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. Spider
    Deliciously wicked, strangely poetic portrait (adapted by Patrick McGrath from his own novel) of a schizophrenic man at once tyrannized and elevated by oedipal terrors.
  2. Sketches of Frank Gehry
    Sketches was produced for PBS's American Masters series, but it's in theaters now and deserves to be seen on the largest possible screen.
  3. Bartleby
    While Parker and co-writer Catherine di Napoli are faithful to Melville’s plotline, they and a fully engaged supporting cast — have made the old boy's characters more quick-witted than any English Lit major would have thought possible.
  4. Joe Gould's Secret
    The alchemy of good acting under the pressure of sublime film sense makes for a miracle in the hearts of the audience.
  5. Elling
    Heartwarming here relies less on forced air than on Petter Næss’ delicate, clever direction -- and a wonderful, imaginative script by Axel Hellstenius.
  6. Under the Sand
    Powerfully enigmatic study of the fundamental opacity of human relations.
  7. Raising Victor Vargas
    Victor Vargas has the look and feel of a neo-realist masterpiece, yet captures New York with a burnished authenticity not seen since the glory days of ’70s American cinema.
  8. 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.
  9. Kippur
    Though Kippur seems a creature radically different -- more nakedly autobiographical, more naturalistic, more forgiving -- from Gitai's highly conceptual and stylized body of work, there are clear thematic continuities.
  10. 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.
  11. X-Men
    The film's strength and its entertainment lie in John Myhre's production design, its generally appealing cast...and, perhaps most importantly, a canny degree of self-parody.
  12. Downtown 81
    Poignant, funny, and proof of Basquiat's magic.
  13. 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.
  14. Fighter
    A humane and precociously wise documentary by the young Los Angeles director Amir Bar-Lev.
    • L.A. Weekly
  15. Godzilla
    Can now be appreciated not just as a minor classic of tragic destruction, but also as a somber exploration of conflicted postwar emotions.
  16. 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Donnie Darko
    It is funny, sad and beautiful. And it's right on time.
  18. And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen...
    For those of us who find Lelouch an unbreakable habit -- the guiltiest of guilty pleasures -- watching And Now Ladies & Gentlemen comes close to sheer moviegoing bliss.
  19. 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.
  20. Topsy-Turvy
    We never seem to be looking at actors, but at people; never at scenes, but at life unrehearsed.
  21. Alias Betty
    The last-minute details of plot can't compete with the frightening intensity of Kiberlain's and Garcia's performances, which trace, with brilliant precision, the exhausting mix of brutality and grace inherent in the mother-daughter relationship.
  22. The Last Winter
    The Last Winter won’t win many fans among those who place the saving of union jobs above the repairing of the ozone layer. But this is a horror movie with many inconvenient truths to tell about the ways in which we are willingly destroying our planet.
  23. The World
    The comic, tragic and monumentally beautiful new film by writer-director Jia Zhangke (Platform).
  24. Little Otik
    Magnificently twisted black comedy.
    • L.A. Weekly
  25. 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.
  26. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    The best of the Harry Potter films so far, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is also hands down the scariest, and the deepest.
  27. Fateless
    Like "The Pianist," Fateless painstakingly builds up the reality of what it is like to be drawn into a perfectly arbitrary hell you can neither comprehend nor rationalize.
  28. Venus
    Venus may be a leering male fantasy, but it is also, improbably but persuasively, a love story as tender as it is transgressive. It's a wry celebration of the tyranny of beauty, and the tragicomic way in which desire outruns the betrayals of dying flesh.
  29. March of the Penguins
    Thrilling documentary.
  30. Howl's Moving Castle
    Another soulful gem from the peerless Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki.
  31. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    Fiercely intelligent, terrifying and absurdly funny documentary.
  32. Since Otar Left
    The kind of small film -- morally ambiguous, graceful in its admission of imperfect knowledge, at once specific and universal -- that expands our understanding of the emotional economy of family life, with its ebb and flow of love and hostility, secrecy and egregious candor. You must see this film.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Distant
    The film's extraordinary shifts from windswept sorrow (Mahmut watching from a distance as his ex-wife departs Istanbul for a new life in Canada) to deadpan comedy (the cousins' carefully engineered capture of a household rodent) are uniquely, triumphantly their maker's own.
  34. Far From Heaven
    Not a campy movie. True, it has its ironies, but though you can read it ironically if you wish, Haynes' triumph is that it also plays beautifully straight.
  35. Teaching Mrs. Tingle
    A dark, biting comedy-- funny, smart and full of unpredictable twist and turns.
  36. 8 Mile
    Eminem plays Rabbit with riveting, flamboyantly expressive intensity.
