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. Halloween
    Too often, in this version, Green doesn’t seem to know where to put the camera to elicit that sense of surveilling or being surveilled. Worse, that incompetence often works hand in hand with overwrought comic dialogue. But let’s get to what really works here: Curtis.
  2. Charlie Wilson's War
    Watching Charlie Wilson’s War is like sitting through a very long episode of "The West Wing."
  3. 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.
  4. Life and Debt
    Black's cool-headed but blistering indictment of globalization and the racist international economic policies that have shoved that country into crushing poverty.
  5. Better Luck Tomorrow
    Though it doesn't fully transcend its small budget (the lighting is dingy), the story feels rooted in something more solid than prefab posturing.
  6. A Decade Under the Influence
    One wonders what exactly Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme thought they were doing in this documentary, which doesn't so much look at the period as genuflect before it.
  7. Young Adam
    The movie is another showcase for the underappreciated McGregor, who disappears into his character so discreetly that, even as his face lets us track Joe's every thought, you never feel you’re watching a Performance.
  8. Finding Neverland
    Surprisingly wan film.
  9. The Business of Strangers
    Stettner's vision of both women lacks fullness, relying on stereotypes of feminine strength and vulnerability.
  10. After Everything
    White and Monroe are terrific — their relationship, as well as its dissolution, is completely believable — but they’re limited by a script full of old tropes.
  11. Tales of the Rat Fink
    These hunks of greased lightning tell how a gearhead SoCal teen got wind of the post-World War II hot-rodding craze, crossed paths with a pinstriper named von Dutch and ended up as the automotive visionary whom Tom Wolfe famously called “a genius of the only uniquely American art form.”
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    In its well-mannered way, this genteel film delicately keeps its platonic May-December love story from turning creepy. But without the sexual undertones and macabre humor of Hal Ashby's classic, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is merely a soft, slightly patronizing movie about the poignancy of aging.
  13. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
    The movie is driven almost entirely by its exhilaratingly subversive characters.
  14. An Affair of Love
    A delicate mood piece that owes much of its languorous charm to the understated intelligence of its two leads.
  15. Open Range
    Here is a Western without irony or innovation, without any of the overt efforts toward “revisionism” we’ve come to expect even from Eastwood -- a movie that waxes elegiac about the end of the West, but remains sure that cowboys and cattle and ramshackle frontier towns will live on in perpetuity at the cinema.
  16. The Ninth Day
    A morally complex and emotionally satisfying drama about the vagaries of Catholic response to the Third Reich.
  17. A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
    It's forceful and alive and spilling over with crazy poetry.
  18. Enemy of the State
    This paranoid thriller has all the failings we expect...but Enemy of the State also has enough wit, talent and narrative thrust to mostly transcend those flaws, at least until that ludicrous finish.
  19. Watermarks
    Not especially lively filmmaking, but Zilberman has unearthed some terrific footage of the club in its heyday.
  20. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    The tediously convoluted plot involves the foursome’s attempt to pay him back, a labored venture that involves crooks with names like Dog and Plank, a man on fire, some fine cinematography, plenty of gore though no real point.
  21. Music from the Inside Out
    The result is 90 minutes in the company of some of the nicest and most boring people you can imagine ever having a movie made about them.
  22. Ivansxtc
    To the degree that ivans xtc. works, it's thanks to Huston's revelatory performance.
  23. Quo Vadis?
    The film should also wow fans of Herbert Wise's "I, Claudius" and Franco Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth" alike.
  24. Garden State
    Braff is bright and has a quick ear for vernacular dialogue, and he's caught the look and the sound of his blitzed, prematurely disillusioned generation, which has had to live with more lack of definition than most.
  25. Schultze Gets the Blues
    Michael Schorr's delightfully deadpan comedy debut blew away the German box office, and once you let yourself sink into its gentle rhythms, as slow and deliberate as those of its protagonist and inflected with tiny but significant shifts of pace and tone, you'll see why.
  26. Brothers of the Head
    Yes, this is another faux rock documentary, but one so dramatically and visually textured that it reinvents that decidedly worn genre.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yiddish Theater: A Love Story
    [A] wistful and moving portrait of quixotically dedicated artisans playing to half-empty houses, struggling for solvency and relevance — which renders it not just a movie about a theater in particular, but about the theater in general.
