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. The Virgin Suicides
    Sofia Coppola, who's directed the film from her own screenplay, narrowly misses making the story work on the screen.
  2. The Situation
    As ambitious in scope as it is interpretively timid, The Situation delivers the requisite incendiary climax, but collapses in on itself with daft speeches about the elusiveness of truth in something called "the fourth dimension of time."
  3. 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.
  4. Bride & Prejudice
    It is a truth universally acknowledged that had Jane Austen lived to see the profits that have been squeezed from her most marketable premise, she'd doubtless have wept, then lobbied for her share of the royalties.
  5. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
    Jolie has a gangly inelegance that suggests a giraffe trying to hang wallpaper -- but the entire movie is predicated on a spark between its prettier-than-thou stars that seems to have bypassed the screen and ignited in the tabloids instead.
  6. Monsters and Men
    Monsters and Men seems as if it was made for the world that existed a few years ago. I honestly can’t tell if my dissatisfaction is with the movie or the era into which it is released.
  7. Bringing Down the House
    Even the director's flat-footed moves can't quell Martin and Latifah, whose combined energy is fearsome and sometimes most amusing.
  8. Glory Road
    Glory Road keeps its focus frustratingly narrow. There's a nugget of an interesting idea here...But first-time director James Gartner's movie is less a study of race than it is a fast break of underdog clichés and "inspirational" speeches.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Steal This Movie
    Throws in a lot of detail but withholds the real secrets of Abbie Hoffman. His life was no fairy tale. Why should it be filmed to end like one?
  10. 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.
  11. 5x2
    There’s precious little character development forward or backward.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bring It On
    Starts strong, but then falters.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Firehouse Dog
    Not quite disturbingly forlorn, but forlorn (and overly literal) just the same, this latest entry in the doggy-acrobat subgenre of canine comedies has but one joke, and it comes early: In the Idol age, celebrity culture has gone to the dogs -- literally.
  14. Brown Sugar
    Despite crisp photography and the director's gift for building a scene, the film doesn't click until the third act, when Mos Def's performance as Dre's protégé appears to energize everyone around him.
  15. Beyond Vanilla
    While moderately entertaining, the film also captures another old dynamic: The “ew” factor dissolves into the yawn factor with surprising quickness.
  16. Fakers
    If you can't count on a British con movie to deliver at least a few moments of entertaining color, well, then what can you count on? Director Richard Janes' slight and wobbly Fakers comes close to shattering one's faith in a just and orderly universe.
  17. Wicker Park
    In the end it doesn't lead to much beyond weepy melodrama. Still, McGuigan draws committed performances from a talented cast.
  18. Envy
    Even the relatively successful pairing of neckless maestro of anxiety Stiller with the indomitably effervescent Black gets bogged down by Steve Adams' aimless screenplay. Would the Barry Levinson who once made "Diner" please wake up and pull himself together?
  19. Breakin' All the Rules
    Yet another unfunny buppie sex comedy in the manner of "The Brothers," "Two Can Play That Game" and "Deliver Us From Eva."
  20. Entrapment
    The only decent actors in Entrapment are high-tech tools of global robbery.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    American Pimp
    Credit the Hugheses for plunging headfirst into a deeply taboo topic, but they're doing it for the wrong reasons and thus playing into the worst of public stereotypes, namely that all black men are hustlers.
  22. Scary Movie
    Some of the funny stuff is actually funny, some of it is funny and yucky, but most of it is just stupid.
  23. Anything Else
    Meant as a return to the form and substance of Allen's far superior early work satirizing the equivocations and betrayals with which we ruin our lives. In fact, the movie only comes alive as a hostile critique of psychoanalysis.
  24. The Young Black Stallion
    IMAX magnifies everything, including flaws, which are legion in this listless, awkward prequel to the 1979 movie based on the novel by Walter and Steven Farley.
  25. Biker Boyz
    Orlando Jones, buff and commanding, steals the film as Soul Train, a lawyer-biker, while Lisa Bonet, a sexy, enigmatic earth mother, is stranded in a movie that has no idea what to do with her.
