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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    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    American Pimp
    Credit the Hugheses for plunging headfirst into a deeply taboo topic, but they're doing it for the wrong reasons and thus playing into the worst of public stereotypes, namely that all black men are hustlers.
  2. Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi
    The film has the unpolished charm of a diamond in the rough, and it boasts a richer inner life than most of the teen movies currently bouncing off the assembly line.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Noriko's Dinner Table
    It’s telling that the freshest portions of Noriko’s Dinner Table are the flashbacks to Sono’s previous film.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
    Slowly degenerates into a gory revenge thriller that is never thrilling, but is often boring and frequently repulsive.
  5. Day Watch
    For all the vampires and blown-up cars, you'll see no sadism for the hell of it, only an oddly sweet-tempered mix of hyperbole, understatement and profoundly Slavic philosophizing about guilt, freedom and responsibility.
  6. The Children of the Century
    Juliette Binoche is the only reason to see Diane Kurys' florid, incoherent movie.
  7. The Shape of Things
    Disarmingly funny new film with a doozy of a twist ending... may be his best, cruelest, most vital act of confrontation yet.
  8. Naqoyqatsi
    Incoherence reigns.
  9. Barbershop 2: Back in Business
    An even richer, smarter, funnier sequel.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I, Robot
    Proyas merely assembles a mess of spare parts from better movies.
  11. Heights
    The acting is uniformly superb.
  12. Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert
    She makes a perfectly fine role model, if you rate cheerful, sensible and chaste under the skinny tights and glow-in-the-dark tank tops.
  13. The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland
    The film is nothing if not benign, but its merits are moot for those above 7 or so.
  14. Bang Rajan
    It's not easy to spend the better part of two hours with your heart parked in your mouth, but this roaring battle epic is worth the risk of your palpitations.
  15. 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.
  16. Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story
    This is as corny as it sounds, and yet not half as cloying and sentimental as you expect. At the end of the day, the horse may win the race, but the fate of the American heartland looms large and unresolved.
  17. Music and Lyrics
    Among its other sins, the disposable romantic comedy Music and Lyrics fluffs a golden opportunity to make hay with Grant's dark side.
  18. The Magician
    The viewer is meant to chuckle at the escalating violence-ringed absurdities (the kidnapping of a bafflingly passive drug dealer who winds up becoming a road-trip buddy, for example) and at Ray's brutish philosophies, but the chuckles are few. Though the film starts out modestly amusing, it very, very quickly lists into tedium.
  19. 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.
  20. The Ant Bully
    Wittily manipulating scale to generate the requisite fright factor, the movie is stuffed with visual delights both lyrical (a squadron of ants hang-gliding on flower petals) and visceral (a battalion of bottle-blue wasps on the wing).
  21. Danielson: A Family Movie (or, Make a Joyful Noise Here)
    Shot on digital and layered with animated segments, performance footage and clips from Smith family home movies, Family Movie unfolds with a gentle, justified confidence in the power of its subject.
  22. Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    In the final act, the movie dons a more human face and commits to an absorbing tale of crime and punishment, albeit pushing the fatigued message that you can't always tell light from dark these days.
  23. The Triumph of Love
    What is surprising, and what one takes away most deeply and happily from Triumph of Love, is a refreshed admiration for Mira Sorvino.
    • L.A. Weekly
  24. Pipe Dream
    Does have its charms.
  25. NASCAR: The IMAX Experience
    Disappointing that the film's modern-day race sequences -- which follow quick glimpses of computer-run car factories and pit-crew practice sessions -- fail to excite the senses.
  26. My Sister Maria
    One worries from scene to scene about whether the movie is a work of experimental art or just another ruthless intrusion into the life of a dying and, to some degree, broken woman. I'm willing to bet that Maximilian fretted over this too, for the film is as tense and fractured, as alienating -- and, finally, touching -- a work as it undoubtedly ought to be.