  28. Stranger Than Fiction
    Teems with ideas both literary and existential, which might make it unbearably precious, were it not redeemed by woozy charm and some serious acting from Will Ferrell.
  29. Selena
    For all its simplicity, however, the film is entertaining, even uplifting, with Lopez giving a stellar, confectionary performance.
  30. Zathura: A Space Adventure
    The result is a glorious low-tech pleasure that may be the most lyrical, phantasmagoric boys' adventure story since Joe Dante's Explorers.
  31. Ronin
    A film in which the mechanics of the plot are far less interesting, and vital, then the interior landscape of men who exist outside the law.
  32. Over the Hedge
    Deftly held together by bags of good humor and zany action sequences, tethered to a heartfelt conviction that green is good and family is better.
  33. The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me
    Drake draws us in, digging deep to track the occasionally divine, always ridiculous journey that is big-city gay life.
  34. Too Much Sleep
    Maquiling offers us the unexpected pleasures of taking the side streets in a film about how even minor-key adventures can make a life stuck in low gear something to look back on.
  35. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    Ultimately just another celebrity bio-pic, and far less trenchant than, say, the more conventional "Auto Focus." For all their whirring ingenuity, Kaufman's scripts require a director who will tether his cleverness to reality.
  36. Me Without You
    Me Without You is at its truest and most affecting when it steps back from the gig gling, bitching and nail biting to reveal how the compulsion to control and appropriate can be born of simple love and admiration.
  37. Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust
    In the current flood of Holocaust documentaries, stories of righteous gentiles abound, but the singular beauty of Hiding and Seeking is its delicate but relentless probing of ambiguous motivation on the one hand, and its hearteningly conciliatory spirit on the other.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hipsters
    Punch-drunk, decadently designed slice of eye candy.
  39. Solaris
    While I could tell the love story was supposed to be moving, I kept feeling the characters' passion struggling against the virtuosity of Soderbergh's direction, which is so tight, so gorgeously lit, so worked that even when he wants scenes to be emotionally incandescent, they wind up detached, even chilly.
  40. As Good as It Gets
    As funny as it's got all year. Manipulative and calculating? Sure. Submit! Enjoy!
  41. The Goebbles Experiment
    Brilliantly edited for drama and irony, The Goebbels Experiment juxtaposes little-seen German propaganda films with excerpts from Goebbels' diary.
  42. Fight Club
    On a purely visual level, it's the most powerful and viscerally exciting movie to come out of Hollywood this year. Which doesn't mean that it's all good.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    This Is It
    The problem is that Ortega offers only the public Michael.
  44. Frequency
    If the trailer for this one left you feeling you'd pretty much got it, plot point by plot point, so really why bother.
  45. Home Movie
    At 60 minutes, the film never stops feeling like a guided tour, while we're wishing it was a sleepover.
  46. The Page Turner
    Though The Page Turner clearly aims for ambiguity of meaning, you'd have to be blind, or deaf to the strenuously long-faced score, to miss the signs and portents that keep piling up in this dispiritingly transparent movie, which brandishes its foregone conclusion 20 minutes in.
  47. Flanders
    The film arrives at a familiar conclusion -- that war is hell -- but the getting there is made uniquely unsettling by Dumont's relentlessly anti-psychological disposition.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos
    Though the movie promises a Behind the Music–type look at the meteoric rise and tragic fall of the Cosmos -- a team (if the press notes are to be believed) overwhelmed by wealth, groupies, rivalry and power struggles -- it all adds up to a tempest in a tea pot.
  49. Rock School
    You root for the kids, who are utterly captivating, but Green is another story. His shtick -- a combo of insufferable stage-parent and unbearable rock geek -- is exhausting.
  50. Demonlover
    Nielsen beautifully embodies the sadness and confused sense of unreality that attend our appetite for the Internet's cheaper thrills.
  51. Time to Leave
    The same quiet ecstasy that made the final moments of "Under the Sand" so moving works on the viewer here too, inspiring joy and naked grief in equal measure.
