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 8.8 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. Gulliver's Travels
    Black, looking like an unwashed clothes pile and capering in familiar "Uncle Jack" style, is a good babysitter, his cross-dressing turn in a doll's house a highlight.
  2. Fantasia 2000
    What's missing from Fantasia 2000 is the shamelessly pandering Disney cutesy that made the original such a full-blooded nostalgic memory.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Star Trek: Insurrection
    With its young-vs.-old plot conflicts, its vid-game-reminiscent setups and its prominent positioning of a 12-year-old in the cast, the ninth Star Trek movie explicitly stalks kids, and probably snares neither them nor their parents.
  4. Vera Drake
    As a character study Vera Drake is coarsely drawn, and as pro-choice polemic, it’s both a blunt instrument and a red herring. Which may be why, among all the moviegoers who staggered from the theater wielding soaked tissues, I was among the few who remained dry of eye, and raised of brow.
  5. Center Stage
    Has next to no story beyond some stock clichés about bulimia, stage mothers and internal affairs in the corps de ballet.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Marine
    Tongues are planted firmly in cheek; it’s impossible to endorse a full price ticket, but fans of campy action should check this out.
  7. Quitting
    Whether Quitting will prove absorbing to American audiences is debatable: After all, it's not like we don't have enough rehab stories of our own, and Jia often comes across as a sullen, unreachable brat.
  8. Atlantis: The Lost Empire
    Has the comfortable, old-fashioned, earnest idealism of a '50s Disney action-adventure.
  9. Americano
    Watching Americano is like hearing a long story about someone else's holiday, and while it seems everyone had a nice time, it's too bad they didn't shoot a better film while they were there.
  10. Bad Santa
    Gets stuck in a rut. Hearing Santa say “f---” isn't nearly as funny the 50th time as it is the first 49.
  11. Lower City
    This frenetic potboiler about a love triangle on the Salvador waterfront smacks of liberal slumming and bristles with faux authenticity.
  12. Bollywood/Hollywood
    Perhaps it is simply impossible, even with affection in your heart, to craft an evocative homage to the expansive musical melodramas of Bollywood on a small-scale indie budget.
    • 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.
  14. 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.
  15. Psychopathia Sexualis
    It's a mildly enjoyable romp.
  16. Feast
    Feast isn't the least bit artful, but it is gleefully gruesome, which may be all one can ask of a no-budget monster movie.
  17. Mail Order Wife
    Initially amusing, ultimately wearying mock documentary.
  18. 39 Pounds of Love
    Despite Menkin's clear belief that he's crafted a rousing true-life drama, his film plays like a cliché-ridden, painfully self-conscious Hollywood melodrama about a noble person with disabilities.
    • 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.
  20. Sex Sells: The Making of 'Touché'
    Tiresome, and with no discernable edge or wit, Sex Sells is most powerful when it dawns on us we're watching Barnes, the leggy replacement for Suzanne Somers on "Three's Company," and Zmed, the beefcake cop from "T.J. Hooker," arrive at this point in their careers.
  21. Rock School
    You root for the kids, who are utterly captivating, but Green is another story. His shtick -- a combo of insufferable stage-parent and unbearable rock geek -- is exhausting.
  22. Enigma
    It's all part of a larger calculus that the filmmakers hope will translate into a thinking person's thriller. If only they themselves knew how to figure it.
  23. Breakfast on Pluto
    Jordan is trying for a surrealist romp, and it's as coy and callow as you'd expect from a movie with a lead character nicknamed Kitten.
  24. After the Wedding
    Evidently, this bloated piece of Oscar-nominated nonsense was a big hit in Denmark, which makes me think there's a glittering future in that otherwise discriminating country for several seasons of "Days of Our Lives."
  25. Window Theory
    This film looks so good, thanks to some impressive production work (nice rainstorm) as well as Andrew Huebscher's vibrant cinematography, that one wonders, as one dull scene after another rolls by, why director Andrew Putschoegl - and co-writers Large and Kyle Kramer - didn't lavish half as much attention on the script.