  27. The Fast and the Furious
    The best cheap thrill to come out of Hollywood in ages -- it's a shot of tonic for the current blockbuster bloat.
  28. 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.
  29. Samoan Wedding
    The all-Polynesian cast, many of whom developed this material as part of a theater troupe called "The Naked Samoans," bring so much energy and glee to the telling that one can only smile and hope they all profit wildly from the American remake that's reportedly in the works.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Midnight Meat Train
    Director Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus) is a bit weak when it comes to storytelling, but there are few who could so enthusiastically stage a butcher fight amid hanging human carcasses in a subway car.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
    There's something terminally small about this big-screen melodrama, with its trite characterizations of fighting parents, empty pockets and kind hearts.
  32. It Happened in L.A.
    At times, Morgan's script inspires laughs; but at others, the witticisms seem forced
  33. X-Men: The Last Stand
    Long before the movie's climax, in which Magneto (Ian McKellen) turns smashed-up automobiles into fiery projectiles to be hurled at his enemies, those in the audience will know what it means to behold a flaming hunk of junk.
  34. Jarhead
    Curiously, Jarhead transforms Swofford himself (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) from the book’s duty-bound youth, desperate to live up to his father's military legacy, into an enigmatic voyeur whose feelings and motivations are rarely made clear.
  35. Love Liza
    Quirkily sad, unexpectedly funny -- and just a tad repetitive.
  36. Swimming Upstream
    A passionately told tale.
  37. Tuvalu
    Allusive as all hell, Tuvalu's slapstick allegory of European socioeconomic upheaval in the 20th century opens with a spoof of "Breaking the Waves" lofty coda, then races through a mise en scène that's equal parts Tarkovsky, Méliès and the Brothers Quay.
  38. Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
    Far too often, Douglas indulges his preference for the superficial over the substantive: The plentiful performance footage -- shot in overproduced, music-video fashion -- overwhelms the film, as do White’s purplish, faux-poetic musings.
  39. Life Is Beautiful
    The director gives us not just a pop Holocaust but a prettified, palatable Holocaust.
  40. The King
    A lurid, overheated Southern Gothic that wallows in its own unpleasantness.
  41. Hard Candy
    The more things drag on, the more monotonous they become and, by the end, Hard Candy has devolved into a rather transparent game of one-upmanship in which Hayley and Jeff come across in almost equally repellent measure, their behaviors driven less by organic impulses than by their need to satisfy the script's elaborate series of reversals and counter-reversals.
  42. 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.
  43. Brown Sugar
    Despite crisp photography and the director's gift for building a scene, the film doesn't click until the third act, when Mos Def's performance as Dre's protégé appears to energize everyone around him.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bridge
    The result is an attractive, well-intentioned film that is surprisingly dull and uninvolving.
  45. The Oath
    While watching the film, I not only laughed a lot and gasped oh, shit! in the right places. I somehow never once found myself tempted to sneak a peek at my phone to check in on our real American hellscape.
  46. Beloved
    Though Beloved sags into repetition after two of its three hours, this beautiful movie is suffused with an intensity that holds our attention for the conclusion.
  47. Unleashed
    The most enjoyable film Besson has had his name on in eons.
  48. ...And They Lived Happily Ever After
    This look at the assorted struggles of modern hetero coupledom gives off a distinctly moldy aroma.
  49. Snakes on a Plane
    Snakes was the most exuberantly trashy delight of this summer movie season or last.
  50. Solomon & Gaenor
    First-time writer-director Paul Morrison has a gift for evoking a time and place.
  51. The Grey Zone
    It's grim stuff indeed, but somehow the horror never quite overwhelms Nelson's sure-footed approach to raising all manner of frankly unanswerable questions -- in particular, what would or could one have done in such circumstances?
  52. K-19: The Widowmaker
    K-19 is so unnervingly square that it seems eerily like Party-sanctioned Soviet filmmaking: Its Motherland-loving sailors, myth-making shots of K-19 and displays of heroism are worthy of the Young Lenin Pioneers' Handbook.
