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 8.7 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. This Is England
    The result is a film marked by eruptions of brutal violence, but also passages of extraordinary tenderness.
  2. Springtime in a Small Town
    Simply put, it represents the work of a filmmaker so exhilaratingly in command of his craft that he can, among other things, turn a single image of two people standing next to each other -- fully clothed, their bodies not quite touching -- into one of the most sublimely erotic moments we have ever beheld on the screen.
  3. Sweet Sixteen
    It's not a happy film, but there's much incidental, quotidian happiness in it. Like Lynne Ramsay's lovely "Ratcatcher," the movie is far from sentimental about children.
  4. The Son
    Makes no attempt to entertain us. Much of this extraordinarily tactful movie, like "Rosetta," is shot in close-up, focusing on the back of Olivier's neck, as if inviting us to see the world as he does.
  5. The Gleaners & I
    It's both surreal -- and wholly accessible.
  6. Waking Life
    Individual artists were assigned their own characters and given free rein -- characters and locations shift on a dime from naturalistic to baroque -- with the result that the movie's formal imagination surpasses and redeems the banal tedium of some of the dialogue.
  7. The Bourne Ultimatum
    Faster and, if possible, furiouser than its predecessors.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    It's a climax of truly epic proportions.
  9. You Can Count on Me
    (Linney and Ruffalo) are just beautiful enough, in fact, to be in the movies and still remain convincing as authentic folk, and their performances are tremendously moving.
  10. The Pianist
    Polanski, wisely, doesn't interpret or explain. He seems to have decided that in the face of such meticulously planned horror, the best one can do is get the details right.
  11. Gimme Shelter
    Signals the real end of the party, charting a denouement that arcs from blissful ignorance to violence and its ever-present threat to a final retreat.
  12. The Endurance
    Not only relates the astounding story of the expedition and its unimaginable hardships, it presents a thoughtful study of a time when there were adventurers who might actually respond to an advertisement reading "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold . . ."
  13. Charm City
    There’s still charm in Charm City, despite it all.
  14. Kings & Queen
    For all its hectic comings and goings, though, Kings & Queen is superbly controlled, gracefully shot and edited, and, for its entire 150 minutes, as engrossing as its meanings are opaque.
  15. Sling Blade
    A remarkably moving and disturbing film about the possibility of belonging and the genealogy of violence.
  16. Knocked Up
    Line for line, Knocked Up isn't quite as funny as "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," which got most of its laughs from the friction between prissy Carell and his sex-crazed stoner co-workers. But it is equally good as a nutty anthropology of marginal living and as an illustration of how much energy it takes to do nothing in a work-obsessed society.
  17. Turtles Can Fly
    Ghobadi's genius seems supercharged rather than weighed down by his higher calling, and his imagery is so boilingly alive that we come away from it feeling exhilarated rather than depressed.
  18. The Departed
    DiCaprio harnesses a terrific, buggy intensity reminiscent of "GoodFellas'" hopped-up Henry Hill (Ray Liotta).
  19. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
    The film unfolds at a deliberate pace, with a soundtrack occupied less by dialogue than by the sounds of water flowing and crickets chirping. And if you listen carefully enough, you might just hear the sound of one hand clapping.
  20. Festival Express
    To watch Joplin, Rick Danko, Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart, all massively wasted, giggling and jamming, is a delight tempered by the knowledge that Joplin would be dead just months later, with the rest but one following after.
  21. Half Nelson
    At a time when most American movies, studio made or "independent," seem ever more divorced from anything approximating actual life experience, Half Nelson is so sobering and searingly truthful that watching it feels like being tossed from a calm beach into a raging current.
  22. The Insider
    Has the glorious look and immaculate technique we expect from Mann, along with a wealth of superb secondary performances.
  23. Street Fight
    This is classical activist filmmaking of the first order, a movie with the power to turn hearts, change minds and, just maybe, right the wayward course of an entire city.
  24. About Schmidt
    The bleakness and poignancy are inescapable in About Schmidt, a character study that has the emotional richness of the great Italian and Eastern European films of the 1960s, in which humor and pathos rode up and down on the seesaw together.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hero
    Hero is an epic, evocative of another epoch and of landscapes beyond time. It's overwhelming. And yet I miss the animating anger of Zhang's early masterworks, in which penniless young lovers were oppressed by impotent old men.
