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 8.9 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. Metroland
    Replete with false dilemmas, assisted by a dreadfully stagy screenplay and directed with all the animation of a tableau vivant, Metroland is such a draggy bore.
    • L.A. Weekly
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
    Issues of faith, courage, loyalty, sacrifice and betrayal (the last perpetrated by Soren's brother) are all tackled by Snyder with understated maturity, though a series of slightly repetitive aerial skirmishes can't quite match the inventiveness of Feet's buoyant song-and-dance mash-ups.
  3. Stick It
    The final meet felt eternal to me, but little girls may love it all, and even if they don't, they're almost sure to practice their handstands when they get home.
  4. Eight Legged Freaks
    It's the filmmakers' post-camp comprehension of what made old-time B movies good-bad that makes Eight Legged Freaks a perfectly entertaining summer diversion.
  5. The Big Tease
    How nice to see a new comic lead (Ferguson) with the confidence not to hog the screen.
  6. The Heart of Me
    While director Thaddeus O'Sullivan has some interesting visual ideas -- his period London is a heavily aestheticized, matte-painted dreamscape -- he never makes an emotional connection to the material the way he did in his fine Irish gangland drama, “Nothing Personal.”
  7. A Foreign Affair
    The photography is clear and colorful, the acting just fine, and the pace steady. However, the wan script by Geert Heetebrij imbues the brothers with so little personality that their respective transformations -- pack no emotional punch.
  8. Sky Blue
    The result is a soulless piece of product, an ungainly hybrid of sketchy hand-drawn characters in blocky CGI environments, derivative at just about every level.
  9. Can't Hardly Wait
    The cast of mostly unknowns is agreeable if unnecessarily bland, not a Spicoli among them.
  10. Apt Pupil
    Heartless piece of ill will.
  11. Bounce
    Thrillingly unpredictable.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Barenaked in America
    Surprisingly few insights from the quintet, and after 90 minutes we're more familiar with the furniture of their rooms.
  13. Charlie's Angels
    Of course, it's terrible -- but did it have to be this bad?
  14. A Love Divided
    In the end, Macartney and screenwriter Stuart Hepburn decide that love conquers all, which may have been the way it happened but doesn't leave the film with much going on.
  15. Tomorrow Never Dies
    The hardware explodes just fine, all the right people die, and Pierce Brosnan, suave and likable as ever but no Sean Connery, not in a million years, gets the job done.
  16. Anger Management
    Although Sandler's formula remains constant -- the downtrodden hero can do eet! -- what's new is his willingness to share the screen equally with a male co-star. Not that anyone could get in the way of that mugging steamroller Nicholson.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Protector
    Jaa has the skills for the job, and shows them off in numerous fight scenes; it's just a shame that the movie he's in is barely acceptable in any other respect.
  18. Wild Side
    Though Lifshitz's attitude toward sex and sexuality ranks among the most progressive in contemporary movies, he doesn't belabor it; seen through his eyes, Wild Side is a love story in which love is unrestrained by matters of gender or sexual orientation or even the number of lovers.
  19. The Devil's Own
    Hobbled by a schizoid desire to make a deep human drama on the one hand and a blistering IRA shoot-'em-up on the other, Alan Pakula's new movie is less a story than a plodding sequence of debates punctuated by gunfire.
  20. The Wood
    What feels genuine in the film -- mother-son bonds, the wedding party -- is surrounded by overdetermined and formulaic scenes lifted from other films.
  21. Orfeu
    Unfortunately, the innovations that attend this updating dilute the iconic weight of the original.
  22. Down with Love
    This brittle little confection from director Peyton Reed (Bring It On) may drive you up the wall -- unless you're willing to settle for great frocks, stylish production design and wicked opening credits.
  23. XX/XY
    The young filmmaker clearly needs to experience a bit more of la vraie vie before his own observations can take in more than the clumsy romantic feints and parries of early adulthood.
  24. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
    Achieves a generic period look, but there's nothing lived-in about its rooms, nothing persuasive or necessary about its time and place -- there's no longer even a movie fan's nostalgia to give it some spark, or a reason for being.