  37. American Movie
    This unassuming, insistently entertaining documentary has the virtue of a great subject.
  38. The Water Horse
    Personally, I wouldn’t take a toddler (unless he was the son of Tarantino) to this intermittently, legitimately terrifying tale of a boy and his Loch Ness monster. But everyone else should blow off "Alvin and the Chipmunks" and show up for the best kiddie picture of the season -- and, along with "Ratatouille," of the year.
  39. 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.
  40. OT: Our Town
    A smart, seamless commentary on race, class and the expectations (or lack of) that are often attached to them. Kennedy is helped greatly by deep currents of heart and humor that pull you into the unfolding tale, and to the edge of your seat as the countdown to opening night begins.
  41. My Voyage to Italy
    Has power not only as film scholarship, but as an inquiry into cinema's interplay with our collective memories and the nature of history itself.
  42. 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.
  43. Springtime in a Small Town
    Simply put, it represents the work of a filmmaker so exhilaratingly in command of his craft that he can, among other things, turn a single image of two people standing next to each other -- fully clothed, their bodies not quite touching -- into one of the most sublimely erotic moments we have ever beheld on the screen.
  44. Oasis
    At once a romantic melodrama, a sharp social comedy and a fierce political commentary on Korean society's cruelty to social outcasts. It's also a triumph of artistic indirection: Not a single scene plays out the way you expect. This is a film that gives humanism back its good name.
  45. Scratch
    Simultaneously hilarious and deeply informative thanks to the vibrant personalities at its center.
  46. Chunhyangdyun
    The film is unabashedly sexy, and its heady romanticism feels as right and as unaffected as Im's bold use of color and his equally bold decision to tell the story through traditional pansori narration.
  47. Femme Fatale
    I haven't admired a De Palma film since "Carrie," or even enjoyed one since "Scarface," so it must mean something that Femme Fatale gave me one of the best times at the movies I've had this year.
  48. Croupier
    Immensely rich, clipped and precise, with a sly, sardonic sense of humor.
  49. Chicken Run
    A delirious fable about every creature's need for espace.
  50. Antz
    A charmer, complete with cute critters voiced by the ultrafamous.
  51. Happy Here and Now
    Since premiering on the festival circuit in 2002, this small masterpiece has been one of the best films around not to secure a proper theatrical release, and while one week on a single L.A. screen at the height of the crowded holiday season may not exactly qualify as proper, it's nevertheless a joyous happening.
  52. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
    By not even attempting to follow Sterne to the letter, Winterbottom and Boyce have triumphantly captured his impish creative spirit.
  53. All or Nothing
    It's a strangely stirring experience that finds warmth in the coldest environment and makes each crumb of emotional comfort feel like a 10-course banquet.
  54. Bus 174
    Tough and relentless, dazzlingly researched and crafted. At its core is compassion for those who are angry, violent and uneducated.
  55. Timecode
    We're afforded the illusion of an omniscience so complete as to mark a pioneering breakthrough in movie storytelling, one not to be missed.
  56. Judy Berlin
    Where "American Beauty" was smug and obvious in its dissection of suburban life, Judy Berlin is hilarious, heartbreaking and -- in its graciousness -- unlike any American film we've seen in a long time.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Almayer's Folly
    Almayer's Folly is lush and dreamy (if not quite dreamlike), but it never feels unanchored or given to pointless meandering. However hypnotic it at times becomes, this is a sober(ing) endeavor that never strays far from its post-colonial backdrop.
  58. Grosse Pointe Blank
    With a brisk pace and satiric blend of nostalgia and violence, it's the sharpest, funniest comedy so far this year.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Blue Velvet
    What dazzles still about David Lynch's Blue Velvet is its total authority: Not a single false gesture. No shock delivered solely for its own sake.
  60. The Devil's Backbone
    Here is a ghost story so dynamic you could call it a ghost poem.
  61. Diary of the Dead
    In most horror movies, it's a given that we should root for the heroes to make it out alive, but Diary of the Dead isn't nearly so certain, and so it terrifies us all the more.
  62. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    While it's Dave's madly humming brain that propels the film, Davis, whose every glance is a short story in itself, makes Dana's internal crisis equally resonant.
  63. Ghost World
    Zwigoff pulls off something in Ghost World that seems a minor miracle -- he creates someone with a complex inner life.
  64. Hilary and Jackie
    This sensitively directed film is one of those rarest of accomplishments: a graceful work of art about the very creation of art itself.
  65. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    It is worthy of comparison to the lifelike, character-rich films we cherish from that era (1970s), and is certainly one of the finest films to come out this year.
  66. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    In the nearly 30 years since the movie was released (it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1972), one forgets how falling-about-funny is this mad caper.