  26. Neil Young: Heart of Gold
    Jonathan Demme's superb film of Neil Young's 2005 performance at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium is as fervent a musical homage as was Demme's bubbly tribute to the Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense (1984).
  27. Mudbound
    With Mudbound, Rees proves the truest rule of all: That talent and vision make all lesser rules negotiable. This absorbing, incredibly accomplished film should win awards and be taught in history classes all over America.
  28. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
    Mitchell retools his play magnificently, opening it up into a vibrant cinematic work.
  29. The Intruder
    For Denis’ film - which may be her most intricately constructed and intensely beautiful to date - is one that transcends words and stories, a movie to be felt rather than rationalized.
  30. No Greater Love
    I'm thankful No Greater Love is around to make people realize how much war heroes need our love, help and support once they come back home. Just telling them "thank you for your service" ain't gonna cut it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    24 Hour Party People
    The movie's a rave and a half.
  32. The Host
    The Host is a miracle of breathless play with form and tone that also seethes with attitude and ideas, from pure movie love to pointed sociopolitical commentary to a bleak existentialism about the inherent cruelty of our world.
  33. Grisbi (re-release)
    Grisbi is hard (new subtitles bring out the chill of the gangsters' argot) and gray: a meditation on what we are left with when life has let us down, played out in the haunted eyes of Jean Gabin.
  34. The Iron Giant
    One of the best films of the year thus far.
  35. Paragraph 175
    Speaks so eloquently for itself, there's not much more for me to do than urge you to get over to the Nuart for the one week it's playing in Los Angeles.
  36. Long Night's Journey Into Day
    Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffman's heart-stopping, Oscar-nominated documentary about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is narrow in focus, but broad in its reach for insight into the power of public drama.
  37. The Circle
    A triumph of invisible craftsmanship that embraces so much specific detail that none of the women ever comes across as an emblem or an abstraction.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sound and Fury
    Perfectly situated in the maelstrom of the personal and the political, Sound and Fury creates a space for serious, obstinate contention.
  39. Since Otar Left
    The kind of small film -- morally ambiguous, graceful in its admission of imperfect knowledge, at once specific and universal -- that expands our understanding of the emotional economy of family life, with its ebb and flow of love and hostility, secrecy and egregious candor. You must see this film.
  40. Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession
    A marvelous tribute to a heady age.
  41. A Christmas Tale
    Their endless groupings and regroupings, their brief encounters and power struggles are framed by an armory of cinematic devices that will be familiar to any Desplechin devotee.
  42. Out of Sight
    This isn't a profound film, or even an important one, but then it isn't trying to be. It's so diverting and so full of small satisfying pleasures, you don't realize how good it is until it's over.
  43. The Last Waltz
    To see the film in this meticulously restored and remixed version is like watching it for the first time, so clear is the sound, so vivid the sights.
  44. Children of Men
    One of the year's most imaginative and uniquely exciting pieces of cinema.
  45. American Movie
    This unassuming, insistently entertaining documentary has the virtue of a great subject.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Man Without a Past
    If Aki Kaurismaki were the Eagles, which he is not, The Man Without a Past might be considered a kind of "best of" album.
  47. Calle 54
    Trueba reveals his subject organically, letting the music speak for itself.
  48. Lantana
    Notable for its power of surprise and its refusal to immediately clarify the confusion of these lost souls.
  49. 49 Up
    Their pain is our pleasure, for though occasionally Apted's bluntness makes you want to take a bite out of his neck, there's something immensely satisfying about watching the playing out of ordinary lives we've become attached to over time.
  50. American Beauty
    Surprises you with a kind of hardheaded romanticism.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    No Man's Land
    Tanovic steers his story away from feel-good brotherhood clichés and toward the darker reaches of human nature. The principal cast is excellent.
  52. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
    It works its magic with such exuberance and passion that the film's length becomes a part of its fun.
  53. Far From Heaven
    Not a campy movie. True, it has its ironies, but though you can read it ironically if you wish, Haynes' triumph is that it also plays beautifully straight.
  54. Darwin's Nightmare
    But for all its bleakness, Nightmare is a film that demands to be seen. In unflinching terms, it captures the hellish existence endured by the many so that the few may wallow in privilege.