  52. Tupac: Resurrection
    Needless to say, other voices -- any other voices -- would have given this legacy-obsessed film an invaluable context for such a fiery, scrutinized subject, but Tupac: Resurrection (with that fabulously unsubtle title) is intended to be more video bible than textbook.
  53. Two Girls and a Guy
    Two Girls and a Guy grooves on a provisional spirit that keeps the movie shifting in unexpected directions, tracking the exhilaration and horror of an open-ended game with high stakes to which no current rules apply.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Looking for Eric
    Mixing light magical realism with a more familiar brand of working-class gloom, Loach's warm, comic touch elevates the story of an aging man cracking up in plain sight.
  55. World Trade Center
    World Trade Center is fatally benign -- an unexceptionable and therefore unexceptional heroic narrative that does little to further the tentative creep of our pop culture toward parsing the significance of that catastrophic day.
  56. The Take
    This film puts a pained human face on the cost of the corporate status quo.
  57. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
    At its best, Behind the Mask offers some, um, cutting insights about mass-media blood lust and the cult of the serial killer, and in Baesel, who is by turns charming, manic and thoroughly scary, it has a gifted young actor who clearly relishes a role he can sink his pitchfork into.
  58. In Good Company
    It's "Rain Man" with ageism substituted for autism.
  59. Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
    Game Over provides no answers.
  60. La Nouvelle Ève
    Corsini's insight into the psyche of this contemporary woman doesn't have much of a point because it tells us nothing new.
  61. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
    Here's a picture that you actually want to see a second time, not for the sake of further wrapping your head around its gnarly conceptual matrix, but because of the sheer visceral charge it provides. Here, at long last, is a summer movie -- like its precursors in the Terminator canon -- worth its weight in cybernetic organisms.
  62. Shadow Magic
    Shadow Magic is rich with detail.
  63. On the Outs
    Well-meaning but mediocre.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Three... Extremes
    Title notwithstanding, Three . . . Extremes really offers only two.
  65. Something's Gotta Give
    Jack, the actor, smiles obligingly, but you can practically feel him rolling his eyes.
  66. Diary of the Dead
    In most horror movies, it's a given that we should root for the heroes to make it out alive, but Diary of the Dead isn't nearly so certain, and so it terrifies us all the more.
  67. Innocent Voices
    Chilean-born actress Leonor Varela (TV's Cleopatra, a few seasons back) plays Chavo's mother, who, in her rage to see her children survive, powerfully embodies the film's moral center.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Me You Them
    Skirting overt politics, Waddington opts instead for a subtle portrait of emotions, and a story that's told through glances, languorous pacing and breathtaking landscapes.
  69. Stuart Little 2
    Returning director Rob Minkoff (The Lion King) and screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost) have done a fine job of updating White's dry wit to a new age, led in no small measure by Lane, who could probably make the IRS code book sound funny.
  70. Auto Focus
    Certainly the movie is one of Schrader's most accomplished, and most entertaining, but there's something cold and unforgiving about his vision, delivered with a severity that only a bred-in-the-bone Calvinist could muster.
  71. Creed II
    It’s a Rocky movie, just the latest go-round, its story more formulaic, its people less specific, its rhythms as wheezily familiar as a workout you should have changed up weeks ago. It’s a diminishment of Creed, a dumbing down, just as Rocky II was a diminishment of Rocky.
  72. A Map of the World
    If director Scott Elliott falters, it's only in the spots where he tries to comment on her (Alice's) persecution without being complicit in it.
  73. Dog Days
    Dog Days is in fact a bleak but deeply felt humanism -- a yearning that we might all learn to better love our neighbors and, perhaps more importantly, ourselves.
  74. Tuck Everlasting
    Tuck Everlasting is a wise and beautiful poem to the idea that the fundamental human tragedy is not death, but the unlived life.
  75. Steamboy
    The movie's true genius lies in the exquisite animation, a blend of hand-drawn and state-of-the-art digital technology that suggests an old world being bullied into a new one.
  76. Fly Away
    Fly Away could have been stronger if its antiseptic visual style, which anchors it in old-fashioned TV movie mode, had been more adventurous in shouldering some of the weight of depicting the emotional and psychic anguish of the story.