  26. The Best Man
    The best parts of the film...are often distractingly slick enough to cover the film's overriding lack of soul.
  27. America So Beautiful
    The film staggers under its own didacticism. Too often we're told of men who were professionals back home and are here reduced to driving cabs, waiting tables or vending ice cream.
  28. The Widow of Saint-Pierre
    As stunning to look at as "Girl on the Bridge" or indeed any of his others, but it lacks the distilled intensity — and, surprisingly for Leconte, the wit.
  29. A Midsummer Night's Dream
    The set design is gung-ho Hallmark (Tinkerbell lights, that sort of thing) with a strong whiff of Fellini (the fairy glade looks like a pre-Raphaelite red-light district).
  30. The Boondock Saints
    (Duffy's) assembled a fine cast -- it's hard to take your eyes off the two young leads -- but he's given them little to do but squeeze triggers and mouth platitudes.
    • 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.
  32. The Skeleton Key
    The Skeleton Key takes its time making a slow, creeping ascent, but once it starts plummeting downward, Softley keeps things moving at a furious pace, and both Hudson and Rowlands enjoy surrendering themselves to the grandiloquent lunacy of it all.
  33. Thirteen
    More than once, while watching the film, I thought: The camera should really just turn away from those grating teen brats and follow the mom (Holly Hunter).
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ella Enchanted
    While the lovers here are sweetly believable, the film's murky giants-alongside-man effects shots are strictly Darby O’Gill and the Little People.
  35. The Newton Boys
    In his true-life film about four brothers who robbed banks out West during the late teens and early '20s, Richard Linklater seems to achieve the impossible: He makes Ethan Hawke bearable.
  36. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    The film won't likely change any minds, but there's a taut political essay beneath the blatant campaigning.
  37. Volcano
    Here, the volcanic villain behaves like a smart terrorist, taking over almost immediately and holding a collection of excellent actors (Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche, Don Cheadle) hostage for two hours of "real time."
  38. Est - Ouest
    By the time the movie ends, having traversed numerous plot twists and character revelations, the viewer is emotionally drained in a bittersweet sort of way.
  39. The Family Stone
    A potentially interesting tale flailing haplessly in the quicksand of holiday-movie formula.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Best Laid Plans
    Manages to be a fun twist-within-a-twist movie.
  41. The Sentinel
    Sentinel works overtime to suggest what a thrill-a-minute world its characters inhabit; but only during the last 20 minutes does the movie's pulse (or ours) raise above a flatline. The actors look uniformly unhappy to be there - except for Basinger, who seems lost in a lithium haze.
  42. Beowulf & Grendel
    Filmed in Iceland, Beowulf & Grendel is beautiful, grungy and a little too tasteful for its own good. You can practically feel the filmmakers yearning to have Beowulf and Grendel go all Rambo on each other.
  43. Son of the Bride
    Although it's better written and directed than the average Nora Ephron bagatelle, it's easy to imagine Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan slipping into a remake of Son of the Bride.
  44. For Love of the Game
    The film's larger, surprisingly mature emotional rhythms are strong enough to pull it through.
  45. Serenity
    It's the zippy chatter among the Serenity's wised-up space pirates that gives the film most of its punch, but with only serviceable action sequences and largely cookie-cutter effects, you can still sense the void just outside.
  46. Megiddo: The Omega Code 2
    Ironically, for all the paranoia, York's Defiler and his henchman, an always game Udo Kier, are an oasis of wit in an otherwise parched, self-serious script.
  47. The House of Yes
    What follows doesn't much surprise, since every emotional detail, accompanied by a noisy storm and then a black-out, arrives well in advance of its execution.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Conversations with God
    Beyond a lack of enthralling characters or convincing plotting, though, what's most glaringly missing in this self-promotional marketing tool is, of all things, God, who gets only a bit role as Walsch's muse in a few scenes.
