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. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    Lucas is a major figure, and Revenge of the Sith may be some kind of historic achievement -- the first movie in which it is fully impossible to tell where flesh ends and digital paint begins.
  2. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire
    Though it includes plenty of footage from those terrible days, this wonderful, devastating documentary is as much Dallaire's story as it is the story of a whole continent abandoned by a cynical world.
  3. Mindhunters
    A tiring exercise in time-biding sadism (versus wit or suspense), inflated with shock editing, noisy effects and an angry score, like a thriller with road rage.
  4. Kicking & Screaming
    My own little critic-in-training laughed her head off. Lacks taste, must try harder.
  5. Monster-in-Law
    This is a gay men's movie whose primary function is to doll Fonda up like a drag queen and let her rip.
  6. Unleashed
    The most enjoyable film Besson has had his name on in eons.
  7. Mad Hot Ballroom
    The worthy text of Mad Hot Ballroom is undercut by the real source of its energy, the heat of competition and the pure joy of winning.
  8. My Mother
    Honoré never gets beneath these characters' sunburned skins, and well before the end, the film tips irretrievably over into the realm of absurdity.
  9. 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.
  10. Lost
    Writer-director Darren Lemke's likable thriller shows surprising smarts for a low-budget debut, cribbing from all the right sources.
  11. Modigliani
    A tiresome, hammy and ultimately annoying portrait of the artist as a young drunk.
  12. House of Wax
    Boring.
  13. Kingdom of Heaven
    In its depiction of a fleeting, but nevertheless factual, peace in the Middle East, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven may seem a more quixotic Hollywood fantasy than all six Star Wars movies lumped together.
  14. Fighting Tommy Riley
    Davis, who did some writing for a TV series and acted in a couple of B-thrillers, is notably solid inhabiting Riley's conflicted machismo, supported by Diane Tayler's fine turn as a bottom-rung manager.
  15. Jiminy Glick in Lalawood
    While it isn't surprising that improv gods Short and fellow SNL vet Jan Hooks, as Glick's wife, Dixie, are brilliant, who knew that perennial onscreen good girl Elizabeth Perkins, playing here a has-been bitch-diva, could be so brittle and sexy?
  16. Mysterious Skin
    A warped, but beautiful and strangely hopeful, coming-of-age tale.
  17. Up for Grabs
    But by film's end, no one is looking good. If Wranovics is somewhat too noncommittal in his presentation, he still shows a great eye for detail.
  18. The Great Role
    Half a notch above a vanity project, this chipper little number by French director Steve Suissa offers a deadly combination of shamelessness, narcissism and schoolboy comedy.
  19. Brothers
    Bier's portrayal of the brothers' interplay holds few surprises, and the exploitation of the war between East and West is vulgar, contrived and borderline racist.
  20. A Hole in One
    Ledes shows promise, but truly, this would have been better left to Todd Haynes.
  21. 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.
  22. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    This very funny, very British movie -- directed by newcomer Garth Jennings -- has sci-fi effects that are impressive yet appropriately cheesy.
  23. xXx: State of the Union
    What's fun is that the road to that climactic Capitol showdown is paved with one ridiculous and relentlessly edited set piece after another.
  24. 3-Iron
    As repellent and repellently opportunistic a piece of work as the various shock-horror provocations (The Isle, The Coast Guard) that helped to launch this worrisome career (Kim Ki-Duk).
  25. Another Road Home
    Marvelously conciliatory film.
  26. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    Jacquot seems unwilling to either shape his story or offer commentary, a standard New Wave strategy that, in this instance, makes for a tale as vague as it is nouvelle.
  27. Funny Ha Ha
    Bujalski takes a sledgehammer to the carefully ordered surfaces and dramatic conventions of narrative cinema, favoring instead an unpredictability in which the crosscurrents of quotidian life collide on the screen in a series of brilliantly alive patterns.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Holy Girl
    It's a style at once ravishing and mysterious, austere and intimate, carrying with it the suggestion that even cinema may be powerless to invade the most clandestine antechambers of human behavior.
  29. Ladies in Lavender.
    Ladies in Lavender oscillates between scenes so relentlessly nice they make you want to scream and others - particularly those depicting the crush Dench develops on her new housemate - creepier than anything in "The Amityville Horror."
  30. The Painting
    The Painting is a sleekly crafted quilt of moldy racial insight and feel-good kumbaya-isms set against the backdrop of the civil rights era. The acting is competent, TV-movie-of-the-week quality (network, not cable), while every single character is a type you've seen a million times before.
  31. Stalin's Wife
    Shakily cobbled together from stock footage and new interviews with authors and family, Stalin’s Wife is nearly barbarous in its denial of aesthetic pleasure. The whole thing looks like a late-night-TV infomercial.
  32. The Tunnel
    Director Roland Suso Richter gives a raw, frank but sophisticated account of the excruciating logistics of this great escape, and the appalling, inspiring blend of betrayal and courage that attended the group's herculean efforts.