  77. Idiocracy
    If you crave a lively and funny trek through the farcical possibilities of unchecked dimwit power, Judge is still your guy. Just go rent "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America" instead.
  78. Crash
    Not just one of the best Hollywood movies about race, but, along with "Collateral," one of the finest portrayals of contemporary Los Angeles life period.
  79. The Eye
    Genuinely scary, especially when it strays from its lame plot to orchestrate some beautifully chilling set pieces, including one in the world's slowest elevator that'll raise the hairs on the back of even the most weary genre fan's neck.
  80. Bend It Like Beckham
    Enjoyably shameless confection.
  81. So Close
    The protracted final sequence, which involves balletic swordplay worthy of the famous scene in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," will take your breath away.
  82. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
    Cloudy is smart, insightful on a host of relationship dynamics, and filled with fast-paced action.
  83. Dark City
    [Proyas] hasn't yet learned how to enliven his characters as fully as his sets. Part of this is structural (somnolence is built into the script), but the greater fault lies with Proyas' direction of his performers, most of whom deliver their lines in a strangulated whisper.
  84. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
    As Tweedy talks about canning his stockbroker and repairing his pool, you yearn for a few airborne TV sets or nude groupies on the nod to liven things up. And what do we get? Diet Coke! Tonight is definitely not the night.
  85. Tattoo
    Indulging his taste for Grand Guignol and the stylistically baroque, Schwentke never quite overplays his hand, though his occasional lapses into visual extravagance can be irritating, and the result is a nasty, intelligent and complex thriller.
  86. Trembling Before G-d
    Remarkable exploration of sexuality and the Jewish faith.
  87. Margarita Happy Hour
    Breaks in the film's otherwise smooth continuum, however, are bridged by Hutchins' soulful performance, and by Chaiken's excellent feel for the grace notes and steady tempo of native New York life, the sacredness of female friendship, and the precarious balance between love for oneself and for others.
  88. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
    Not just the funniest but the smartest comedy around by a mile.
  89. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    It is worthy of comparison to the lifelike, character-rich films we cherish from that era (1970s), and is certainly one of the finest films to come out this year.
  90. Jackass Number Two
    As merry pranksters they have no match, and as they age (Knoxville is 35 now), they only grow in appeal. As they proudly hurl their tattooed (by ink and battle scars) bodies into harm's way, a devilish glint in their eyes, it's as if they've discovered the fountain of youth, and its name is Jackass.
  91. Margot at the Wedding
    Margot at the Wedding gives its characters (and us) something to laugh about.
  92. Shall We Dance?
    As sticky as "Strictly Ballroom," if far better behaved, Shall We Dance was written and directed by Masayuki Suo, a man who really knows his way around clichés both benign and tiresome.
  93. Scream
    A meta-horror film that hilariously parodies the genre's clichés with smarts to spare. It's also the scariest fucking movie Craven has made since the first "A Nightmare on Elm Street."
  94. Maelstrom
    Dark, wickedly funny tale.
  95. Beautiful Boxer
    It’s a good story, and Uekrongtham, making his feature debut, captures the camaraderie of camp life and the subsequent matches with the panache of a veteran studio hand, but the insights into Toom's psyche never extend past the fun he has applying powder and eyeliner.
  96. Mean Girls
    Lohan is a warm and engaging presence, but she's completely outshone by the bad girls, and when they're offscreen, Mean Girls is an oddly restrained, barely plotted movie.
  97. Transamerica
    Transamerica is about as sexual as "The Brady Bunch." It's about an intelligent woman in excruciating transition to a new body that will line up with an identity she's held all along.
  98. Notorious C.H.O.
    When she unabashedly puts herself in the same category as Richard Pryor (the master of identity politics and cultural reportage), it's not just presumptuous posturing on her part. She's earned her place there.
  99. The Tailor of Panama
    The movie is crudely jokey and, finally, a wimpy betrayal of its source.
  100. A Shot at Glory
    Demonstrating yet again that he knows few limits as an actor, Duvall not only nails the accent, he inhabits the man's flinty, grudge-bearing contrariness with such a furious commitment that it brings out the best in the actors around him.
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