  49. Autumn
    Elegantly stylized but emotionally strained.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    School for Scoundrels
    This crass remake of the 1960 Robert Hamer film is kept alive for a while by director Todd Phillips (Old School), but ultimately succumbs to its weak script and hopeless typecasting.
  51. The Aryan Couple
    We get director John Daly's feel-good tedium and a waste of a performance by the magnificent Landau.
  52. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    The best I can say about Buster Scruggs is that it seems as though the Coens picked their favorite actors and wrote them a part specifically tailored to their abilities.
  53. Fifty-Fifty
    Schizo is an earnest also-ran, sadly muffled by the opaque performance of non-actor Oldzhas Nusupbayev.
  54. The Komediant
    Slight but enjoyable documentary.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes
    Once the Quay brothers confidently establish their film's astonishing look, they merely repeat their techniques until the images no longer delight or surprise, leaving all too visible the Quays' struggles with the trickier demands of storytelling and character development.
  56. Cuban Rafters
    What's fresh for these people is, frankly, old news for anyone who has seen even one or two documentaries on similar subject matter.
  57. Danny Deckchair
    American-born writer-director Jeff Balsmeyer can't seem to make up his mind whether he's making a gentle romantic comedy with heartfelt trimmings, or a full-court Aussie farce.
  58. The Machinist
    In a way, though, it’s all Bale's show. Withering down to an alarming 120 pounds, he delivers a deeply obsessed performance that leaves us both fascinated and sickened.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Beauty in Trouble
    Unfortunately, Hrebejk settles for unsatisfying allusions to the Czech experience that never break through the melodrama to make his case with any conviction.
  60. Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)
    These live performances and classic music videos drive home the point that part of the Giants' longevity flows from the fact that they can't be explained, only experienced.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Center of the World
    We should be thankful for the courage of Wang and his cast in standing against a culture that nervously treats sex as either a prurient joke or a puritan crime.
  62. American Pastime
    With such rich material about dreams deferred, it’s disheartening that co-writer–director Desmond Nakano’s nobly made but patchy drama mires itself in nostalgia tropes and storytelling clichés.
  63. Notting Hill
    The result is two films: a big, dreary star vehicle that sags whenever its leads spend quality time together, and a mettlesome British caper whose nutsosecondary characters walk away with the movie.
  64. Lady Vengeance
    If this is what qualifies, as some critics have suggested, as an artistic advance for Mr. Park, let us pray for a hasty retreat.
  65. Evolution
    Amiably goofy, but it isn't especially funny.
  66. 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.
  67. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
    Attack of the Clones' high-definition surfaces are certainly impressive, but they offer no lifelight, nothing to put your arms around.
    • 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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Copying Beethoven
    One is left yearning for the overheated melodrama of Bernard Rose's 1994 Beethoven biopic, "Immortal Beloved," which was trashy, but fun.
  70. 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.
  71. The Memory of a Killer
    Director Erik Van Looy has filmmaking chops to spare, and while he has created a sharply shot and crisply paced film, he isn't able to make it all cohere.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Stone
    At odds with its own lofty and base instincts, Stone ultimately channels neither compellingly.
  73. Home on the Range
    The film skews young, to be sure, and it isn't as memorable as the new Disney classics of the early 1990s, but there's still plenty here to hold the interest of viewers of all ages: delightful performances (particularly by Dench, plowing Angela Lansbury terrain), zinging comic dialogue and a soundtrack that's a wealth of sonorous riches.
  74. Assassination Tango
    The plot is slow and absurdly contrived, and if you're looking for a thriller, look elsewhere. If you love dance movies, Assassination Tango is worth a go.
  75. This Girl's Life
    Though spiked with nice performances (Marquis herself is a natural, no matter how lame her lines), This Girl's Life succeeds more as a nudie curio.
  76. Ghost Ship
    If you take your ghost stories garnished with a dressing of sadism, sanctimony and silliness, go ahead and squander the nine bucks.
  77. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
    The script, credited to "Twin Peaks" co-creator Mark Frost and longtime "Simpsons" writer Don Payne, unsuccessfully strives for hipster irreverence.
  78. The Interpreter
    When it comes to the United Nations, though, the movie turns to Jell-O. Whether Pollack was softened up by his meetings with U.N. brass (all the way up to Kofi Annan), or by his own gentlemanly Midwestern liberalism, he is alarmingly circumspect about that august body.
  79. Maria by Callas
    Volf’s refusal to address key choices that Callas made to shape her own career and fight her insecurities suggests that he’d prefer to imagine Callas as a victim of fate — and bronchitis, fame, Onassis, etc. — instead of a strong-willed but human prima donna.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Two Weeks Notice
    It's not a horrible film -- and it's a fuckload better than some other oops-we-fell-in-love comedies in recent years (e.g., J. Lo's doggy "The Wedding Planner"). It's just not very smart. Deeply rentable.
  81. Apres Vous (After You)
    The best that can be said for this excitable, harmless romantic comedy is that it is smoothly directed by Pierre Salvadori.
  82. Dear Wendy
    Starts out as an inspired test case for the continued necessity of the Second Amendment, and only near the end does it lose some of its tightly concentrated focus.
  83. In Her Shoes
    Diaz and Collette are believable as sisters, but their performances rarely surprise -- in a more interesting movie world, they'd have switched roles.
  84. 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.
  85. Side Effects
    It’s a tantalizing idea - a little rom-com sugar to help the Big Pharma exposé pill go down -but Slattery-Moschkau is simply not a writer of the caliber necessary to pull off that delicate balancing act.
  86. Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown
    Despite its Scottish scenery and period frocks, Madden's film proves a pallid creature indeed compared to the hanky-panky leaking out of Buckingham Palace of late.
  87. A Wake in Providence
    The best news here is Adrienne Barbeau, the 1970s TV star and B-movie queen (Swamp Thing), who invests the role of Anthony's aunt with a worldly-wise sensuality that suggests a long-lost cousin of Tony Soprano.
  88. Passionada
    Nearly drowns in languor, only to be saved by Milos and Isaacs, who are sexy, movie-star talented and, together, really good kissers.
  89. X2: X-Men United
    Singer's approach to X2 is very much of the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" school, resulting in a movie that, even at its best -- a thrilling jailbreak scene that's the closest thing in either X movie to a rousing set piece -- seems tame and unmemorable.
  90. Runaway Jury
    As in all his films, there's a sense that honest human emotion bores Fleder, but he gets points for packing the trial with fine character actors.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Godzilla 2000
    Dumb, fun, out of this world.
  92. On the Outs
    Well-meaning but mediocre.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bee Movie
    For all the muscle and money behind Bee Movie, it still feels unfocused and unfinished.
  94. 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.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Game Plan
    Johnson’s a good actor, but it would take the ghost of Laurence Olivier to convince us that a grown man could legitimately fall for this brat.
  96. Assault on Precinct 13
    Excitably puppyish homage.
  97. Storytelling
    Storytelling is no more likely than "Happiness" or "Welcome to the Dollhouse" to resolve the question of whether director Todd Solondz is a serious artist or a nasty little man with a perversely glum view of the universe.
  98. The Missing
    What neither Howard nor his screenwriter, Ken Kaufman, seem to realize is that The Missing is that much bleaker and more unsettling when its horrors spring forth from the land itself and from the souls of wayward men.
  99. The Girl in the Spider's Web
    Everything has been watered down: the intensity of the hero, the sense of sexual danger, the violence.
  100. The Treatment
    A feather-light comedy about losing emotional baggage and finding love in upper Manhattan.
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