  25. Don't Tell
    Don’t Tell is intelligent on the schizoid mental strategies of incestuous families, but its style and mood are so heavily drawn from television soap opera, I found myself more absorbed in the seriocomic lesbian subplot that rambles along entertainingly, if irrelevantly, on the periphery.
  26. Black Snake Moan
    Black Snake Moan is, at its core, a fairly straightforward variation on George Bernard Shaw -- "Pigsfeetmalion," if you will. One day, when he outgrows his terminal adolescence, Brewer might be the perfect filmmaker to tackle Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Three Days of Rain
    The result is both a hypnotic mood piece -- where characters' blank existential stares are framed through rain-beaded car windows -- and a murky riff on urban Midwestern ennui (by way of the Russian steppes).
  28. Dorian Blues
    Dorian Blues is full of similarly rigged moments, but there are genuine chuckles, and a palpably heartfelt final scene between Dorian and his mom ends the tale on a powerful note.
  29. Blade II
    Even Del Toro can't raise the conceptually dead.
  30. The Independent
    Kessler frames it all with an ironic eye (Stiller's misfit mogul holds court in cheap motels and burger joints) and with enough big-hearted tenderness to keep the humor from going sour.
  31. Get Over It
    A lobotomized updating of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
  32. The Mothman Prophecies
    Pellington's sharp, fastball compositions and nerve-splintering cutting style are of a piece with such intelligence, devilishly mixing shock with optimism.
  33. The Visual Bible: The Gospel of John
    It aims simply to relate a great and enveloping story -- one that may lead us to ponder the things that unite (rather than distance) peoples of differing belief systems, and may compel us to marvel at the many wonderful and horrible endeavors undertaken in the name of religion.
  34. 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.
  35. 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.
  36. Little Manhattan
    At its best, there's a strong (albeit live-action) echo of Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts" in Little Manhattan. The movie's hero, Gabe, is a world-weary 10-year-old who addresses us in eloquent voice-overs. Like Charlie Brown, he's in love with a red-headed beauty.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Wild Tigers I Have Known
    The film is distancing and off-putting, more a feat of look-at-me-ma derring-do than something resonant, meaningful and just the slightest bit moving.
  38. Gridiron Gang
    In a true-life sports tale like the recent "Invincible," you buy into all the inspirational clichés because the characters have inner lives and the movie is about something bigger; here, you keep hoping for something bad to happen to somebody just for the sake of balance.
  39. Con Air
    Con Air is entertaining in an extravagantly decadent sort of way. It just isn't a movie.
  40. The Lake House
    By herself, Bullock isn't enough to hold up this enervating movie, which lumbers along ponderously until, at the end, it takes a giant leap into the suspension of disbelief that lost me altogether.
  41. Wind Chill
    Jacobs and his writers are notably more interested in creepy atmosphere -- and in contemplating the order of the universe -- than in jump-in-your-seat jolts. But well before day breaks, it's the movie’s plot (which would have made for an outstanding Outer Limits episode) that has come to seem stuck in an endless loop.
  42. Bean
    This is not comedy - it's mugging. And there's no excuse for making Bean cuddly; he only works with an evil edge.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Beefcake
    Dull, tacky docudrama
  44. Cotton Mary
    Richer and cleverer than any Merchant Ivory movie in memory.
  45. That's the Way I Like It
    Goei's sharp-eyed satiric sense evokes the diversity and energy of Singapore, and his good-humored nostalgia makes disco rise from the dead.
  46. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
    Rather exciting, rendered in a bright sunset palette and a mixture of expressive, boldly drawn traditional animation and fluid computer-generated imagery.
  47. Bomb the System
    As Bomb snakes its way toward tragedy, it grates rather than entices. The actors come off more as poseurs than as characters, and the film's political and cultural insights are superficial and old hat.
  48. The Hills Have Eyes
    An orgy of bloodletting and dismemberment that's more monotonous than shocking. Aja and Levasseur are to splatter what Liberace was to rhinestones: practitioners of gaud.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bring It On
    Starts strong, but then falters.
