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. Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London
    Muniz has a great face and body for physical comedy, but the numerous one-liners shoehorned into the script fall flat, unassisted by Anderson's numbing “street” ad-libs.
  2. Secret Window
    The ultimate test of one's tolerance for King's self-aggrandizing postulations about writer's block, obsessive fans and the potentially frightening manifestations of the writer's id...It's just plain lousy.
  3. Spartan
    Terrifically terrible, Spartan could well be Mamet's first true comedy. Only the movie thinks it's a nail biter.
  4. Knafayim Shvurot
    Exquisitely calibrated domestic drama.
  5. 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.
  6. Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
    If we never do find out exactly why Wilbur is so intent on offing himself, it almost doesn't matter, given Sives' magnetic, star-making performance and the careful, elating mixture of comedy and pathos.
  7. Games People Play: New York
    A big-screen reality show that flashes plenty of t-- and d--- but little integrity.
  8. Starsky & Hutch
    This depressingly uninspired action-comedy (based on the 1975–79 TV series) is Hollywood’s latest McMovie -- name-brand recognition as raison d’être or, if you will, creative bankruptcy on a very large scale.
  9. Hidalgo
    Hidalgo can still be a wonder to behold, especially in its dynamic racing sequences, but the movie bogs down in its midsection with a needless kidnapping subplot that ultimately becomes quite tedious.
  10. James' Journey to Jerusalem
    An enjoyable, sneaky-smart fable about the collision between innocence and experience.
  11. Ghost River
    Outside of Sylvia, none of the characters has any real presence or personality in a movie that takes greater interest in shots of pretty flowers than in the human beings onscreen, and in which nearly every major plot turn is the result of blind chance.
  12. The Reckoning
    The Reckoning proceeds with such leaden literal-mindedness that it never seems more than a stodgy (and, at times, blatantly silly) paperback affair.
  13. Red Trousers: The Life of the Hong Kong Stuntmen
    Brave, gifted, haunted and poor, these kids are so heartbreaking that you wish Shou had the good sense to give their lives the attention he lavishes on himself.
  14. Down by Love
    Fascinating film, which tracks Éva's slowly dawning realization that she's being played for a fool, an insight that may be driving her mad.
  15. What Boys Like
    And like, the movie's got all these bright colors and shit, so it's not some fuckin' boring art film, and the new wave soundtrack is awesome.
  16. Club Dread
    Chandrasekhar is a master forger of images and situations from horror movies past, but unlike Wes Craven did in "Scream," he doesn't build on them in any way, and the result is the opposite of what's intended; the movie is stultifying.
  17. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights
    The dance sequences might have saved it, were it not for the fact that director Guy Ferland seems to have learned everything he knows about (over) shooting and (blindly) cutting such scenes from watching "Moulin Rouge" and "Chicago."
  18. Twisted
    Insipid embarrassment.
  19. Alila
    Though absorbing enough, Alila must be counted a noble failure, if only because its efforts to follow the screwed-up lives of 12 hapless souls in a seedy Tel Aviv apartment building finally add up more to mere mimicry than commentary.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Confessions of a Burning Man
    The film reduces a complex social environment to a trifling spectacle of fakery, peopled by faux-hemians who offer up trivial confessions as if they're earth-shattering.
  21. Goodbye Lenin!
    Director Becker and his sharp screenwriter, Bernd Lichtenberg, come less to bury communism than to hurl darts at the Western commodity culture that floods East Berlin.
  22. Greendale
    It's perhaps Greendale's greatest flaw that, rather than stirring the blood, its heartfelt call to arms comes off as a sentimental, even trite, notion from an increasingly distant past.
  23. Tube
    Korean cinema may be a rising force in Asia, but Tube isn’t the place to take your first ride.
  24. The Passion of the Christ
    Gibson has made a big, bold, nightmarishly beautiful film not just about the dawn of the Christian faith, but about the awful tendency of human communities (wherever and whenever in the world they may exist) toward self-preservation, intolerance and mob rule.
  25. Kitchen Stories
    In the landscape of contemporary movie comedies, Kitchen Stories is like a rejuvenating blast of crisp Nordic air.
  26. Against the Ropes
    There's not a believable moment in all of it, but for a while the film chugs along on Ryan's innate charisma. Even so, no amount of movie-star twinkle could lighten screenwriter Cheryl Edwards' bizarre character arc, which finds Jackie turning, overnight, into a callous, possibly racist, ninny.
