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 8.9 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
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  1. Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
    Ray Harryhausen's original stop-motion Sinbad classics are a hard act to follow, but Tim Johnson and Patrick Gilmore's update, couched in a gorgeous palette of indigo and dark rose, is a big, beautiful thrill all its own.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    Plays more like a disjointed radio show with pictures -- The power of Chomsky's intellect and message are poorly served when pigeonholed by the hagiography of some of his supporters.
  3. 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."
  4. The Gatekeeper
    Earnest, shoestring indie that makes use of some sharp location shooting and sympathetic performances to rise above its often awkward staging and writing.
  5. Ju-on: The Grudge
    Occasionally scary, never coherent.
  6. The Oh in Ohio
    Posey and Rudd are the real deal, so it's almost sad when Priscilla and Jack are left hanging in the final act, their issues unresolved. It's as if the filmmakers lost their nerve when it came time to write the kind of intimate, revealing conversation that can make a sex toy unnecessary.
  7. Sugar & Spice
    Any movie offering a Muzak version of the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop"warrants an immediate and unqualified recommendation.
  8. Final
    On the strength of such skillful pacing, and the pair's beautifully modulated performances (Leary's never been so warm or vulnerable), the film builds almost imperceptibly to a climax that's as moving as it is startling.
  9. Scary Movie
    Some of the funny stuff is actually funny, some of it is funny and yucky, but most of it is just stupid.
  10. Rush Hour 2
    The best parts of the movie occur during the outtakes, which are genuinely funny. The movie proper is insufferable.
  11. Prey for Rock & Roll
    The movie deflates, but you still can't take your eyes off Gershon, who does her own singing, is fearless in the one girl-on-girl make-out scene, and is mesmerizing throughout -- an underused Barbara Stanwyck in a Gwyneth Paltrow age.
  12. Janice Beard
    Slight but charming comedy.
  13. Chicken Little
    Chicken Little is a clunky, arbitrarily plotted, over-caffeinated spritz that, despite colorfully visualizing a world of suburbanized animals, shifts from social-outcast comedy to underdog clichés to War of the Worlds mayhem as if the filmmakers were an improv troupe slamming through genre requests.
  14. The Idiots
    Becomes guilty of the very prejudice that his film has so obviously tried to subvert. It's too bad -- the rest of it is hilarious.
  15. Vertical Limit
    A thriller that, at its best, has the gooney absurdity of an old Saturday-afternoon movie serial.
  16. The Santa Clause 2
    While the film is not entirely successful, it still manages to string together enough charming moments to work.
  17. Elvira's Haunted Hills
    Peterson and her longtime writing partner, John Paragon, as well as director Sam Irvin, clearly worship the Poe-inspired Roger Corman/Vincent Price films of the 1960s, so of course there’s a pit and a pendulum in that dungeon, but who’d have expected it to be so beautifully designed?
  18. Maze
    Holds its potentially problematic ingredients together remarkably well, summoning outstanding performances from Morrow and Linney, while never dipping into sentiment or patronizing the ailment's sufferers.
  19. The Core
    The first half-hour of The Core is hip enough to its own moribund formula that for a brief, shining moment, there's hope the film will actually be a goofy gas instead of the effects-bound lump it becomes.
  20. Orange County
    This genial comedy is as unambitious and, at times, as funny as its high concept.
  21. Super Troopers
    Begins so well that it's painful to watch it degenerate into tried-and-true frat-boy humor.
  22. Hit and Runway
    Surprisingly smart film.
    • 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. High Crimes
    While its blowout finale is telegraphed long before the first act ends, and too much else is just as obvious and bland, Judd, Freeman and Franklin never stop adding filigree. The big picture isn't much to look at, but the detailing isn't bad.
  25. The Fantasticks
    This is the first Broadway-sourced movie musical in umpteen years, and you should see it, because the score is gorgeous.
  26. Shallow Hal
    Shallow Hal is "Shrek" for grown-ups, a fairy tale right down to its reverse-Cinderella plot.