  50. Center Stage
    Has next to no story beyond some stock clichés about bulimia, stage mothers and internal affairs in the corps de ballet.
  51. Possession
    Watching Possession is a movie experience not much deeper than you'd get on your couch watching Masterpiece Theater or Mystery! -- pleasant enough, but oh so soft.
    • L.A. Weekly
  52. House of Fools
    Powerful war satire.
  53. Serendipity
    As Serendipity moves into the final stretch, Chelsom's direction becomes frenzied but still lethargic; he never breathes life into the film.
  54. 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.
  55. I Know What You Did Last Summer
    There's no doubting that Williamson is a man who knows and loves his genre, and all the scary, screaming, sniggering fun continues here.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Milarepa
    Engages on a narrative level; however, Chokling’s direction fails to give the story any period texture or visceral emotion.
  57. Dark Water
    The movie is prettily shot by Almodóvar collaborator Affonso Beato, but no amount of tastefully desaturated color or imaginary friends going whoo-whoo in the deserted apartment upstairs can save this lumbering echt-thriller from fatal tedium.
  58. The Fifth Element
    Too long by half, burdened with shabby F/X and offering up some seriously weird performances, this pricy foray into science fiction is a muddle of miscues and narrative bloat--along with a lot of frivolous fun.
  59. Race to Nowhere
    Abeles sheds little new light on why few parents, teachers, politicians or administrators seem willing to get off the bus.
  60. Running with Scissors
    One expects neither subtlety nor surprise from a scenario boasting a household pet named Freud. If there's any reason at all to see Running With Scissors, it' Bening.
  61. Last Holiday
    Queen Latifah gives a spectacular performance in this hugely enjoyable wish-fulfillment fantasy.
  62. Once in the Life
    May lack any transcendent point that would make it exceptional, but it is certainly a worthy start, and worth catching.
  63. The Princess Diaries
    The director is Garry Marshall, but The Princess Diaries is no where near as nauseating a fairy tale as Marshall's "Pretty Woman."
  64. Brotherhood
    Characters make choices that are incredibly stupid, even wildly offensive, but also recognizably human, and as the night spirals out of control Cannon demonstrates a strong hand in controlling the mayhem. He also sets himself up as a filmmaker to watch.
  65. The Sea
    Undone by its own malignant contempt for every one of its characters, except a pathologically candid grandmother who single-handedly kept my chin from dropping to my ankles. Even Bergman would be scrambling for his Prozac.
  66. Atlantis: The Lost Empire
    Has the comfortable, old-fashioned, earnest idealism of a '50s Disney action-adventure.
  67. Secondhand Lions
    Despite the considerable imagination that has gone into realizing period scenes on a modest budget, all the episodes (past and present) feel hurried and clipped, like they've been passed through too many impatient editing-room hands, and the picture never fully absorbs you.
  68. Dopamine
    This feels like a movie that was grown in a petri dish -- poked and prodded with all manner of overcooked symbolism and thesis statements, but fatally absent the genuine human emotions about which it incessantly prattles on.
  69. 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.
  70. Any Given Sunday
    The director has created a slick, newer-than-new, faster-than-fast entertainment to end all entertainments.
  71. Goya's Ghosts
    Far from an embarrassment and a generally fine piece of work.
  72. Valentin
    It's not that Noya is bad as kid actors go, but a pair of dewy, crossed eyes and a beyond-his-years melancholy do not an entire movie make.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Little Secrets
    Despite its extraordinary theme, the film wades again and again into the kind of ordinary territory befitting its muted if glossy made-for-TV look and its tinkling, whimsically modern piano score.
  74. The King Is Alive
    The tedium of the situation is felt by the audience, but too often in the wrong way: We don't empathize so much as suffer through the movie.
  75. Splendor
    It's dirty and delightful, if a tad on the slight side.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Water for Elephants
    Beautifully designed, sufficiently choreographed, insipid but watchable, Elephants stresses that showbiz is about the maintenance of an illusion by any means necessary.