  53. Small Voices
    Ultimately, however, a too-earnest script that pins the future of this community on a school-district singing contest, undercuts the film's natural performances and its sedate, contemplative pacing.
  54. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
    The result is a fast-paced, brilliantly edited indictment that's as hard to turn away from as it is infuriating to watch. The irony, of course, is that Greenwald deploys the tricks of the trade every bit as knowingly as the evil geniuses at Fox.
  55. Fuck
    Profound and joyously silly at the same time.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Man on the Moon
    The sort of sick humor even Andy Kaufman would have recognized as well beyond the pale.
  57. The Safety of Objects
    A couple of unexpected revelations in the final act pack an emotional wallop that shifts the film (shot in clean, uncluttered takes) into the realm of old-fashioned tearjerker, but the tears are wholly earned.
  58. Session 9
    A deft exercise in atmospheric horror and insanity. Which is why it's unfortunate that, ultimately, Anderson steps back from the brink.
  59. Shanghai Knights
    Turns out to be that rarest of Hollywood creatures: a sequel that one-ups the original…These two smart, happy movie stars prove that silliness doesn’t have to be moronic.
  60. Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie
    Whether on the high seas or in the Holy Land, the film exhibits a colorful, bouncy sense of the epic (the whale's Jaws-inspired arrival even elicits a few chills), while its saving grace is a consistent sense of its own absurdity.
  61. Gozu
    The various disruptions Miike visits upon his stories, and upon his audience, serve mainly to focus attention on the manipulating intelligence behind the scenes. They're a fancy way of yelling, "Look at me!"
  62. Big Fish
    The whole seems disjointed, incoherent and lacking in the startling originality of the other two Edwards (Scissorhands and Wood) who, half a career back, poured from Burton's distended outsider imagination.
  63. Stepmom
    Less a movie about stepfamilies than a PSA about how cancer makes everyone behave themselves at Christmas.
  64. Prime
    On and on drags this amour fou, with its one-liners, ripostes, elaborate misunderstandings and chastened reaction shots, all courtesy of writer-director Ben Younger, straining to let out his inner femme after the testosterone excesses of "Boiler Room."
  65. The Legend of 1900
    The sense of loss aroused by the film is oceanic.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    ZigZag
    A great ensemble cast can't lift this heartfelt enterprise out of the familiar.
  67. Tortilla Soup
    It is, however, Tortilla Soup's cultural transposition that feels most phony. Where Lee brings depth and subtle observation to his middle-class ensemble piece, Ripoll has simply added a thin Latino glaze.
  68. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
    Somehow poor pacing and this lack of visual variety manage to make a great show seem boring.
  69. Francis Ford Coppola Presents: The Legend of Suriyothai
    The characters are flat creatures of duty, and the film is more a tale of the collective will of a state than of the rugged individuals behind it.
  70. Ask the Dust
    What seduces most about Ask the Dust isn't its verisimilitude, but its gloriously old-fashioned backlot sheen - the L.A. of old Hollywood movies and of our collective fantasies.
  71. First Snow
    First Snow has a fine sense of place and a small but terrific turn by veteran actress Jackie Burroughs.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    City of Ember
    The story subtly evokes Rand and scripture, colliding secular and spiritual values, and, as such, appeals to the blue- and red-minded alike.
  73. Undisputed
    With flashbulb editing as cover for the absence of narrative continuity, Undisputed is nearly incoherent, an excuse to get to the closing bout (shot through bars and barbed wire in case we forgot the combatants are incarcerated), by which time it's impossible to care who wins.
  74. Kiss of the Dragon
    The inventive, often comically horrible fight set pieces will have you standing on your seat cheering like a Viking, and the result is a supremely kinetic and amusing guilty pleasure.
  75. American Pie
    The movie lover in you will recoil; your inner sophomore will rejoice.
  76. May
    The inventive and unpredictable May is exactly the kind of unexpected delight one hopes for every time the lights go down.
  77. The Myth of Fingerprints
    An overly mannered film drowning in the symptoms of dysfunction but unable to tap the root causes of this WASPish clan's pain except in the most oblique and cursory ways. This might be Freundlich's point, considering this family deals with its problems through avoidance.
  78. 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.
  79. Burning Man: The Burning Sensation
    The overall vibe is druggy and self-indulgent, like a spring-break orgy for pretentious arts majors.
  80. Glory Road
    Glory Road keeps its focus frustratingly narrow. There's a nugget of an interesting idea here...But first-time director James Gartner's movie is less a study of race than it is a fast break of underdog clichés and "inspirational" speeches.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Stone
    At odds with its own lofty and base instincts, Stone ultimately channels neither compellingly.
  82. The Yards
    There's so much that's right in it that its blunders are all the more frustrating.
  83. The Holy Land
    The film, like the beleaguered country it depicts, has a raw, neurotic, brawling yet tender vitality.
  84. Renaissance
    The director is Christian Volckman, whose skills as an animator greatly exceed his grasp of an idea worth pursuing.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crank
    First-time feature directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor play with speed and sound to effectively recreate the buzz of an over-caffeinated all-nighter, delivering one of the year’s best pure junk-food entertainments.
  86. Keeping Up with the Steins
    As director, Scott Marshall displays an unsurprising flair for selling a joke, but also a fine sense of dramatic pacing and, even better, a gift for brevity, neither of which, it could be argued, are innate skills of his famous filmmaking family.
  87. Lila Says
    Vahina Giocante oozes a killer blend of purring, lascivious innocence and little-girl-lost vulnerability as Lila.
  88. Holy Smoke
    What transpires is so rich that I've seen this movie three times. The joy of being involved with two wholly truthful (if colorfully fucked up) characters is that exhilarating.
  89. The Ring
    In the final reel, the tension dissipates with a flabby hiss, as the film devolves into a banal, conventional ghost story.
  90. The Sea Is Watching
    Despite a hopelessly corny score, the movie is redeemed by a goofily touching final scene.
  91. My Wife Is an Actress
    Calculated to titillate middlebrow audiences on both sides of la Manche.
  92. The World Is Not Enough
    The formula, with its comforting arrangement of familiar elements, is what we're after, and The World Is Not Enough certainly comes through on that front.
  93. Flicka
    It takes a pristine gift for mediocrity to ruin Mary O'Hara’s muscular children's novel about a wild boy and his wild horse, but director Michael Mayer has brought off the massacre with aplomb.
  94. Master of the Flying Guillotine (re-release)
    Yu’s filmography includes dozens of pictures between 1965 and 1994, but with its nonstop flurry of fighting, ersatz bloodletting and incidental hilarity, this remains his signature work.
  95. Mifune's Last Song
    A mood of anarchic spontaneity and freshness that thrills.
  96. Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
    One of the best part 3's ever made, and Rodriguez's knack for concocting the most imaginatively deranged children's entertainments since "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" remains unassailed.
  97. Lisa Picard Is Famous
    The makers of Lisa Picard Is Famous -- having mastered the obvious early on, set their sights on the unfunny and repetitive.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Romulus, My Father
    Admirably unsentimental about the ravages of poverty and mental illness on the foundations of family. But soon the endless succession of heartaches that visit Gaita's brood -- including multiple suicide attempts and romantic betrayals -- becomes monotonous and unbearable, the cinematic equivalent of someone slowly pressing his thumb into your forehead.
  99. Happy Endings
    When all is said and done, Roos treats his characters and his audience to an unblushingly sentimental, conciliatory ending of the kind that ordinarily makes me feel as though I'm being played for a sucker. I wept on demand and went home happy.
  100. Cowboy del Amor
    Michèle Ohayon falls into the old documentary trap - the illusion that once you've found yourself a lovable eccentric to follow around with a camera, you automatically have a movie.
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