  27. Dummy
    Milla Jovovich, as Steven's Yiddish-spouting punk-rocker friend, is so bad, she's downright entertaining.
  28. Incantato
    There may, somewhere in the premise of Incantato, lie the inspiration for a fine farce, but under Avati's shaky stewardship, the picture is leaden and charmless.
  29. Orgazmo
    There’s something entirely ridiculous about rating a movie like this NC-17: Why should sniggering, infantile, adolescent humor be denied its natural core audience of snigger-ing, infantile adolescents?
  30. The Longest Yard
    Peter Segal's film, a predictable, choppy affair at best, boasts an understated, likable performance by Sandler, but here we never feel, as we did with the original, invested in the outcome of the final game, or convinced of the redeemability of the movie's sordid protagonist.
  31. The Rider Named Death
    Curiously flat and immobile.
  32. American Gun
    This is "Crash" with gun violence substituted for racism, although the tone of director–co-writer Aric Avelino's debut feature may be closer to one of those pious public-safety films that used to be shown to schoolchildren in order to frighten them out of potential bad behavior.
  33. Step Up
    The movie serves up a pleasant, if unsurprising, confluence of classic ballet with street dance, not to mention a seamless collusion of polite racial integration with savvy niche marketing.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dirty Laundry
    Cheesy crockpot of a film.
  35. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    Khouri manages, with terrific flair, to keep the extremes of screwball farce and blood-curdling family intensity on one continuum -- not only through the strength of the performances (including one from James Garner, who, as Sida's dad, gets the best one-liners) but in the ways they match across time.
  36. Murder at 1600
    The convoluted plot unfolds mechanically and with little atmosphere as if sex and death in the Oval Office would provide enough gravity on its own. That it doesn't is a sign of mediocre filmmaking as well as a measure of just how cynical the times have become.
  37. The Great Raid
    The Great Raid cries out for the kind of B-movie industriousness that Dahl brought to his early, low-budget films noirs (Kill Me Again, Red Rock West and The Last Seduction), but instead it has dreams of sugarplum Oscars dancing in its head, and never stops mistaking spectacle for the truly spectacular.
  38. Condo Painting
    A superb, instructive portrait of an artist at work.
  39. Adam & Steve
    Adam & Steve is uneven, but it's a relief to see a gay romance that isn't about ab-perfect 20-year-olds, and which features lovers played by two long out-of-the-closet actors. Wonder of wonders.
  40. The Thing About My Folks
    Raymond De Felitta's directing is straightforward, tactful, lyrical where necessary and never mawkish, and though Reiser's script offers no grand insights, it's full of sharply observed and funny detail.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    National Treasure: Book of Secrets
    This ain’t "The Da Vinci Code," folks, and the reason you can tell is that it’s actually quite entertaining.
  42. xXx
    The film gives good action (amid more tired spy business) but comes riddled with contradictions.
  43. The Mummy Returns
    You can't see the movie for the footage, so thick is it with digital tricks and furious action.
  44. Hard Ball
    Until its dismaying final 15 minutes, this baseball redemption movie sails along on the charms of cute kids and a star who makes up in bone structure what he lacks in talent.
  45. Kiss Me, Guido
    That crack in Vitale's storytelling foundation would be forgivable if the writing, acting and character epiphanies . . . well, existed. As it is, not even Scotti's formidable lips can blow life into this stillborn flick.
  46. Shark Tale
    Falls prey to the lazy assumption that a parade of whiz-bang CGI will cover for the absence of a muscular story.
  47. A Love Song for Bobby Long
    Not terrible for a movie featuring John Travolta as a literature professor, but not too good either.
  48. 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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
    Like Percy himself, the film doesn’t have any traits that qualify as having an actual personality. Even so, as long as the kiddies aren’t too upset by the major liberties reportedly taken with the source material, it might be enough to distract them until Harry returns.
  50. Smile
    If the dialectics here are strictly Hallmark, the film is lifted by some nice location work - all of the Chinese scenes are shot around Shanghai - and deepened somewhat by the bleak depiction of the emotional lives of Katie, her family and her friends.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Weather Girl
    Humdrum but marketable comedy.