  77. Dead Man's Shoes
    Like so many movies of its kind, Dead Man's Shoes gets hopelessly lost in vicious process, and so loses all sight of anything you might optimistically call insight.
  78. The Producers
    The musical film version of The Producers is, for better or worse, a faithful record of the stage production, adhering to the same if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it philosophy that informed the recent "Rent."
  79. Nacho Libre
    Like the abominable "Napoleon Dynamite," director Jared Hess' second feature will doubtless capture the hearts and minds of 12-year-old boys everywhere, even if Nacho Libre sacrifices the earlier film's aggressive mean-spiritedness in favor of gentle slapstick lunacy.
  80. Romeo Must Die
    Doesn't even come close to being a good movie, but it is a lot of fun.
  81. Blow
    If as much thought had been expended on character and consequences as was lavished on bell-bottom diameters, collar widths and soundtrack selection, Blow might have been a richer, more intelligent experience, and much more Demme's movie than a carbon copy of other people's.
  82. Rat Race
    The good news is that this off-the-wall ensemble comedy may just be the summer's happiest surprise.
  83. Under the Tuscan Sun
    The movie is not without charm or humor, but it leaves little for Lane to do besides chuckle at setbacks as if they were naughty children.
  84. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    Refreshingly laid-back romantic comedy.
  85. Snake Eyes
    Not too long after the knockout opening, all that's left of Snake Eyes are Cage's wild eyes, the dregs of David Koepp's rotten script, and De Palma's restless, anxious camera, on the prowl for something, anything, to hang on to.
  86. À cause d'un garçon
    Screenwriter Vincent Molina and director Fabrice Cazaneuve are wonderfully calm about the tumult of teen life.
  87. 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.
  88. Haiku Tunnel
    The Kornbluths don't offer much visual style -- the film is as flat and sterile as its corporate environs -- but they build an excruciating tension from Kornbluth's confounding inability to lick a few stamps.
  89. Seeing Other People
    Begins as a refreshingly subversive departure from the Hollywood studios' cookie-cutter romances, but the thin script can't sustain that initial charge, and it soon flattens out, like a punctured comic balloon.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    First Descent
    Hardcore fans will appreciate the handful of genuinely gnarly aerial sequences, but these gravity-defying stunts, which can be thrilling as part of a five-minute James Bond pre-credit sequence, grow very tedious when repeated over almost two hours.
  91. Cherish
    May be scant on character and plot development, but it’s rich with affection for daydream believers
  92. Windtalkers
    In the studied excess of his Hong Kong action movies, Woo's swooning sentimentality plays like grand opera. With its dogged Hollywood naturalism and the inexorable passage of its characters toward sainthood, Windtalkers is nothing but a sticky-sweet soap.
  93. An American Rhapsody
    While Gardos knows what to ask -- and though Kinski and Johansson both easily command attention -- the filmmaker lacks the storytelling sophistication to answer with anything but prettily rendered cliches.
  94. The Brothers Grimm
    This is one of the most visually off-putting films ever made by a director who supposedly makes beautiful pictures.
  95. Girl, Interrupted
    Mangold can't escape the fact that instead of someone in the throes of a genuine existential crisis, his star comes off as -- to paraphrase nurse Whoopi Goldberg -- a spoiled, lazy girl who's afraid to face life.
  96. The American Astronaut
    The result is a sui generis, love-it-or-hate-it exercise in homegrown American surrealism.
  97. Six Days Seven Nights
    Against the odds of this wheezy material and Michael Browning's fitfully funny script, director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, Dave), a master of timing, contrives to spin a likable romantic comedy.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Baxter
    A movie filled with cardboard cutouts where the interesting characters ought to be. As a result, The Baxter is less engaging than the '40s screwball comedies (like The Philadelphia Story) that it's supposedly sending up, and not nearly as effervescent.
  99. Adam's Apples
    Some will see this as a movie about how we're all God’s children. I saw only the misanthropic fulminations of Jensen's runaway ego.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Death at a Funeral
    Rock's interventions can't compensate for excessive fealty to dumb gags involving watery poop and designer hallucinogens.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »