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. Up and Down
    This fluidly paced film, with its keen observation of the confused longing for love, family and stability in an inherently unstable world, nonetheless keeps faith with the Czech genius for holding the tonal line between tragedy and the absurd.
  2. Sex Sells: The Making of 'Touché'
    Tiresome, and with no discernable edge or wit, Sex Sells is most powerful when it dawns on us we're watching Barnes, the leggy replacement for Suzanne Somers on "Three's Company," and Zmed, the beefcake cop from "T.J. Hooker," arrive at this point in their careers.
  3. Window Theory
    This film looks so good, thanks to some impressive production work (nice rainstorm) as well as Andrew Huebscher's vibrant cinematography, that one wonders, as one dull scene after another rolls by, why director Andrew Putschoegl - and co-writers Large and Kyle Kramer - didn't lavish half as much attention on the script.
  4. Because of Winn-Dixie
    Jeff Daniels is a compelling-enough actor to lift almost any film out of mediocrity, but even he has his work cut out for him.
  5. Constantine
    Constantine, which opts in the end for what I can only describe as a kind of supernatural humanism, is not without its spiritual satisfactions.
  6. Son of the Mask
    Most of the animated sequences, capably mixed with live action, leave a bad aftertaste, particularly when the ultimate fate of one beaten and battered human bystander after another is left callously unresolved. In other words, parents beware.
  7. Nabbeun namja
    Ghastly.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. The Animation Show 2005
    Animation fans, no matter their stylistic preference (computer-generated, claymation, old-school hand-drawn), will find much to sate their appetites in this collection of award-winning and critically acclaimed work. There’s not a dud in the bunch.
  11. Ong Bak
    However shrewdly he's been packaged, Tony Jaa is the real thing.
  12. Bride & Prejudice
    It is a truth universally acknowledged that had Jane Austen lived to see the profits that have been squeezed from her most marketable premise, she'd doubtless have wept, then lobbied for her share of the royalties.
  13. Hitch
    The film moves in fits and starts, and is way too long, but it may prove memorable, if only for the sweet, marvelously inventive performance of Kevin James.
  14. Inside Deep Throat
    Seeks to establish a pioneering role for the movie in liberating America’s sex life. To me it’s far from clear that that cheerfully cheesy slice of hardcore, made for $25,000 by a middle-aged hairdresser named Gerard Damiano, has spawned much in the way of a cultural legacy.
  15. Uncle Nino
    There's not a single surprise or moment of dramatic tension in Uncle Nino, which has already proved itself a hit as a self-distributed film in the Midwest.
  16. Pooh's Heffalump Movie
    Amusing, beautifully drawn one-hour film.
  17. The Letter: An American Town and the 'Somali Invasion'
    The result is a carefully wrought, historically grounded and thoroughly absorbing look at a quintessential American experience.
  18. Boogeyman
    Unexpectedly gripping horror movie.
  19. The Wedding Date
    Anemic.
  20. Harry + Max
    It's one of those rare movie failures that truly warrants being called ambitious.
  21. Nobody Knows
    Unfolds with such leisurely, terrible beauty, it takes a while to realize that what we are witnessing is the children's long slide into beggary, exacerbated by the slow torture of faint hope.
  22. The Nomi Song
    Dazzles with rare performance footage.
  23. Rory O'Shea Was Here
    O'Donnell's directing is assured and glossy as befits a former maker of television commercials, and Jeffrey Caine's exuberant script sidesteps cliché -- just.
  24. Swimming Upstream
    A passionately told tale.
  25. Sunset Story
    It's the cinematic equivalent of glancing up at the sky and taking a good deep breath.
  26. Assisted Living
    Yet for all its willful blurring of the lines between documentary and fiction, Assisted Living is the least self-conscious of movies.
  27. Daybreak
    Though the acting is uniformly excellent, especially Petren in her bilious rage, Daybreak doesn't provide anything like the cumulative catharsis of, say, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." We don't really care about these people - we just want someone to make them stop.
  28. Fear X
    Turturro keeps Fear X fascinating, practically in spite of itself.
  29. Travelers and Magicians
    In this lovely film, writer-director Khientse Norbu (The Cup) shifts smoothly between a kind of Buddhist "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and depicting the bonds that form among Dondup and his companions.
  30. Alone in the Dark
    Director Uwe Boll (House of the Dead) pulls off a nicely staged fistfight in an open-air market at the start, but soon loses his way amid mind-glazing exposition and endless gunfire aimed at bulletproof giant lizards.
  31. Hide and Seek
    While the final revelation is laughably absurd, DeNiro and Fanning are so far inside their roles that one can't giggle for long.
  32. Fascination
    So tedious is Fascination that the plot, the embittered characters and, yes, the sexuality are merely insipid.
  33. Lost Embrace
    This delightful riff on the identity crisis of a young Jewish Argentine man deserves both the Grand Jury prize and Best Actor awards it won at last year's Berlin Film Festival.
  34. Are We There Yet?
    Surely the only thing more excruciating than being trapped in a car with a bratty child is having to sit through a road-trip movie that features two of them.
  35. 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.
  36. Head-On
    In its breathlessly claustrophobic way the movie is vital and passionate, and lit with a lyric beauty that washes over love scenes and violent acts alike.
  37. Monsieur N.
    And though at over two hours the movie is too long and too slow, de Caunes sustains a sense of mystery and ambiguity to the end of what is both a satisfying character study and a stately quasi-thriller for amateur historians.
  38. Watermarks
    Not especially lively filmmaking, but Zilberman has unearthed some terrific footage of the club in its heyday.
  39. Assault on Precinct 13
    Excitably puppyish homage.
  40. Coach Carter
    The corniness and predictability feel, if not quite fresh, then not so groaningly stale.
  41. Elektra
    When a movie makes you wish you were watching Halle Berry in "Catwoman," something is most definitely wrong.
  42. Racing Stripes
    Sweet, innocuous and about as fresh as yesterday's lettuce.
  43. The Chorus
    The Chorus is sham art and questionable entertainment, but at the very least it sends you whistling out of the theater.
  44. Appleseed
    The film's snazzy new automated animation style falls short: The supposedly human face of our metal-plated robocop's partner -- the inevitable curvy female in a leather jump suit -- is an inexpressive, glossy doll mask, untouched by human hands.
  45. Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela
    An amiable and colorful, if dewy-eyed, documentary.
  46. White Noise
    No, this isn't an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s great 1985 novel, but a muddled talking-ghosts movie.
  47. Sky Blue
    The result is a soulless piece of product, an ungainly hybrid of sketchy hand-drawn characters in blocky CGI environments, derivative at just about every level.
  48. In Good Company
    It's "Rain Man" with ageism substituted for autism.
  49. The Merchant of Venice
    It all collapses under an atrocious performance by Pacino, whose laughably bad accent and scene-chewing delivery serve up thick slabs of that rarest of delicacies: Jewish ham. There may be grounds here for a class-action lawsuit.
  50. A Love Song for Bobby Long
    Not terrible for a movie featuring John Travolta as a literature professor, but not too good either.
  51. The Assassination of Richard Nixon
    This often gripping but also unremittingly grim and drab account of these events is a "Taxi Driver" without the cathartic finale.
  52. Fat Albert
    A spirited re-creation of the series that once ruled Saturday mornings.
  53. Darkness
    Full of shuttery jump cuts set to music cues so loud your heart can't help but convulse, Darkness should have been left to molder in Miramax's vast vault of horror-movie stiffs.
  54. The Woodsman
    Overblown melodrama, as muddle-headed as it is palpably sincere.
  55. Meet the Fockers
    Feels like a big-budget "Dharma & Greg" episode with toilet jokes.
  56. The Phantom of the Opera
    Watching the passionless Phantom, with its geriatric story-framing device, gooey dimestore romanticism and tawdry pop ballads about unrequited yearning, feels akin to dying and waking up in your parents’ easy-listening-radio hell.
  57. Hotel Rwanda
    Hotel Rwanda, based on real lives and events, aims unequivocally to break your heart.
  58. In the Realms of the Unreal
    Yu has transferred to her superb film, the hushed awe she must have felt the day she walked into the room - and, in a sense, the mind - of this strange, singular individual.
  59. The Keys to the House
    There is nothing obvious about this subtle yet powerfully subversive look into the emotional toll and confusion of dealing with a disabled child.
  60. The Aviator
    A triumph of production design...As a character study, though, The Aviator is downright squeamish.
  61. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
    Silberling and writer Robert Gordon have made the fatal error of trying to jolly up the novels, which are often funny but never, ever cute.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Spanglish
    Spanglish is Brooks' unqualified kitchen disaster - a desperate, shapeless, overreaching big-screen sitcom of a movie that just wants to be loved. Is that so wrong? In a word, yes.
  63. Flight of the Phoenix
    But, in the end, it may be that man against sand isn't as thrilling as it was back in the day.
  64. Beyond the Sea
    Put simply, the film is a dazzling and fearless piece of showmanship.
  65. The Sea Inside
    What makes The Sea Inside such a riveting drama is that none of these relationships is sufficient to make Ramón want to go on living.
  66. Imaginary Heroes
    This schizophrenic mess zigzags all over the place, trying to figure out whether it's a dysfunctional-family drama, a slapstick comedy or an angst-ridden coming-of-age movie.
  67. Ocean's Twelve
    For sheer urbane elegance coupled with technical mastery and lush, old-fashioned élan, no one working for the studios today comes close to the versatile Soderbergh.
  68. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
    Somewhere buried beneath all this ballast something is being said, again, about flawed middle-aged men falling from grace and redeeming themselves. This time I'm damned if I know what that something is.
  69. Freeze Frame
    This nastily efficient thriller from British newcomer John Simpson offers a low-budget, high-tech expression of the idea that just because you're paranoid doesn' mean they'e not after you.
  70. A Talking Picture
    As a political statement it is either a cry of despair or a grim acknowledgment that in the endless cycles of history, civilization will always have its saboteurs.