  33. The Interpreter
    When it comes to the United Nations, though, the movie turns to Jell-O. Whether Pollack was softened up by his meetings with U.N. brass (all the way up to Kofi Annan), or by his own gentlemanly Midwestern liberalism, he is alarmingly circumspect about that august body.
  34. A Lot Like Love
    Peet is triumphant as the beguiling object of desire with wounded-bird eyes and devilish smile -- sexy and tart, then, in the space of a breath, totally, tenderly tragic. Like Oliver, we'd happily follow her anywhere.
  35. King's Ransom
    Remarkably unfunny.
  36. Double Dare
    Zoe is lively and an astonishing athlete, but it's Jeannie who gives this film resonance.
  37. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    Fiercely intelligent, terrifying and absurdly funny documentary.
  38. The Game of Their Lives
    The final match stirs briefly, but when it's over, the movie's energy crashes right back down again. Disappointing.
  39. Madison
    If not for the race sequences and the intriguing presence of Caviezel, who made this film before "The Passion of the Christ" and who one hopes will take on even more roles befitting his peculiar sad-eyed charisma, the film would amount to a well-intentioned snooze.
  40. The Man Who Copied
    An enjoyable ride.
  41. One Missed Call
    It's a prolonged, maddening, predictable -- yet curiously pleasurable -- descent into incomprehensibility.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Erosion
    For those turned on by the thought of such “sexually charged” scenes as men describing techniques for picking locks to women while drawing on their bodies with mascara pencils, Erosion may provide some pleasure. Everyone else though, will be worn down by the film’s tedious hand-wringing about infidelity and bursts of unerotic sex.
  43. The Amityville Horror
    Much meaner remake, starring Ryan Reynolds (quite good).
  44. House of D
    David Duchovny’s debut as a writer-director puts little flesh on the bones of the roguish tricks he got up to as a lad in Greenwich Village in the 1970s.
  45. Down and Derby
    It's when adults with whitewashed notions of childhood get hold of a camera that kiddie fare - like this uninspired effort from writer-director Eric Hendershoot - goes limp.
  46. It's All Gone Pete Tong
    The movie catches us up so profoundly in Frankie's self-destructive spiral (and gradual rehab), it's as though we’re seeing it all for the first time. I'd like to say that's because the story is true, only it isn't.
  47. Torremolinos 73
    Pablo Berger's subtle satire Torremolinos 73 is almost there. Almost.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Year of the Yao
    This glorified infomercial glosses over the underlying tension of a young man's introduction into a society whose materialistic, capitalist tendencies are diametrically opposed to his country's values.
  49. Palindromes
    With the possible exception of Neil LaBute, I can't think of a filmmaker who can divide an audience as efficiently as Solondz.
  50. Sahara
    This perfectly distracting, ultimately unsatisfying film feels like a James Bond flick in which the stand-in got the lead.
  51. Fever Pitch
    Unfunny, charmless and hopelessly ordinary.
  52. Kung Fu Hustle
    The movie refers glancingly to dozens of Hollywood classics, from "West Side Story" to "City Lights," but at heart it is a debt of honor richly paid by Stephen Chow to his martial-arts forebears and to the traditions that shaped his sensibility. His gong fu is the best.
  53. Eating Out
    Deadening comedy.
  54. Eros
    A maddeningly uneven triptych.
  55. Winter Solstice
    Too sensitive for this world or any other, this stifling portrait of a family stuck in bereavement offers the painful sight of at least two highly accomplished actors frozen for lack of direction from novice writer-director Josh Sternfeld.
  56. Smile
    If the dialectics here are strictly Hallmark, the film is lifted by some nice location work - all of the Chinese scenes are shot around Shanghai - and deepened somewhat by the bleak depiction of the emotional lives of Katie, her family and her friends.
  57. ...And They Lived Happily Ever After
    This look at the assorted struggles of modern hetero coupledom gives off a distinctly moldy aroma.
  58. Voices in Wartime
    The film's self-limiting pacifism precludes a closer look at the poetry of war, which is not synonymous with poetry against war.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    First Love
    The film, which is directed by Matteo Garrone (The Embalmer), could do with a bit more plot: It doesn't resolve so much as collapse in utter desolation.
  60. Sin City
    After half an hour spent drooling over its visual splendors, I found the movie every bit as sickening as its creators intended it to be, minus the kicks they so palpably got out of making it.
  61. Dust to Glory
    Absolutely exhilarating...Pound for pound, it's more kinetically thrilling than anything Hollywood has produced in years, not least of all because it's real.
  62. Control
    What the movie lacks is a point.
  63. Look at Me
    Directed by Agnès Jaoui, who made the equally delightful "The Taste of Others," this comedy of manners with a serious purpose centers on a group of loosely connected neurotics, all working in the rarefied worlds of amateur chorales.
  64. Beauty Shop
    The script is painfully underbaked, and director Bille Woodruff (Honey) continues to raise a question: How can someone from a music-video background have absolutely no sense of rhythm, timing or pacing?
  65. Guess Who
    Has surprising depth and charm, descriptors never before ascribed to a movie starring Ashton Kutcher.