  55. Blood Simple
    On viewing, the cuts seem negligible, but what is new and clearly improved is the sound, which now booms with each door slam and gunshot.
  56. Old Joy
    The movie's scale is minuscule, but the physical and emotional landscapes it travels are as broad, deep and mysterious as the human psyche itself.
  57. Momma's Man
    Momma's Man taps into that ambivalence, and those moments when all of us long to flee adulthood and sink back into being our parents' beloved baby birds, whether or not we ever were in the first place.
  58. Volver
    The movie is enjoyable, but not passionately engaging in the way we've come to expect from Almodóvar, and it leaves you somewhat cold in spite of the warmth of Cruz's galvanic performance.
  59. 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.
  60. First Man
    In the end, what shines through First Man is the toughness and resilience of the men whose no-nonsense efforts allowed the rest of us to dream.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Distant
    The film's extraordinary shifts from windswept sorrow (Mahmut watching from a distance as his ex-wife departs Istanbul for a new life in Canada) to deadpan comedy (the cousins' carefully engineered capture of a household rodent) are uniquely, triumphantly their maker's own.
  62. Shrek
    Shrek's first 20 minutes are so devilishly funny that letting go of pure belief doesn't seem like such a bad thing.
  63. Dave Chappelle's Block Party
    Results in moments of real beauty that make you grateful Chappelle chose an aesthete for directing chores. And yet, in terms of content, the film doesn't quite reach the bar set by its historic predecessor (Wattstax).
  64. The Day I Became a Woman
    Promising, if uneven, first feature.
  65. The Quiet American
    Noyce has made a good-looking, intelligent stab at the novel, mildly undermined by a tendency to seek contemporary relevance.
  66. Iraq in Fragments
    Seattle filmmaker James Longley's poetic essay on the plight of ordinary Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds trapped in a war simultaneously waged over their heads and in their faces stands head and shoulders above an overcrowded field of documentaries about the Iraq war.
  67. Mystic River
    Where Lehane's novel seethes with emotionally charged subtext, Eastwood's workmanlike direction feels static -- fatally tasteful, embalmed in gravitas -- while his sporadic efforts at dramatic heightening come off as vulgar cliché.
  68. Mutual Appreciation
    As before, Bujalski's preference for nonprofessional actors, his ear for the rhythms of conversation among bright young 20-somethings and his adept use of a roving, hand-held camera (this time shooting in fuzzy black and white) lend the film an invigorating energy.
  69. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
    Maddin's genius is so inescapably idiosyncratic that his work seems destined to remain a cult taste. Although Dracula won't change that, I hasten to add that this is the most inventive vampire picture of the last 80 years.
  70. Together
    Moodysson's movie, one part mash note and three parts scathing piss-taker, is hugely compassionate toward the well-meaning fools in his tale, but he doesn't suffer their nonsense gladly; his film is, in large part, about grown-ups needing to grow up.
  71. Fighter
    A humane and precociously wise documentary by the young Los Angeles director Amir Bar-Lev.
    • L.A. Weekly
  72. Adaptation.
    Adaptation is hardly profound, but it's one of the most soulful and loopily romantic movies I've seen all year.
  73. Bus 174
    Tough and relentless, dazzlingly researched and crafted. At its core is compassion for those who are angry, violent and uneducated.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In the Loop
    Zooming back and forth between London and D.C., In the Loop hasn't any real plot -- it plays like a rather brilliant Brit-com stretched over 100 minutes, a collection of anecdotes and incidents.
  75. Amores Perros
    There's something overly studied, almost clinical, in how it all pulls together.
  76. Osama
    At the center...lies the stunning Golbahari, a nonprofessional who recalls some of Bresson's most haunting model-actors in her intense, anguished grace.
  77. Raising Victor Vargas
    Victor Vargas has the look and feel of a neo-realist masterpiece, yet captures New York with a burnished authenticity not seen since the glory days of ’70s American cinema.
  78. Corpse Bride
    There is much clattering and clanking plus a couple of songs; some of the gothic-inspired, neo-Victorian visuals are quite arresting; and the corpse bride herself is, dare one say, surprisingly hot. But the whole thing just isn’t much fun.