  71. A Tale of Two Sisters
    While all the pieces don't quite add up in the end, as memory, fantasy and delusion collide, the film succeeds again and again at pulling you to the edge of your seat and keeping you there.
  72. Bandido
    Director Roger Christian (Battlefield Earth -- yes, that Battlefield Earth) and screenwriters Scott Duncan and Ned Kerwin have been influenced more by James Bond than El Mariachi–style spaghetti Westerns.
  73. Blade: Trinity
    By and large, the jokes fall flat, and the entire film often seems as fatigued as its star.
  74. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    Born Into Brothels will break your heart, then warm it up and leave you with that 7-Up longing to know what happens next to Zana's kids.
  75. Closer
    Strip away the cavernous lofts, the minimalist art galleries and the pricey consulting rooms, and you have four characters unable to earn their keep with the audience.
  76. House of Flying Daggers
    The most seamless piece of sensuous expressionism Zhang has created since "Ju Dou" (1990).
  77. After Midnight
    Rich in lovingly assembled silent-film clips, as well as in intimate views of the magnificent Mole, this impassioned yet somewhat too precious fable from writer-director Davide Ferrario feels calculated to make a cineaste swoon, and yet . . . it never quite does.
  78. Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
    Game Over provides no answers.
  79. The Green Butchers
    While the acting is top-notch, the real star of the film is the script.
  80. The Aryan Couple
    We get director John Daly's feel-good tedium and a waste of a performance by the magnificent Landau.
  81. A Very Long Engagement
    Shuttles between schoolboy humor, calculated savagery and, at the end, a rank sentimentalism in which love all too easily conquers all.
  82. Easy
    In forced, quirky tedium, it drags us through love triangles, mommy issues and crying jags that make you want to shake this chick.
  83. Ae Fond Kiss...
    Gradually, and with a kind of inquisitive generosity, the filmmaker's scope expands to take in Casim's parents and two sisters, whose public shame and private despair at having the only son move in with a “goree” - a white girl - is made palpably, wrenchingly real.
  84. Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
    A remarkably clear-eyed look back at a moment in which real revolution seemed possible - even probable - in America's streets.
  85. Purple Butterfly
    Hectic, lyrical, swooningly romantic and almost unwatchably brutal, Purple Butterfly deploys a modern Asian gangster-movie aesthetic to tell a love story of Shakespearean dimensions.
  86. Straight-Jacket
    Writer-director Richard Day, whose debut feature, the drag comedy Girls Will Be Girls, was shamefully neglected by critics and audiences alike, proves again that he's the new master of the catty one-liner, and he's also becoming a striking visual stylist.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Alexander
    What Stone has delivered instead is no folie de grandeur, but rather the last thing one would have expected from him: an honorable failure.
  88. Christmas with the Kranks
    Other lumps of coal in this celluloid stocking include director Joe Roth's leaden pacing - like trudging through heavy snow - and screenwriter Chris Columbus' tireless affinity for pain gags.
  89. Notre musique
    Strikes me as one of Godard's most accessible works - one in which the graying, stubbly maestro, who turns 74 today, presents himself and his ideas to the audience in a less combative way than he sometimes has in the past.
  90. Paper Clips
    There is something quite heartening about watching these kids earnestly guide others around their memorial.
  91. National Treasure
    Can't match an ounce of the suspense generated by contestants frantically buying airline tickets on Bruckheimer's own TV money quest, "The Amazing Race." This movie is a fortune wasted.
  92. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
    The movie is driven almost entirely by its exhilaratingly subversive characters.
  93. Bad Education
    It's the director's most complexly ordered film to date - a labyrinth of ids, egos and alter egos waiting around blind corners - and may be the movies' most deliriously inventive narrative spiral since "Adaptation."
  94. Fear and Trembling
    Testud, who learned to speak Japanese phonetically for the role, is nothing short of sublime, her expressive face morphing from tear-stained frustration to slaphappy delirium with the speed of lightning flashing across the Tokyo sky.
  95. Ya lyublyu tebya
    Though the progress of this ill-matched love triangle is fun to follow in its self-consciously wacky way, the movie's chief pleasures, at least to a Western eye, are anthropological.
  96. Days of Being Wild (re-release)
    Like Proust's madeleine unleashing a flood of reminiscences in the narrator of his novel, Wong works the elements of his aesthetic — music, beautiful people and emotion — into a mood that so overtakes you it's nearly impossible to emerge from his films without feeling slightly drunk.
  97. After the Sunset
    Instantly forgettable caper comedy.
  98. Finding Neverland
    Surprisingly wan film.
  99. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
    If you liked "Love, Actually," you'll love this too, another small jewel in the crown of unabashedly commercial, cheerfully middlebrow, eminently exportable British fluff.
  100. Kinsey
    The movie's strength lies in its portrayal of a many-sided genius, as manipulative as he was charming and persuasive, monomaniacal to a fault, generous and sweet yet utterly clueless about the emotional havoc he wrought in the name of science.
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