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. Laila's Birthday
    Laila’s Birthday is beautifully shot and overlaid with a spare, lyrical score that lends rueful emphasis to Masharawi’s exasperated fidelity to a chronically malfunctioning city.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Not Forgotten
    If the film's first two-thirds are dreary and preposterous, give Soref credit for a truly -- what's the proper cinematic terminology? -- batshit-crazy finale involving demented religious sects, ridiculously bloody face-offs and a gaggle of cross-dressing Mexican prostitutes.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Sorority Row
    Call me the sarcastic sister, but the only things screaming in any convincing way here are the cheap look, epileptic direction and off-key, “edgy” humor. It’s all so ‘80s, I could die.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    I Can Do Bad All by Myself
    Has so many dead moments that singing spots by Gladys Knight, Pastor Marvin Winans and Mary J. Blige simply highlight, rather than alleviate, the inertia.
  5. White on Rice
    At its best, this uneven film by writer-director Dave Boyle suggests that going a bit nuts is a good thing for the rigid paterfamilias.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gamer
    Neveldine and Taylor’s spazzy (but coherent) action scenes rely mostly on blood spurts instead of feats of badassery, but their dystopia is inventive and their visual schemes diverse.
  7. All About Steve
    Refreshingly quirky comedy.
  8. Amreeka
    When most filmmakers want to say something important about cultural conflicts, they labor to bring tears to our eyes. Dabis, by contrast, makes us laugh at ourselves and, in turn, each other.
  9. The Final Destination
    Ellis and screenwriter Eric Bress even go all meta on us with an "Inglourious Basterds"–esque finale set inside a 3D cinema, though their set pieces never quite muster the giddy brio of "Final Destination 1" and "3" auteur James Wong at his best.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Open Road
    The Open Road isn’t an unwatchable howler -- instead, writer-director Michael Meredith’s film is merely dull and obvious.
  11. Halloween II (2009)
    This time, Zombie doesn’t appear to have many deep thoughts, so Michael doesn’t just stab his victims, he slices and chomps them into gooey pulp — an overkill motif that actually feels false to the character and quickly becomes a depressing bore.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard
    The few real laughs -- all two minutes’ worth -- come courtesy of Russ Meyer veteran Charles Napier as Dick Lewiston, the angriest macho male anachronism of the year.
    • 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.
  14. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
    After a first hour that plays like a bad TV show, Sommers hits his groove with an over-the-top Paris chase sequence that, in turn, leads to an underwater finale that’s absurdly overproduced, momentarily diverting, and then instantly forgettable.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Aliens in the Attic
    Cheap, shoddy, crass and depressing fun for the whole family -- by which I mean 8-year-old boys.
  16. The Collector
    Making his directorial debut, Dunstan displays a knack for building suspense. And yet, weirdly, amidst all the requisite blood spray, one senses a reluctance on the filmmaker’s part to linger lovingly over the pierced skins and protruding entrails of the killer’s various victims.
  17. You, the Living
    Andersson particularly delights in left-outs: the guy who can’t squeeze into the bus stop during a downpour; the natty little suitor getting his bouquet smashed in a slamming door. The sum total is the reflection of a worldview -- sad sack, bordering on “Everybody Hurts” black-velvet sad-clown bathos -- rather than any narrative.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    G-Force
    Amping up the "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" formula with a whole A-team of adorable, talking furballs who converse in one-liners and pop culture references (Apocalypse Now and Scarface, really?), the mega-producer’s stamp is on every fight sequence, explosion and ugly stereotype.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In the Loop
    Zooming back and forth between London and D.C., In the Loop hasn't any real plot -- it plays like a rather brilliant Brit-com stretched over 100 minutes, a collection of anecdotes and incidents.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Weather Girl
    Humdrum but marketable comedy.
  21. Life Is Hot in Cracktown
    Life goes far past the boiling point for most of the characters in this hilariously overwrought ghetto soap opera from cult writer-director Buddy Giovinazzo.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Year One
    Unbearably painful from shrugging start to outtakes-laden finish, Harold Ramis’ half-assed, hare-brained return to writing and directing makes Mel Brooks’ equally muddled, soporific "History of the World, Part 1" look downright majestic by comparison.
  23. $9.99
    The stop-motion animated puppets in Tatia Rosenthal’s beguiling first feature look like clay-mated slabs of glazed meat, at once unreal and hyper-real.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Under Our Skin
    Andy Abrahams Wilson builds a decent, if stylistically dull, case that Lyme disease is far deadlier and more neurologically debilitating than most doctors want to admit.
  25. Land of the Lost
    It ends up sagging into a pleasantly undistinguished pudding. The big news is that Matt Lauer, playing himself, can act. A little. Hardly at all, really. But he’s a jolly good sport, and quite handy with a fire extinguisher.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tennessee
    Woodley’s film mostly floats along on its melancholy drift, so well-attuned to the low-key rhythms of its beaten-down characters that it never quite summons up enough energy for the rest of us, who are along for the ride.
  27. Up
    Up emerges as a gentle hymn to adventure of both the soaring, storybook variety and the smaller, less obvious kind -- the perilous, unpredictable and richly rewarding journey of ordinary, everyday life.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dance Flick
    The gags themselves only marginally work when they stick to silly non sequitur; the random movie references are forced and flat, and the takeoffs of "Dreamgirls" and "Fame" songs would make "Weird Al" groan.
  29. Big Man Japan
    Between such shots of inspiration, Matsumoto’s mock-doc framework seems a lazy stock device, interviews playing more dead than deadpan and failing to exceed an over-familiar comic-pathetic attitude toward the lives of functionaries.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Management
    Each new superfluous Jennifer Aniston rom-com is already met with low expectations, but add some overcooked, middlebrow Indiewood quirk and you've got cinema's purest shade of beige.
  31. Love N' Dancing
    Actress Amy Smart (Crank) has a knack for bringing a spark to mediocre movies, which she does again in this amiably dull dance drama.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Next Day Air
    Benny Boom built his reputation directing music videos and commercials, and his first feature, Next Day Air, falls somewhere between the blunt-force visuals of the former and the focus-grouped formulas of the latter.
  33. Star Trek
    The visual effects are predictably excellent -- sometimes, in the case of a three-man free fall through space, unexpectedly lyrical -- but most of the movie's dramatic conflicts feel strictly pro forma.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Naked Ambition: An R Rated Look at an X Rated Industry
    It isn't really a documentary about the porn industry but rather a documentary about the making of a coffee-table book containing posed photos of porn stars, fans and moguls. Director Michael Grecco is also the photographer making the book, so perhaps "infomercial" would be a more accurate description.
  35. Three Monkeys
    Ceylan’s departure from his moody sonatas "Distant" and "Climates" into more plotted film noir is equal parts Bresson and Buñuel, a merciless etching of the indiscreet charmlessness of the Turkish bourgeoisie, which sharply raises the stakes on that class’s petty hypocrisy and serial betrayals.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Obsessed
    Isn't half as dramatic as what probably went down after she (Beyoncé Knowles) kicked LaTavia and LaToya out of Destiny's Child.
  37. Baby on Board
    Feels like a movie made by men whose world views were shaped, primarily, by "Porky's" and "American Pie."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Earth
    State-of-the-art camera equipment captures images of startling clarity and proximity. There isn't one frame of CGI.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Crank: High Voltage
    The diminishing returns of shock value are the movie's built-in joke, and it would be a lot funnier without the directors' unforgivably bratty postsexist/postracist/posthuman showboating.
  40. Hannah Montana: The Movie
    It's almost foolish to review Hannah Montana: The Movie as anything other than the latest cog in a cultural phenomenon/mass-marketing juggernaut. The film itself certainly doesn't aspire to anything more.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    C Me Dance
    In 2009, its hilarious ineptitude makes it border on becoming a cult classic for the ages ... and we're not talking religious cult.
  42. The Escapist
    All might have been forgiven were it not for a needlessly Shyamalanized ending that deserves to earn Wyatt at least 25 years for grand-theft cinema.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    12 Rounds
    This is the kind of amiable time-killer that belongs on a basic-cable weekend afternoon.
  44. Shall We Kiss?
    Witty, insightful portraits of hyperverbal, self-conscious young people falling in and out of love.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Knowing
    What would a Christian Apocalypse movie look like with a big budget, a talented director, and star power of higher wattage than a discount Baldwin brother? Here comes the answer: like a glum hybrid of the "Final Destination" movies, an Irwin Allen disaster bash, and the kitschiest parts of Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain."
  46. Race to Witch Mountain
    A calculated bid to turn the Rock into a more family-friendly commodity. That calculation may be transparent, but it pays off: Cracking one-liners and alternating between world-weariness and growing affection for his charges, Johnson is wonderful -- much better than his material.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Edge of Love
    Director John Maybury showed a defter hand with the artist biopic in his 1998 Francis Bacon film, "Love Is the Devil." Here he repeatedly falls into the genre’s traps, creating an inert, claustrophobic movie.
    • 7 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Miss March
    Only a moron would expect a dude road-trip-sex comedy to be more than an aggressive expression of male sexual anxiety. But really, when did women become such vile creatures.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Perfect Sleep
    The movie layers its fatalistic drama with absurdist horseplay and a few moments of Lynch-ian mysticism, but it's an awkward mix at best; even when The Perfect Sleep is trying to be funny, it's far too self-conscious to really be much fun.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sherman's Way
    The film is confidently polished, and thankfully more sweet-tempered than preachy, given that every narrative thread has an underlying theme of social injustice.
  51. Echelon Conspiracy
    Given the passivity of computer use, the "hacker thriller" is film history's great running joke, but special attention should go to Echelon Conspiracy's authors for conceiving a climax that tries to juice tension out of someone using a search engine and staring at a download countdown.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
    Idiot plotting and dialogue are what you'd expect from a genre that typically rewards narrative development with a skip function. But the rote fight scenes are a disappointment.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Madea Goes to Jail
    Check off all of Perry’s motifs: vilification of the black bourgie princess, tough-love Christian messages, Academy Award–nominated actresses (Viola Davis, this time) managing to maintain their dignity.
  54. Gomorrah
    The five interwoven narratives in this visceral but disciplined and beautifully acted movie show to devastating effect how ordinary men and women -- and especially vulnerable boys desperate for masculine role models -- get caught up in the seductive violence and are ruthlessly destroyed by the network's hardened henchmen.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Objective
    It plays like a disastrous Sci-Fi Channel castoff, thanks in no small part to Myrick's odd decision to include incessant voice-over narration by Ball, which plays like a really terrible in-character DVD commentary track.
  56. The Uninvited
    A remake of the 2003 Korean horror film "A Tale of Two Sisters," The Uninvited is a Hand That Rocks the Cradle–type thriller that's been dressed up as a horror movie.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Taken
    Neeson's tormented weariness lends an air of dignity to the film's pulpy, grubby nastiness, but as striking as he is in action-hero mode, the truth is that Taken doesn't need dignity.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
    Mincing around like a bored old glam rocker and hissing threats from behind electric neon eyes, Nighy seems to be the only person on set who found a glint of amusement in his part. He fares better than poor Sheen, a scraggly Wolverine who made a more credible vampire-slayer opposite Frank Langella’s Nixon.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    My Bloody Valentine
    There's no excitement or terror in watching the 3-D execution of 2-D actors giving 1-D performances, just the steadily diminishing returns of the same eye gouge delivered ad infinitum.
  60. Hotel for Dogs
    Slobbery wet kiss of a family movie.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paul Blart: Mall Cop
    Done as an all-out battle to the death, this could have been an entertaining mix of "Die Hard" and "The A-Team."
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bride Wars
    A step backward for Hathaway, Bride Wars is one more step into the quicksand for Hudson, who's spent the nine years since ""Almost Famous wandering the rom-com wasteland in search of an exit strategy; this movie, which she exec produced, ain't it.
  63. Not Easily Broken
    These resourceful actors -- to say nothing of the audience -- deserve better.
  64. While She Was Out
    The film, executive-produced by Guillermo del Toro, hinges on a first-rate performance by Basinger, who imbues Della with a fire that makes the film's basic thesis -- both the domestic sphere and the larger world are dangerous places for women -- seem something more than boilerplate.
  65. Cadillac Records
    Director Darnell Martin (I Like it Like That) races through the script's bullet points with a brisk superficiality that leaves crucial plot points underdeveloped and unresolved, and refuses to engage the dark side of Leonard Chess’ paternalism.
  66. A Christmas Tale
    Their endless groupings and regroupings, their brief encounters and power struggles are framed by an armory of cinematic devices that will be familiar to any Desplechin devotee.
  67. Bohica
    Has one thing to recommend it, but even that will likely appeal to a small subset of filmgoers: the cult of Brendan Sexton III.
  68. Dostana
    As it's been done, with this ingratiating cast, a retro peach-and-turquoise color scheme that makes every shot look like a 1986 fashion layout, and a brace of insanely catchy Vishal Dadlani dance numbers, the movie isn't half bad.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Alphabet Killer
    "Wrong Turn" director Rob Schmidt ably goes through the motions, though the hook for a sequel at the end is truly annoying. Still, The Alphabet Killer may well make enough money to justify a Part II.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Haunting of Molly Hartley
    From Freestyle Releasing, the self-service distributor that brought you "D-War" and "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale," comes a movie even worse than those two combined.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eden Lake
    As a thriller, Eden Lake absolutely works, but feel-good entertainment it isn’t. Don’t bring a date.