  79. Spider-Man 2
    Molina is an actor of unusually elastic gifts, but unlike Willem Dafoe, who has only to bare his scary teeth to send us all scampering for the exits, there's no getting around the fact that Molina has the face of a kindly basset hound even when it's contorted into a deadly grimace.
  80. When We Were Kings
    When We Were Kings is a wonderfully entertaining, at times thrilling, film. Ali is magnificent, Foreman oddly touching, and their fight, which is shown almost in total, makes for superb, nail-biting suspense--even two decades after the fact.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Avatar
    At the end of a decade defined by much bellyaching about "the death of cinema" (including, on occasion, by this critic), Avatar concludes, appropriately enough, with an image of rebirth.
  82. Spider
    Deliciously wicked, strangely poetic portrait (adapted by Patrick McGrath from his own novel) of a schizophrenic man at once tyrannized and elevated by oedipal terrors.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
    It may seem overblown when one of the gamers calls Donkey Kong a metaphor for life, but The King of Kong is just that -- a reminder of how we all have to prove ourselves to others, and the extent to which the odds are often stacked against outsiders and newcomers.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Taxidermia
    All this helps to shape Pálfi’s crudely bombastic but impressive philosophical view of the body as landscape and art, a source of personal discovery, wonder and annihilation.
  85. Merci Pour Le Chocolat
    The story proceeds, by minuscule tonal shifts and barely perceptible changes in the atmospheric temperature, from touches of ghoulish comedy -- to the creepy stillness of death that pervades the house.
  86. Triad Election
    Outside of "Grindhouse," it may be the most bang for your buck to be had in a Los Angeles movie theater this season.
  87. Lilya 4-Ever
    Lilya is the more genuinely unsettling film because Moodysson seems to actually know something of what it is to take and stumble beneath a crushing blow. You feel that here. And you feel it for days after.
  88. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    Vol. 2 is the most sheerly enjoyable movie I've seen in ages, allowing for all the intimacy that was missing from its predecessor -- this time, the violence feels PERSONAL. Yet this film, too, would be richer if it didn't stand alone, but rather were part of one grand grind-house epic.
  89. Vera Drake
    As a character study Vera Drake is coarsely drawn, and as pro-choice polemic, it’s both a blunt instrument and a red herring. Which may be why, among all the moviegoers who staggered from the theater wielding soaked tissues, I was among the few who remained dry of eye, and raised of brow.
  90. Private Life
    Jenkins (director of The Savages and Slums of Beverly Hills) is always more interested in emotional truth than she is in laughs. Throughout Private Life’s tense 124 minutes, she continually achieves both.
  91. The Magdalene Sisters
    Grim, grueling and triumphantly powerful.
  92. Free Solo
    To watch Honnold think through each ledge of his climbs can stop the heart; to watch him navigate human emotion might melt it.
  93. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    Tim Burton has taken a hallowed classic of the modern musical theater, hemmed in the narrative from well over two hours to well under, cast confessed nonsingers in the principal roles, and somehow managed to make something magical out of it
  94. The Apostle
    An effortlessly complex portrayal that relishes the contradictions and complexities of someone capable of both exalted and debased behavior, a shape-shifter it is possible to be fascinated, repelled and compelled by, all at the same time.
  95. Election
    Election is finally, necessarily, as much about sex as it is about politics -- wanting it, getting it, losing it.
  96. Memento
    If nothing else, Memento is a savvy comment on the queasy uncertainties of the postmodern condition, in which history goes no further back than yesterday's news, and knowledge is supplanted by "information" from a tumult of spin-controlled, unreliable narrators.
  97. Venus
    Venus may be a leering male fantasy, but it is also, improbably but persuasively, a love story as tender as it is transgressive. It's a wry celebration of the tyranny of beauty, and the tragicomic way in which desire outruns the betrayals of dying flesh.
  98. Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    Very few art documentaries are as deeply in tune with the spirit of their subjects, and the implications are enormous, since Goldsworthy is the rare contemporary art star whose work (what a radical notion) is actually about something.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Three Times
    I urge you to see the ineffably beautiful Three Times however you can, lest you go on thinking that Hou's greatness is merely the supposition of obscurantist critics intent on reserving their highest praise for those films that nobody else can actually see.
  100. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    Fiercely intelligent, terrifying and absurdly funny documentary.
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