  27. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
    Welsh director Sara Sugarman and the great cinematographer Stephen Burum (Hoffa, The Untouchables) keep the visuals bouncing along in bright, primary-color-intensive fashion, but the movie has no real heart and even less soul.
  28. EuroTrip
    It sure comes through on the belly-laugh front, from its animated in-flight, safety-manual credits through to the very last blooper ('ooligan Vinnie Jones' breathtaking, obscenity-filled rant against the "fahkin' Eye-ties").
  29. Welcome to Mooseport
    This thoroughly unhip, unfunny political comedy is the kind of movie TV actors like Ray Romano make on hiatus from their successful series, and movie actors like Gene Hackman and Marcia Gay Harden make on hiatus from taking their careers seriously.
  30. Crying Ladies
    The nonstop jumping around undercuts Meily's momentum, especially in the film's overly languorous final third. Still, there's a refreshing optimism fueling his take on working-class life, as if Meily views friendship and neighborly generosity as currencies equal to cold, hard cash.
  31. Clifford's Really Big Movie
    The sketchy, poorly colored, outsourced animation is dispiriting, but it's the only display of blatant crudeness, and in that, an obliging parent may find relief.
  32. Lost Boys of Sudan
    The filmmakers deftly capture the boys' depression and triumphs, but something of the American character -- the generosity and the arrogance -- as well.
  33. After the Life
    This overcrowded, overheated scenario, with many scenes repeated from the first two films, keeps us so busy tracking all the overlapping storylines, we have no time to imagine what they might mean.
  34. 50 First Dates
    Oscillating gracelessly between the coarse and the merely saccharine, 50 First Dates, directed with zero visual or comedic flair by Peter Segal (Anger Management, Tommy Boy), showcases Sandler's cuddlier side as it reprises the tepid chemistry that he and Barrymore road-tested in "The Wedding Singer."
  35. Love Object
    What's missing is any sense of why such a handsome man is afraid of women. That makes the premise hard to swallow, especially since Harrington is too commanding to be a believable dweeb. The actor does achieve moments of pathos, only to be undone by a silly script.
  36. Robot Stories
    This is a heartfelt endeavor, given weight by Shimono's extraordinary performance, in which the actor uses the subtlest flicks of his weary brow to call forth torrents of sorrow and minefields of regret.
  37. The Code
    If the plot comes off more like a reworking of Scorsese’s tales of Italian-American mobsters, Boursinhac nevertheless shows a sure hand with his story, lingering on the handsome, lost face of Dris as his world falls apart around him.
  38. The Seagull's Laughter
    Scenically beautiful, rhythmically uneven comedy.
  39. Osama
    At the center...lies the stunning Golbahari, a nonprofessional who recalls some of Bresson's most haunting model-actors in her intense, anguished grace.
  40. An Amazing Couple
    Domestic farce always has a potentially compelling dark side when it reveals the tenuousness of love and the fragility of all human relationships, but Belvaux seems far too busy orchestrating the copious action to pause for anything approaching insight.
  41. Barbershop 2: Back in Business
    An even richer, smarter, funnier sequel.
  42. Catch That Kid
    A parade of missed opportunities.
  43. Miracle
    At the movie's core, disguised with pitch-perfect Minnesota accent and bushy comb-over hairdo, the perpetually underrated Kurt Russell (as the late coach Herb Brooks) delivers a brilliant performance of immaculate control.
  44. The Dreamers
    Among the pleasures the film evokes, as few films have, is the bliss of conversation.
  45. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
    It’s amusing, but it also eventually becomes tedious, like a comedy sketch that milks a good joke just a little too long.
  46. The Return
    The true mystery is the journey itself, which will turn out to be one of the most spiritually enervating, and elevating, Outward Bound courses ever undertaken.
  47. 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.
  48. The Perfect Score
    Disfigured by flabby dialogue (“You can't put a number on my dreams!”), unfunny pratfalls and criminally slack pacing.
  49. You Got Served
    Seems stuck in fad mode, a showcase in search of a movie.
  50. Latter Days
    Though the film covers familiar queer-cinema ground, Latter Days' finely observed truths about the painful costs of being yourself make even the contrivance of its happy ending forgivable.