  72. High School Musical 3: Senior Year
    Set against a production design seemingly inspired by the American flag, director Kenny Ortega's choreography is industrial and efficient, if haplessly stranded somewhere between Michael Jackson and the Village People.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Saw V
    The method to the madness of the traps turns out to be quite clever, but the rewriting of Saw mythology is the slasher equivalent of revising Star Wars so that Greedo fires at Han Solo first.
  74. Passengers
    A kind of declawed, inside-out "Final Destination" -- with none of the sense of showmanship, and all the looming malice of a mawkish condolence card.
  75. Roadside Romeo
    It would be charitable to forgive this first attempt its technical shortcomings; while the virtual set design is first-rate, the character animation is often clunky and inexpressive. What's harder to excuse is the drabness of the storytelling, the repetitive sitcom dilemmas that are closer to "Top Cat" than "Ratatouille."
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Max Payne
    The role requires Wahlberg to run the gamut of emotions from A to A.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Quarantine
    It's a shame that this English-language cover of an excellent Spanish shocker will eclipse the original, at least in U.S. theaters -- but even those who despise remakes will have to admit that director John Erick Dowdle's furious retread is scary as hell.
    • 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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Good Dick
    It feels provocative but inconclusive -- brimming with intriguing ideas about love's dark underbelly but not quite confident enough to pull them off.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Call + Response
    The result is like "American Idol" meets C.A.R.E. infomercial.
  81. Lower Learning
    Mostly, Lafferty is all about expletives and sexual innuendo of the frankest kind, some of it so raunchy (and unfunny) as to make one wonder if the parents of the film's many child actors bothered to read the script.
  82. An American Carol
    Astonishingly inept alleged satire.
  83. Beverly Hills Chihuahua
    This being Disney, wholesome character-building messages abound, but for once they're freshly spun as cautions against stereotyping both ethnic and canine.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Eagle Eye
    From tepid start to laughable middle to thudding finish (and the final two minutes smack of a reshoot), it's nothing but a herky-jerky clusterfuck of noise and nonsense.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fireproof
    Then the film gets all religulous, suggesting that Caleb's devotion to healing means nothing without Jesus, and so Fireproof stops becoming relatable to us all and only to the already, or easily, indoctrinated.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Smother
    With its mixture of high-profile talent and low-watt comic inspiration, Smother feels like the sort of misbegotten curiosity Comedy Central uses to fill its Sunday afternoon programming.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Igor
    So bad it's scary.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    My Best Friend's Girl
    Tank's whole shtick is taking advantage of stupid women's desire to live in banal romantic comedies, but the film he's in is just as bad as any other Hudson movie.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Righteous Kill
    It's a sad state of affairs when the best news about Righteous Kill is that it isn't awful.
  90. The Family That Preys
    What's memorable here is the sparkling chemistry between Bates and Woodard, whose scenes together are a pleasure to watch, even as one thinks that their next outing should be to co-teach a master class entitled, "How To Rise Above Cliché."
    • 24 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Bangkok Dangerous
    Another of those dopey crime thrillers where the hardcore, bad-ass antihero inexplicably decides one day to lower his guard and open his heart, causing all kinds of hell to break loose.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Surfer, Dude
    Lacking even the train-wreck appeal of a brainless stoner comedy like "Half-Baked," Surfer, Dude is a numbing experience at just 89 minutes.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Disaster Movie
    This carpet-fouling mongrel of a movie no more deserves release than do anthrax spores.
  94. College
    Film critics never come home stinking of their honest labor, but the nearest equivalent is reviewing something like College, which leaves its stain on one's very humanity.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Babylon A.D.
    If nothing else, it's nice to see an action movie that takes Europe, not America, as its grounding point.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Young People Fucking
    Tries a bit too hard to give off the impression of experience, and consequently, the film's explicit dialogue and pseudonaughty tone result in mostly shallow, giggly humor that rarely delves into the kinkiness and hang-ups that make sex a topic both obsessed over and rarely discussed.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Death Race
    With its inexplicably watchable shotgun-riding bimbos, unconscious homoeroticism and "Shawshank Redemption" ending, The Fast and the Frivolous here is almost so bad it's good. Almost...
  98. The House Bunny
    The movie is basically on one level and Faris on another -- in that exclusive aerie occupied by Judy Holliday, Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball and a few other blissfully original comedy goddesses.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cthulhu
    Stuart Gordon adapted the story more conventionally in 2001's "Dagon," and it remains the better bet for Lovecraft lovers.
  100. Momma's Man
    Momma's Man taps into that ambivalence, and those moments when all of us long to flee adulthood and sink back into being our parents' beloved baby birds, whether or not we ever were in the first place.
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