L.A. Weekly's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Little Lili
    It's the third feature Miller has shot using lightweight digital video cameras, and the result is a special lightness in the work itself -- the glowing images ease into one another like leaves turning in a summer breeze, while the performances are similarly effortless.
  2. Way Off Broadway
    This ensemble drama is passionately acted and nicely shot, but the storytelling of first-time writer-director Dan Kay is infused with an archaic naiveté.
  3. Noel
    Sentimental, borderline-bizarre Christmas movie that boasts just enough good acting to make up for the treacle.
  4. The Polar Express
    The result is another powerful children's story dulled into mediocrity by the worship of technology.
  5. Overnight
    A diabolically enjoyable documentary on unearned self-esteem.
  6. Alfie
    Pretty good as pretty good goes, with Jude Law turning in an efficiently chipper, if palpably less dark, performance than the one that earned Michael Caine his first Oscar nomination.
  7. Cachorro
    Albaladejo turns his film into a banal, mildly entertaining trifle of affirmation, eliciting a shrug more than any real emotion.
  8. Callas Forever
    Ardant gives in this film the performance of her life, lip-synching to the voice of the real Callas.
  9. Brother to Brother
    In movies, the young are forever being taken back in time by the old, but what sets apart this low-energy yet ambitious debut feature by writer-director Rodney Evans is the complexity of the questions that journey raises.
  10. Fade to Black
    Routinely assembled live document.
  11. Scumrock
    Sweetly mocking comedy about the perils of reaching 30 with little to show for one's avant-gardeness except crazy hair and an ossifying attitude.
  12. Intoxicating
    Flatly directed by Mark David, tediously paced and melodramatic.
  13. The Incredibles
    The Incredibles creates so seamless a mood of exhilaration that we resent being pulled out of it.
  14. A Silent Love
    All three actors are more than up to the challenge, particularly the radiant Salazar, who feasts upon that rare gift of a role that allows an actress the wrong side of 40 to be funny, sexy and vital without apologizing.
  15. Ray
    For too many minutes of its two and a half hours, Ray flips through its cinematic pages with a breathless and-then-this-happened urgency, offering up little in the way of personality (or truth) beyond Jamie Foxx's strong performance.
  16. Saw
    A story that's so ridiculous you'll at least be entertained by the outrageous plot contortions to come.
  17. Birth
    Birth may be the most futile application of cinematic and acting skill I've seen all year. A little "Twilight Zone" flummery would have livened up the proceedings to no end.
  18. Enduring Love
    British director, Roger Michell, strikes an assured balance between intense mood piece and Gothic chiller.
  19. It's All About Love
    Vinterberg's execution is overstuffed, unoriginal and often downright incomprehensible. And what's Sean Penn doing dangling off airplanes -- pontificating, as usual, from a great height?
  20. Violet Perfume: No One Is Listening
    This powerfully rough slice of neo-realism, hitched to soapy melodrama, puts a heartbreakingly human face on the widespread problem of sexual assault in Mexico.
  21. This Girl's Life
    Though spiked with nice performances (Marquis herself is a natural, no matter how lame her lines), This Girl's Life succeeds more as a nudie curio.
  22. Sideways
    A trenchant American satirist in his previous films, Payne moves in a different direction with Sideways -- one less mordant but just as pointedly observant.
  23. The Grudge
    Isn't art, but as date-night fright flicks go, it's effective.
  24. Surviving Christmas
    It's screen comedy at the end of its tether, Capra-corn gone rancid.
  25. Lightning in a Bottle
    It’s a rousing celebration.
  26. The Machinist
    In a way, though, it’s all Bale's show. Withering down to an alarming 120 pounds, he delivers a deeply obsessed performance that leaves us both fascinated and sickened.
  27. Stella Street
    At full length it’s still pretty funny, but only for its natural 30 minutes, after which it grows repetitive and tiresome as only material meant for the short attention span can.