  66. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    One of those passionately atmospheric movies, like Jane Campion's "The Piano," that sounds idiotic on paper, but whose ambiance, charged with eros, rage, regret and optimism, is strangely moving.
  67. D.E.B.S.
    Doesn't live up to its genre-crossing, parodic ambitions.
  68. Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling
    Leitman has unearthed a terrific collection of vintage footage - yet, as if doubtful about holding our interest, she skims too quickly over the historical background.
  69. Nina's Tragedies
    With masterful tonal balance and control, and a visual sophistication as yet unusual among Israeli directors, Gabizon catches both the absurdity and the sadness of what it means to live with such daily threat and confusion.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Oldboy
    Put simply, in my humble opinion, Oldboy sucks.
  71. Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous
    The only thing remotely resembling a character arc is handed to Regina King, the ferocious Margie Hendricks in "Ray."
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mondovino
    Will get you thinking about wine, and what is and isn't important about it.
  73. Ice Princess
    Joan Cusack and Kim Cattrall bring some nice ambiguity to their thankless roles as the mothers, while pintsize Kirsten Olson and punked-out Julianna Cannarozzo, both professional skaters, leaven this Disney sugarplum with much-needed wit.
  74. The Ring Two
    Might have something interesting to say about cultural ambivalence by and toward the maternal impulse if only it had a spark of originality or verve.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Melinda and Melinda
    From its austere opening credits to its screechy women, this 35th film by Woody Allen looks and sounds like a dozen other Allen movies.
  76. Fifty-Fifty
    Schizo is an earnest also-ran, sadly muffled by the opaque performance of non-actor Oldzhas Nusupbayev.
  77. 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.
  78. The Rider Named Death
    Curiously flat and immobile.
  79. Hostage
    The movie isn't particularly tasteful or finely crafted -- but it grabs you by the jugular, and only during an overcooked climax does it finally relax its grip.
  80. Robots
    On a storytelling level, Robots is in dire need of an upgrade.
  81. The Upside of Anger
    One senses that this is an intensely personal project for Binder, who is not as forgiving as he might be toward the mercurial mother. Still, the film is carried by Costner and Allen, who project a chemistry so incrementally built on reluctant camaraderie, they almost seem like siblings.
  82. Millions
    Millions is an intelligent children’s film that may prove to be a guilty pleasure for adults.
  83. In My Country
    In My Country stands closest to "Hotel Rwanda," a similarly clumsy yet inescapably moving effort to confront the brutal consequences of colonial oppression.
  84. Mail Order Wife
    Initially amusing, ultimately wearying mock documentary.
  85. Black Cloud
    A determinedly old-fashioned boxing/coming-of-age film, only perfunctorily hitting its marks.
  86. Don't Move
    Though sprung from the mind of a woman, the film plays like a hetero male fantasy of tortured love.
  87. Dot the I
    Parkhill's heart seems to belong to 1940s film noir, where a lonely man could be driven half-mad by the sight of a mystery woman performing a hot flamenco dance, a scene Parkhill stages here to unintentional titter-inducing effect.
  88. Fabled
    Quickly reveals itself to be a hyper-stylized flick (lots of odd angles and studied production design in the service of flashbacks and dream sequences), but the glossy sum effect is that of a film student straining for a weightiness he can't pull off.
  89. Nowhere Man
    If Blake Edwards wrote a script and then Abel Ferrara directed it, it might look something like Nowhere Man.
  90. Off the Map
    A small masterpiece of tone and form.
  91. The Jacket
    The director's work is suitably unnerving, but leaves one feeling beaten senseless by reel two. When the hero's well-earned moment of clarity finally arrives, most will likely be too numbed out to care, despite the best efforts of Brody, an actor too vividly alive to be wasting his time playing dead.
  92. Dear Frankie
    The movie’s glib trafficking in illness, death and pinched little faces to jury-rig our emotional responses (Gibb was inspired by the equally likable, equally pandering Czech film "Kolya") lost me at hello.
  93. Face
    Only at the end, when one of the principals makes a decision you don't see coming, does Face fleetingly weigh in as a movie you haven't seen a thousand times before at ethnically correct film festivals.
  94. Gunner Palace
    Sensational viewing.
  95. Walk on Water
    Its suggestion that Israel, of all nations, should know better than to persecute minorities within and across its borders, give the film a thrilling universal appeal.
  96. The Best of Youth
    And like all great family sagas, The Best of Youth, while tipping its hat to the painful confusion of living life forward, reels it backward to give it the thrilling significance of time and place.
  97. Cursed
    Poor special effects, a silly looking werewolf and clunky comic writing help to spoil what should have been a fun B-movie.
  98. Man of the House
    Stuck with flat material and a star more adept at responding to humor than generating it, director Stephen Herek, in a vain attempt to generate laughs, enlists Cedric the Entertainer, as a convict-turned-preacher.
  99. One More Round
    As producer, writer and star of his first movie, Ray Jahangard gets points for confidence and nerve, but at the end of the day, it must be said that not everyone is meant to work in the movies.
  100. The Other Side of the Street
    A smart, quietly moving film.
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