  67. Capote
    The triumph of Capote is that it both grants and shares with him that twisted brew of obsessive identification and monstrous detachment that is the fertile burden of the artist.
  68. Half Nelson
    At a time when most American movies, studio made or "independent," seem ever more divorced from anything approximating actual life experience, Half Nelson is so sobering and searingly truthful that watching it feels like being tossed from a calm beach into a raging current.
  69. Dogtown and Z-Boys
    Enormously enjoyable, high-adrenaline documentary.
  70. Breakdown
    Breakdown recalls so many good movies, in such unpredictable order, that by the end it simply stands on its own, a solid, logical, edge-of-the-seat sluiceway of escape and pursuit.
  71. Broken Flowers
    It's a romantic comedy in which both the romance and the comedy are turned to such muted levels that any lower would require closed captioning.
  72. Lantana
    Notable for its power of surprise and its refusal to immediately clarify the confusion of these lost souls.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A History of Violence
    Cronenberg holds up a mirror, but he leaves it up to us to recoil at what we see.
  74. The Last September
    This is one of those rare times when a credit-heavy gathering of top film talents actually manages to produce a work of art.
  75. Casino Royale
    What's appealing about Bond is precisely its unhip classicism -- its promise of clean, crisp excitement delivered without the interference of whiplash-inducing camera pyrotechnics, attention-deficient editing patterns, gratuitous color tinting and/or ear-splitting rock ballads.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Taxidermia
    All this helps to shape Pálfi’s crudely bombastic but impressive philosophical view of the body as landscape and art, a source of personal discovery, wonder and annihilation.
  77. Street Fight
    This is classical activist filmmaking of the first order, a movie with the power to turn hearts, change minds and, just maybe, right the wayward course of an entire city.
  78. Almost Famous
    Crowe has made a hugely entertaining, nearly pitch-perfect film about rock & roll.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Santitos
    Springall also deftly weaves the film's most dramatic moments with lighthearted comedy, and the result may be Mexico's best film in years.
  80. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [re-release]
    The movie survives beautifully both as an elegant thriller and as a study of the twisted infantilism that shapes the fanatic heart.
  81. In Praise of Love
    In its formal daring and exquisite style, the movie is itself an act of resistance against what Godard sees as a modern triumphalist culture that turns historical truth to lies and love to images created to make money.
  82. Calle 54
    Trueba reveals his subject organically, letting the music speak for itself.
  83. Murderous Maids
    A true rarity, Murderous Maids is an intelligent, moral shocker.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    American Splendor
    It's our great good fortune, and Pekar's, that this movie -- which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, followed by the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes -- is as true to the dyspeptic spirit of its source as anyone could have imagined.
  85. eXistenZ
    eXistenZ gives us Cronenberg at his wittiest, and Leigh at her most vulnerable and fascinating.
  86. Off the Map
    A small masterpiece of tone and form.
  87. Les Destinées
    An exquisite metaphor for the high cost and higher returns of an enduring marriage.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    ...So Goes the Nation
    From its riveting opening to its gripping conclusion, . . . So Goes the Nation is arguably the most intelligent, kinetic analysis of the modern election process since "The War Room."
  89. 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.
  90. Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop
    Belongs to the small rank of hip-hop films that actually have something to say -- and that say it with both style and intellectual bite.
  91. 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.
  92. 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.
  93. Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade
    Where Okiura leads the art of animation into truly uncharted territory is in his character work, the precise behavioral strokes that bring people to life in two dimensions.
  94. Place Vendôme
    It's all about having your intelligence -- emotional, spiritual, cerebral -- respected. Garcia does that; Place Vendôme does that.
  95. The Twilight Samurai
    Perhaps because this is director Yoji Yamada's 77th movie, every aspect of his filmmaking is placidly assured and meaningful.
  96. Our Lady of the Assassins
    A scathing, darkly funny political essay wrapped inside a tragic love story (or vice versa).
  97. Pi
    A triumph of low-end production design, shot in sizzling, solarized black and white, and driven by a propulsive, insinuating score, Pi is a horror movie that makes you think and an indie film that makes you squirm.
  98. The Endurance
    Not only relates the astounding story of the expedition and its unimaginable hardships, it presents a thoughtful study of a time when there were adventurers who might actually respond to an advertisement reading "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold . . ."
  99. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
    Maddin's genius is so inescapably idiosyncratic that his work seems destined to remain a cult taste. Although Dracula won't change that, I hasten to add that this is the most inventive vampire picture of the last 80 years.
  100. Genesis
    The story is as wonderful in the showing as it is in the telling, by an African griot (oral historian) who stirs our tragicomic passage from birth to death, into a simple clay pot.
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