  28. Undertow
    Undertow seems to be straining to say something at once tragic and heartwarming about fathers, sons and brothers, but I'm damned if I know what it is.
  29. Fish Without a Bicycle
    Though Green is engaging, the rest of the cast are unlikable and tediously self-involved, especially Mattison, who, not surprisingly, wrote this tripe.
  30. The Manson Family
    The movie is monotonous, and by the time it gets to its climactic re-enactment of the Tate-LaBianca killings, it seems little more than the heir to "Survive!, The Zodiac Killer" and other unsavory 1970s horror cheapies that tried to turn a quick buck on real-life tragedy.
  31. Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die
    While your personal estimation of this conservative counterprogrammer will depend largely on your politics, Chetwynd and company at least attempt to score their points honestly.
  32. Postmen in the Mountains
    Slow and stately.
  33. Happy Hour
    LaPaglia is a fine actor, but not even he can redeem such bathos.
  34. Sex Is Comedy
    Those who are already in her (Breillat) camp will find much to feed on in this at once intellectualized and accessible, documentary-style peek inside the head of a passionately driven woman and artist.
  35. Team America: World Police
    Accomplished yet uneven feature.
  36. Shall We Dance
    Shall We Dance?, which roams all over the emotional map without landing anywhere, is an unwieldy mess that gives every impression of having been made under a mandate to fill the Miramax crowd-pleaser slot.
  37. Being Julia
    But for all Bening’s high emoting and her trademark giggle, here overused to the point of annoyance, for most of its length Being Julia offers little insight into a woman whose life is ruled by theatrics.
  38. Hair Show
    Despite the claw-baring premise, this comes off as a tame, lame female cousin of "Barbershop," due to a maddening absence of storytelling momentum, editing continuity, fresh humor and even a modicum of detail about such a rich cultural topic as urban hair trends.
  39. P.S.
    This sappy stuff gets better direction by Kidd (who made the far superior Roger Dodger) than it deserves, and Linney gives a wonderfully wistful portrayal of urban loneliness.
  40. Moolaadé
    Quite possibly the most buoyant, exuberant film ever made on such an unpleasant topic.
  41. Riding the Bullet
    Writer-director Mick Garris has a real feeling for the horror master's melancholy worldview - love is loss - but he's too reverent toward the original story, the ending of which, both on the page and, now, on the screen, lands with an overly elegiac thud.
  42. Saints and Soldiers
    The triumph here is a matter of craftsmanship rather than art, but it's rare enough even on that level for a film to be worth celebrating.
  43. Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession
    A marvelous tribute to a heady age.
  44. The Final Cut
    The movie becomes so cluttered with concept and design, it fails to get even a toehold on the humanistic subtext it's clearly reaching for. A pallid performance by Mira Sorvino, as Williams' girlfriend and advocate for the fully lived and recorded life, doesn't help.
  45. The Scandal
    Director Lee Je-Yong gives the book a makeover full of wit and startling beauty as a tragicomedy of Korean manners at the dawn of the Chosun dynasty in the late 18th century, a period known for its gravitas.
  46. 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.
  47. Friday Night Lights
    Country singer and sometime actor Tim McGraw excels as the bitter, besotted ex-Panther who can't cut his kid enough slack to follow his own game plan.
  48. Raise Your Voice
    Duff, who became a teen-set role model portraying Lizzie McGuire for Disney, has sold over four million records and toured to packed houses, yet screenwriter Sam Schreiber and director Sean McNamara, both making feature debuts, set her up to sing just one song through to completion.
  49. Around the Bend
    The final revelation which, however anticipated, however contrived, stings just enough to make it feel like life.
  50. Primer
    A dense and dazzling science-fiction mind-bender unassumingly dressed up in a tech geek’s short-sleeved oxford shirt, pocket protector and safety goggles.
  51. Go Further
    Without the actor’s name and amiably demented grin, Go Further would be an unspeakably tedious and preachy travelogue. With them, this insupportably long home movie, unremarkably directed by Ron Mann, is merely dull.