    • 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.
  53. Fun with Dick and Jane
    This is satire made from the inside of the ivory tower, and when, late in the third act, Fun With Dick and Jane decides to come on strong with platitudes about how the petit bourgeois really can stick it to the haute bourgeois, it goes from bad to worse.
  54. Cote d'Azur
    Bruni-Tedeschi is her usual radiantly libidinal presence, but channeling Bette Midler doesn't become her, and even she can't redeem all the redundant vaudeville carry-on.
  55. What Women Want
    Narrow definitions of femininity limit the comedy and the romance.
  56. Brother
    Brother is a solid return to gangster form for Kitano, who knows how to transcend the most overly familiar genre clichés without betraying the rules of engagement.
  57. The Guru
    By the time a Bollywood production number segues into the finale from "Grease," the transition not only makes perfect sense, it sparkles.
  58. The City of Lost Souls
    While the film throws a solid pop punch, you could still swear you've seen it all before.
  59. Josie and the Pussycats
    A surprisingly smart satire around the bubble-gum band that first found life in the pages of the Archie comic book series.
  60. Borstal Boy
    Overall Sheridan keeps both "Oirishry" and sentimentality in check. He captures the book's evenhanded sense.
  61. Enemies of Laughter
    Paymer is the key to this mild-mannered comedy built on easy setups and borscht-belt one-liners.
  62. Better Than Sex
    This is a small, funny movie drawn from the radical notion that a love born of late-night lust can survive the glaring light of day.
  63. Easy
    In forced, quirky tedium, it drags us through love triangles, mommy issues and crying jags that make you want to shake this chick.
  64. In the Cut
    As a movie, it must stand or fall by intense chemistry between the lead characters. Sadly, as co-written by Campion and Moore, In the Cut suffers from a fatal emotional and erotic imbalance.
  65. The Whole Nine Yards
    Well-tuned wisecracks and clever plot twists.
  66. Failure to Launch
    Even by the low standards of high-concept Hollywood rom-coms, this charmless, prophetically titled stinker stands apart, suggesting that the recent mass firings at studio Paramount may not have been such a bad idea after all.
  67. What to Do in Case of Fire
    If the screenwriters never satisfactorily reconcile these charming misfits with the unsettling fact that they're also bomb planters, albeit clumsy ones, they make up for it with smart, character-driven dialogue that's brought to life by an equally sharp ensemble.
  68. Simon Magus
    Unfortunately, it's our knowledge of what's actually to come that puts much of the chill and complexity in Hopkins' rather formulaic script.
  69. WXIII: Patlabor the Movie 3
    The two encounters with the beast WXIII -- first in a darkened factory, and later in an empty stadium, to the strains of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in G Minor (Pathétique) -- elevate the disappointingly flat animation into a vivid fable of monster and morality.
  70. Hotel
    Surprisingly enjoyable, even if you'd hesitate to call it a complete success. Indeed, Figgis expects you to sit back and roll with the pleasurable moments.
  71. Shooting Fish
    Shooting Fish wants to hang with the hip crowd--witness the vibrant colors, the flashy camera work and the stream of catchy pop songs--but its heart just isn't wild enough.
  72. Proteus
    Proteus carries an air of forced-wit experimentation that never quite gets its anachronisms in order -- this 18th-century tale features a Jeep, a radio, and female court reporters with typewriters and bouffant hairdos.
  73. The Matrix Revolutions
    Nearly wall-to-wall climax -- an unwieldy, two-plus-hours third act of a movie, guided by the principle (incubated by "Reloaded" and fully grown here) that too much is never too much.
  74. The Super
    Naturally, not everything is what it seems; there are a couple of necessary untruths even in this plot synopsis. But the part where it seems like some excellent actors have been roped into propping up a hopelessly by-the-numbers horror movie? That’s totally on the level.
  75. Lies
    If Lies were better, the most obvious point of reference would be "In the Realm of the Senses," but the filmmaking isn't good enough to warrant such comparison, and the ideas are half-baked.
  76. Bittersweet Motel
    Never really gets across the essence of who the band members are and why they inspire such fidelity.
  77. Heartbreakers
    Although the film is a tad long, Mirkin ("Romy and Michele's High School Reunion") has managed to pull off a classy, gently funny movie in which no one throws up, a rare blessing these days.
  78. Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
    "Legally Blonde" was a splashy, wide-screen near musical, a movie made in the spirit of Elle Woods herself. Legally Blonde 2 is Elle Woods' eulogy.
  79. Ladder 49
    Phoenix, who initially seemed the kind of actor who was too cool, too angry, to appear in studio pap such as this, is a magnetic presence, despite the numbing pathos surrounding him, but isn't that what we used to say about Travolta?
  80. Flight of the Phoenix
    But, in the end, it may be that man against sand isn't as thrilling as it was back in the day.
  81. Flyboys
    A highly enjoyable programmer about those brave young men and their rickety flying machines.
  82. Swing Vote
    The longer Swing Vote hangs around, the more engaging it becomes. It's twice as smart as you have any reason to expect but still only half as smart as you wish it were.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Where the Truth Lies
    When conventional answers arrive, Where the Truth Lies seems as cheesy as its title -- but its disorienting layers of narrative make the double-entendre almost profound.
  84. The Next Big Thing
    Spins a warm and fuzzy tale about love and happiness in the cutthroat art business.
  85. The Legend of Bagger Vance
    Leven's tepid screenplay and the passionless self-control of Redford's direction make this bloodless movie a chore to sit through.
  86. Where's Marlowe?
    (Ferrer's) performance as the sensitive private dick borders on beatific as he stumbles about a nighttime Hollywood Boulevard waxing lyrical about "love, sex and betrayal."
  87. Sordid Lives
    Some of the performances are remarkably natural amid so much farce.
  88. The Shipping News
    Spacey is nobody's idea of a goodhearted innocent, and I wonder why nobody has told him he'll blow his career if he keeps trying to pass himself off as Mr. Sensitive. It's time to go back to playing assholes. That's what he's good at, and that's why we love him.
  89. Luther
    British director Eric Till’s ghastly Euro-pudding co-production (with all the international accents and badly post-synchronized dialogue that implies) manages to make a travesty of its title subject.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last Shot
    Appealingly cheesy, a tribute to the hope that springs eternal in the hopelessly inept.
  91. Shall We Dance
    Shall We Dance?, which roams all over the emotional map without landing anywhere, is an unwieldy mess that gives every impression of having been made under a mandate to fill the Miramax crowd-pleaser slot.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Halloween (2007)
    Horrific as it is, Halloween isn’t so much a horror film as a biopic, and a superb one at that.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Lost City
    Compelling in fits and starts, actor-director Andy Garcia's The Lost City possesses grand aspirations but troublesome execution.
  94. The Wild
    The animation is cheesy; the banter isn't funny; the score is noisy and grating; and the critters look like stuffed animals. The best that can be said for The Wild is that it's a most insincere form of flattery. The worst is that it's a sincere form of theft.
  95. The Day After Tomorrow
    This highly entertaining spin on eco-catastrophe could turn the most meteorologically challenged among us into Weather Channel freaks.
  96. The Trip
    Throughout, Sullivan and Braun shine, making for a match so sexy and appealing that it's a shame Swain avoids their love life, an approach that doesn't exactly advance gay liberation -- or cinema.
  97. Full Grown Men
    Lyrical and funny, Full Grown Men is a tough-minded film about the need to grow up.
  98. The Legend of Zorro
    The Legend of Zorro is a Saturday matinee entirely lacking in Saturday-matinee thrills or brevity -- what's passable for the first 80 minutes or so becomes intolerable as the movie ticks past the two-hour mark.
  99. Mouth to Mouth
    A rough but boldly imaginative first feature by British-Canadian writer-director Alison Murray.
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