  51. On the Run
    Though technically sleek and assured, On the Run offers much more than the exercise in style that weakens so much contemporary neo-noir. The movie is an unflinchingly intelligent probe into far-left monomania and the brutish power of ideology divorced from ordinary empathy.
  52. The Big Bounce
    It's Wilson who's the score here. Quick, scruffy and completely at ease, he takes on Jack's let-it-ride charms and foibles as if he were tossing a Frisbee with friends, and it's impossible to watch him without wanting in on the game.
  53. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    Refreshingly laid-back romantic comedy.
  54. Touching the Void
    Breathtaking stuff that freezes the toes, harrows the soul and turns the viewer's seat into a foot-wide ledge over a yawning chasm.
  55. The Butterfly Effect
    An undercooked allusion to chaos theory -- gives every appearance of having been conceived, planned and executed out of a high school locker room.
  56. Made-Up
    Voice-overs and commentaries are piled on top of contrived intimate moments until, despite some easygoing performances, the movie -- the actual movie -- is a blur of undercooked motivations and halfhearted improv.
  57. Along Came Polly
    The film is sporadically amusing, especially early on. But as the gross-outs dwindle, one is left to contemplate if Stiller has always been this neckless and to wonder just why Aniston wastes her summer vacation on junk such as this.
  58. Teacher's Pet
    This mouthy express train of a movie has giddy charm to burn, due in major part to the frantic charisma of Nathan Lane.
  59. Torque
    Zippy, stylish fun.
  60. Tokyo Godfathers
    The film is as lively as a cricket and often very funny, but it's not for the cyberpunk crowd.
  61. The Tracker
    None of Tracker's near-fatal missteps in execution or conception, however, prevents this superbly acted film, in the end, from becoming an engrossing study of race and history in Australia, or making the powerful indictment it intends to make.
  62. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    It makes a convincing argument that Dowd's personal history is a kind of history of the 20th century itself, encompassing the era's art, science, commerce and politics.
  63. Chasing Liberty
    The movie's saving grace is newcomer Goode, who has what they used to call smoldering good looks, and who can, not so incidentally, actually act.
  64. My Baby's Daddy
    Strictly Urban Comedy 101, as if the filmmakers had neither the inclination nor the chops to move the genre past timeworn stereotypes.
  65. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
    It makes an eloquent case against the death penalty, especially when imposed on the mentally incompetent. For if one thing is clear by the time she went to the execution chamber, it's that Wuornos is barking mad, her eyes wild and vengeful, yet also, on some level, already dead.
  66. The Battle of Algiers
    A classic of politically engaged filmmaking, based on a book by Saadi Yacef, a former FLN leader who also produced the picture and played a version of himself.
  67. Secret Things
    Though his work has been little seen outside of France, writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau's reputation as one of the most terribles of his country's filmmaking enfants precedes him. This 2002 film offers ample evidence as to why.
  68. Japanese Story
    The quiet and intimacy of what is essentially a two-character piece are well juxtaposed by Brooks against the vast desert expanses of her home country, captured in sumptuous wide-screen cinematography by the great Ian Baker.
  69. Millennium Mambo
    Jean-Luc Godard famously declared that all it takes to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Both turn up in Millennium Mambo, a ravishing bauble about la dolce vita in Taiwan, but frankly, the gun's an afterthought. This is a movie about the girl.
  70. Cheaper by the Dozen
    Nobody here, especially Martin, looks as if he's having much fun, apart from a dizzy cameo by Ashton Kutcher as oldest daughter Piper Perabo's model-actor beau, riffing heavy-handedly on his pretty-boy image, and loving it.
  71. Cold Mountain
    Zellweger looks like a big movie star roughing it à la Paris Hilton, and as if this weren't distracting enough, the hills are alive with big acting names from both sides of the Atlantic who pop up as help or hindrance to Inman's pilgrim's progress while straining, with variable success, for credible Southern twangs.
  72. Paycheck
    Paycheck is too smart for a mindless actioneer, and too slick to capture the full moral weight of Dick's dystopia.
  73. Peter Pan
    The movie belongs quite rightly to Wendy, the most enchanting little girl in English fiction, and to the untrained actress, Rachel Hurd-Wood, who plays her.
  74. The Company
    On the plus side, The Company is directed by Robert Altman, who's clearly drawn in by the rare opportunity of putting ballet on film, and who responds brilliantly...The rest of the time, the film fails to catch us up in the workaday intrigues of its characters (most of whom are played by real Joffrey dancers) the way Altman can when he's working in top form.
  75. The Young Black Stallion
    IMAX magnifies everything, including flaws, which are legion in this listless, awkward prequel to the 1979 movie based on the novel by Walter and Steven Farley.
  76. Monster
    This gifted actress (Charlize Theron), who hasn't always chosen her roles well, treats this as her big chance to show what she can do, and she's convincing enough that you're not constantly looking for a Hollywood star of more than average pulchritude under all the cosmetic baggage.
  77. Mona Lisa Smile
    What makes the movie seem crass is its refusal to present (or even to see) more than one side of any given issue. In the logic of Konner and Rosenthal, here abetted by director Mike Newell, you're either a Jackson Pollock or a Norman Rockwell.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    Morris is a more talented filmmaker than he is an interviewer. Mean-while, McNamara is a subject so complex and so rich in nuance that he requires no cinematic embellishment.
  79. House of Sand and Fog
    Everything about the movie seems excessive to the material. What should have been a small, independent feature without marquee casting -- the story's protagonists, after all, are meant to be the kind of people nobody ever notices.
  80. The Butterfly
    If there's anyone to credit for The Butterfly's eventual triumph over the inherent fatuousness of the material, it's the great Serrault and his tiny leading lady, who matches her elder nearly line for line and look for look.
  81. Calendar Girls
    The real-life calendar girls were actual human beings, and here they're merely comic patsies, lacking the distinctive personalities that made the men of "The Full Monty" so endearing, their final act of revelation so peculiarly dignified.
  82. The Hebrew Hammer
    But the corker-to-groaner ratio heavily favors the latter as the bagel-and-dreidel jokes begin to lose their spark, as does the story
  83. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    The deep satisfaction of The Return of the King is in surrendering ourselves to the finale, in letting Jackson's superb storytelling (with due credit to co-screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) surround us like a blazing campfire tale -- which it does, gloriously.
  84. Prisoner of Paradise
    An extraordinary documentary about the German entertainer Kurt Gerron, has been timed to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Week, but the film would also fit snugly on a double bill with "My Architect."
  85. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    Webber spins a slight but considerably enchanting tale of impossible romance and artistic discovery.
  86. The Statement
    A tolerable thriller.
  87. Love Don't Cost a Thing
    Remains short on charm, purpose or laughs.
  88. Something's Gotta Give
    Jack, the actor, smiles obligingly, but you can practically feel him rolling his eyes.
  89. Stuck on You
    By the time of its medical-operation climax, Stuck On You has focused so much on ennobling the disabled that it comes to resemble a segment of the Jerry Lewis telethon.
  90. AKA
    So never mind the Xmas schlock -- go treat yourself at once to this sensationally entertaining soul food.
  91. Hotel Room
    Judging by the stilted nature of both the dialogue and acting, that's what this film is -- a thesis project better suited to a grad-night exhibition.
  92. 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.
  93. Honey
    Hinges almost completely on the taut body and delectable beauty of Jessica Alba, but is otherwise so riddled with limp clichés that it doesn't even qualify as a guilty pleasure.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Last Samurai
    The only history that bears a real influence on The Last Samurai is the history of Hollywood moviemaking, and the unfortunate way it has of turning extraordinary stories into hopelessly ordinary ones.
  95. Monsieur Ibrahim
    Excusez-moi, but I'd rather see Omar Sharif punching out croupiers in a casino than dispensing comfort and joy in this sugared-up tale.
  96. What Alice Found
    Bell forces us to see characters from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks in a distinctly human light, neither ennobling nor pitying.
  97. Man of the Year
    Bad improv is bad improv, and it’s a potent virus.
  98. My Flesh and Blood
    Despite, or perhaps because of, the jollity that reigns in this household, one wants to ask the Mia Farrow question: Why does this woman keep surrounding herself with others who are completely reliant on her?
  99. En la ciudad sin límites
    A career best for the daughter of Charlie Chaplin.
  100. In America
    The film is not emotionally subtle, but it is beautifully shot, by cinematographer Declan Quinn, with a grainy, impressionistic eye that mimics a perpetual dance of shards of remembered experience.
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