  52. Stage Beauty
    The movie blows a fresh wind of disrespect, high drama and lush romanticism through that stolidly middlebrow subgenre, the period drama.
  53. Yes Nurse! No Nurse!
    A little of this goes a long way.
  54. The Hillside Strangler
    A good horse kick, or a fistful of Valium, may help you get through this relentlessly sadistic exercise with your soul more or less intact.
  55. Vodka Lemon
    Exceedingly dry and precise and slow-paced comedy.
  56. Taxi
    The glitch, beyond the rote story, is that while she's an infectiously upbeat screen presence, Latifah is not, inherently, a major laugh generator, and neither, it would appear, is Fallon.
  57. Tarnation
    Caouette lifts his story clear out of the victimized whine that bogs down so many confessional memoirs and offers the viewer instead an intimate look inside his ravaged yet loving head, at once street-smart and haloed by the naiveté of a young saint.
  58. Ladder 49
    Phoenix, who initially seemed the kind of actor who was too cool, too angry, to appear in studio pap such as this, is a magnetic presence, despite the numbing pathos surrounding him, but isn't that what we used to say about Travolta?
  59. Shark Tale
    Falls prey to the lazy assumption that a parade of whiz-bang CGI will cover for the absence of a muscular story.
  60. I Heart Huckabees
    A fresh, buoyant, mischievous and rather jolly meditation - if that's the word for a movie as divinely nuts as this one is - on the meaning of life in an unhappy world.
  61. Dig!
    The no-frills documentary also makes it clear that Newcombe is the real deal -- both supremely gifted and organically nuts.
  62. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    The film won't likely change any minds, but there's a taut political essay beneath the blatant campaigning.
  63. Woman Thou Art Loosed
    Startlingly raw and honest, playing at times like one of those blistering Donald Goines blaxploitation pulp novels, only with Jesus.
  64. Thérèse: The Story of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
    Skip the movie, stay home, read the book and say three Hail Marys.
  65. Tying the Knot
    Absorbing documentary about gay marriage is most persuasive when most specific.
  66. Shaun of the Dead
    In this truly retro horror flick, the heroes and heroines don't just quip over the action (though they do get off some funny lines); they're knee-deep in it, and scared sh------.
  67. The Forgotten
    Midway through, the plot pulls itself out of its doldrums with a sudden, heart-twisting turn. Ruben still knows how to cut a sequence for maximum jolt, and, ultimately, he and DiPego manage to summon up some of the B-movie paranoia that fueled "The Stepfather," turning in a pleasantly nonsensical roller-coaster ride.
  68. The Motorcycle Diaries
    A gorgeously burnished vintage post card come to life, Motorcycle Diaries has about as much depth and emotional currency as the cardboard that post card would be stamped on.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last Shot
    Appealingly cheesy, a tribute to the hope that springs eternal in the hopelessly inept.
  70. Hollywood Buddha
    The result is at once a woefully overfamiliar bashing of Hollywood superficiality and a seemingly unwitting paean to the self-absorbed enlightenment that passes among industry folk for personal growth.
  71. Incantato
    There may, somewhere in the premise of Incantato, lie the inspiration for a fine farce, but under Avati's shaky stewardship, the picture is leaden and charmless.
  72. Mind the Gap
    You can see what's coming five minutes into the movie, but capable acting lends it a certain superficial charm.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Moog
    Largely, you get to watch a nice old guy waxing philosophical in his beloved vegetable garden, in his workshop or amid city traffic. If that switches you on, then plug in.
  74. Anatomy of Hell
    Anatomy of Hell offers one of the most hateful and mechanical representations of sexuality I've ever seen.
  75. A Dirty Shame
    I love what his films stand for -- inclusivity, tolerance, liberation and fun -- but I’ve always felt about his movies as I do about Monty Python: Half an hour is a riot; an hour and half starts to be a chore.
  76. September Tapes
    Intentionally blurs fiction and reality.
  77. Rick
    This impressive - and utterly depressing - feature debut is another in the current rush of testaments to the power of the new corporation to suck the goodness from its employees and all who have the misfortune to enter its orbit.
  78. The Yes Men
    An uproarious and appalling piece of consciousness-raising.
  79. The Take
    This film puts a pained human face on the cost of the corporate status quo.
  80. Mr 3000
    Mr. 3000, which starts out promisingly, squanders Mac's natural gift of salty gruffness by shoehorning him into a dull, heartwarming cinematic lesson on humility and the joys of teamwork.
  81. Wimbledon
    Director Richard Loncraine (Richard III) moves things right along, but during the final tennis match, his pacing is undone by sports-movie convention, particularly the witless color commentary offered by tennis legends John McEnroe and Chris Evert.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
    For Conran, after they finished shooting pesky actors, the real fun began at the computer screen with his delirious imagination in free-fall.
  83. Silver City
    Fails to allow the talented ensemble time to develop "Sunshine State’s" fine, Altmanesque ensemble feel, again and again missing the human and leaving cartoons that satisfy only as agitprop.
  84. Merci Docteur Rey
    This is less a coming-out tale than a showcase for late-middle-aged hysterical divas in flowing caftans to yell, scream and ride roughshod over the young homosexuals who are nominally the movie's center.
  85. Cowboys & Angels
    For all the violence and breaking-up-to-make-up that go on, there's never really a sense of risk or exploration, and the film's pulse never rises above faint.
  86. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    This sophomoric stuff is pure self-indulgence, a drone to accompany the admittedly eye-popping sound-and-light show. Oshii looks like yet another director who has gone off the deep end, believing too absolutely his own good reviews.
  87. Incident at Loch Ness
    Razor sharp and funny as hell, Incident at Loch Ness is the harpoon hurled into the hot-air balloon of “reality” entertainment.
    • 6 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    National Lampoon's Gold Diggers
    A May-September sex farce so prodigiously unintriguing that audiences could be forgiven for stampeding from theaters to strangle its writer-director, Gary Preisler, in his sleep.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cellular
    The whole thing skims along on suspension of disbelief.
  90. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
    This is efficient, soul-numbing moviemaking, diverting enough for blistering September afternoons when what's onscreen is secondary to how high they've cranked the air conditioning.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Criminal
    The cast is brilliant, not least of all Reilly -- vaguely despicable, smooth as an oil slick and altogether mesmerizing in the most impressive screen performance he's yet given.
  92. Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire
    An intellectually steelier case against Bush, his cabalistic administration and the Iraq war than Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Hijacking is even more chilling because it eschews the heartstring symphony conducted (albeit very effectively) by Moore and sticks to irrefutable facts and no-bullshit analysis.
  93. Reconstruction
    Eventually it all starts to feel like an extended European perfume ad: pretty but eye-rollingly pretentious.
  94. Testosterone
    The cutesy opening of writer-director David Moreton's Testosterone (co-written with Dennis Hensley) turns out to be a crippling miscalculation.
  95. When Will I Be Loved
    Far from a complete success: It takes too long to get to its central premise and, once there, too often meanders away from it. But Campbell is close to astonishing whenever she's onscreen.
  96. Vlad
    It all adds up to pleasantly nonsensical mayhem.
  97. A Letter to True
    Meandering.
  98. Paparazzi
    In producer Mel Gibson's second crackpot persecution-complex film of 2004 -- heat-blast directed by first-timer Paul Abascal -- it's obvious who Bo is supposed to represent.
  99. Wicker Park
    In the end it doesn't lead to much beyond weepy melodrama. Still, McGuigan draws committed performances from a talented cast.
  100. Warriors of Heaven and Earth
    The buildup is so compelling in this "Chinese Western" by He Ping (Swordsman in Double Flag Town) that its thunderous anticlimax of an ending can almost be forgiven. Almost.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »