
    The film unfolds as a sort of first-person procedural, a vivid step-by-step account of a reporting trip to hell.
  6. Mobile Homes
    In Vladimir de Fontenay’s Mobile Homes, Imogen Poots gives a performance of such multifaceted distinction that it might be hard to believe you’re watching the same actress from frame to frame.
  7. Jinn
    There’s nothing preachy about Jinn, even though Nijla Mu’min’s elegant debut feature is about a teenager coming to terms with her mother’s newly embraced religion.
  8. Family in Transition
    The Tsuk children, with remarkable equanimity, evince the least surprise at their parents’ later actions. Hebrew speakers may be better able to appreciate nuances that the sometimes stilted, distracting subtitles seem to obscure. But those open, honest faces — the story they tell transcends words.
  9. Anchor and Hope
    Too often, viewers just have to take a movie love story’s word for it that its characters actually belong together. Not so in Carlos Marques-Marcet’s loose, observant Anchor and Hope.
  10. The Price of Free
    Director Derek Doneen opens hearts wide with his documentary The Price of Free, his tale of enslaved children working in factories in India. But he’ll also crush many of those hearts with the revelation that viewers are among the villains activist Kailash Satyarthi is fighting.
  11. The Front Runner
    It makes for an intriguing combination of tones and rhythms — urgency running up against paralysis — that speaks to the twisted dynamism of our political process, then and now.
  12. Searching for Ingmar Bergman
    Little here will surprise cineastes but much of it will charm them.
  13. Boy Erased
    When Jared finally erupts, Hedges nimbly navigates the character’s hurt, fear and burgeoning pride — his relief at having at last found his voice.
  14. Monrovia, Indiana
    Wiseman doesn’t engage with immigration or migrant labor in his town portrait, which helps make Monrovia, Indiana a stubborn entry into his canon. Many of his subjects are invested in the continuity of what they perceive as a timeless American normalcy, but they’re too polite — and cagey — to say what that means on camera.
  15. The Grief of Others
    Wang favors static, wide, one-take shots, to underscore the relentlessness of his characters’ suffering. But — like Jost — he also has a knack for primitive in-camera effects. The final shot is a triumph of both economy and feeling.
  16. Liyana
    The animation that brings Liyana to life, created by Shofela Coker, is gorgeous, but the reason it resonates has everything to do with the way it’s woven into footage of the children telling Liyana’s story or going about their everyday business.
  17. Suspiria
    I’m happy to report that I have no idea what’s going on in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake, and that’s wonderful. The two Suspirias function more as companion pieces than as mirrored twins.
  18. Border
    While the film does take some twists and turns — some fairly contrived — it mostly drills down and explores her emotional conundrum without drawing symbolic conclusions about the world we live in.
  19. On Her Shoulders
    Especially wrenching are scenes of the Yazidi, torn from the land of their birth, separated from one another in camps, confronting the question of how to remain unified when scattered across the globe.
  20. Life and Nothing More
    It’s a shame we never get to know Andrew as well as Regina — arguably part of the moody teen persona — but it’s even more affecting when Andrew’s initially passive existence escalates due to white fear, and his mother is left to fight for his chance at life.
  21. Charm City
    There’s still charm in Charm City, despite it all.
  22. The Great Buster: A Celebration
    It’s a relaxed study of greatness, of exquisite physical comedy, of how’d-he-do-that stuntwork, of a vigorous cinema artist who saw new and enduring possibilities for his medium.
  23. A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
    The film, a sort of cinematic state-of-the-arts speech, is endlessly warm, playful and lovable, a sprawling and prankish hangout comedy with no clear precedent.
  24. A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
    The second half proves somewhat darker but also more brazenly inventive in its scene craft. If Part One centered on the role of the arts in the lives of these characters and their community, Part Two finds their lives becoming art. Suddenly, song-and-dance numbers break out in parking lots and coffee shops.
  25. Transformer
    The film might prove more illuminating and instructive if it examined more reactions to Kroc’s flowering from within the lifting world. Overall, though, Del Monte has crafted a warm portrait of the birth of a woman from a man who found that he had even more strength than he ever realized.
  26. Mid90s
    Mid90s, for all its darkness, is uplifted by its hilarious moments and joyous skating shots.
  27. Galveston
    Laurent's work as an actor serves her well as a director, and she allows her performers the freedom to find each moment’s emotional core. Foster and Fanning are excellent, their chemistry intensified by their characters' shared bitterness and loss of what could have been.
  28. Wildlife
    Dano’s film is shrewd and exacting, composed with rigor yet alert to the rhythms of its performers.
  29. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    No one does dissolute hubris with as much charm as Grant, and his ebullience is the perfect foil to the misanthropic McCarthy.
  30. The Sentence
    Here’s a true surprise in 2018: a documentary about an American injustice that will likely leave you, by its end, blubbering tears of relieved joy.
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