  26. See No Evil
    The killer in this nasty yet taut slice-and-dice 'em horror flick is a collector of eyeballs, which he removes from his screaming victims with an efficient single swooping motion of his talon-like index finger. If that image makes you grin not cringe, then this movie's for you.
  27. A Good Woman
    Stephen Campbell Moore is miserably out of his depth as the playboy trying to tempt Scarlett, leaving poor Tom Wilkinson to sound a lone note of sophisticated intelligence.
  28. The Hard Word
    The Hard Word’s greatest betrayal, however, is of its cast, of Pearce (hamming it up as the charismatic antihero) and Griffiths (as sexy as ever, but more or less abandoned by the movie midway through), who give it their all but get very little in return.
  29. Shark Tale
    Falls prey to the lazy assumption that a parade of whiz-bang CGI will cover for the absence of a muscular story.
  30. Training Day
    One of those movie equivalents of a freeway pileup -- it's a mess, at once insistently watchable and a total dead end.
  31. 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.
  32. Reconstruction
    Eventually it all starts to feel like an extended European perfume ad: pretty but eye-rollingly pretentious.
  33. Cowboys & Angels
    For all the violence and breaking-up-to-make-up that go on, there's never really a sense of risk or exploration, and the film's pulse never rises above faint.
  34. All the Little Animals
    Three leads do their best with simplistic characters.
  35. 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.
  36. Go Further
    Without the actor’s name and amiably demented grin, Go Further would be an unspeakably tedious and preachy travelogue. With them, this insupportably long home movie, unremarkably directed by Ron Mann, is merely dull.
  37. My Wife Is an Actress
    Calculated to titillate middlebrow audiences on both sides of la Manche.
  38. Vaya
    The movie lays on the melodrama too thick.
  39. People I Know
    As a thriller, People I Know -- which has languished unreleased since 2001 -- is barely plausible. As a critique of the meshing of power politics between East and West coasts, the movie is more smart-alecky than wise.
    • 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.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Trudell
    How could a movie about someone with one of the nation's longest FBI files be this dull?
  42. Hollywood Homicide
    Nothing, in fact, really fits together, most notably the partnership of Ford and Hartnett: Looking weathered yet professional, Ford carries what he can, but pretty and sullen Hartnett barely comes to life, leaving his partner stranded, and straining.
  43. Return to Me
    Where else could this flabby excuse for a women's movie go? Straight to the Oxygen Channel, if it's lucky.
  44. Evelyn
    The movie has a script (by Paul Pender) made of wood, and it's relentlessly folksy, a procession of stagy set pieces stacked with binary oppositions.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Last Time
    The Last Time seems even more hapless than the Midwestern rube it's skewering.
  46. Ray
    For too many minutes of its two and a half hours, Ray flips through its cinematic pages with a breathless and-then-this-happened urgency, offering up little in the way of personality (or truth) beyond Jamie Foxx's strong performance.
  47. L.A. Twister
    The film offers no new insights into its people or into the dynamics of the Hollywood machine -- the whole affair, played for low-intensity laughs, is numbingly familiar.
  48. The Hidden Half
    Ultimately, The Hidden Half is shopworn feminist soap opera, enacted in a political echo chamber.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Last Legion
    Second-rate sword-and-sorcery saga.
  50. The Lightkeepers
    Danner, the film's sole strength, does what she can with the material, but it's not enough to offset writer-director Daniel Adams' cliché-ridden script and leaden direction, or the excruciating hamfest that is Richard Dreyfuss' lead performance.
  51. Bandido
    Director Roger Christian (Battlefield Earth -- yes, that Battlefield Earth) and screenwriters Scott Duncan and Ned Kerwin have been influenced more by James Bond than El Mariachi–style spaghetti Westerns.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
    There's something terminally small about this big-screen melodrama, with its trite characterizations of fighting parents, empty pockets and kind hearts.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Human Traffic
    Turns into a driving soundtrack accompanied by a film.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stardom
    With Woody Allen's "Celebrity," Altman's "Prêt-à-Porter" and MTV's "House of Style" predating it by half a decade, this is kind of like clubbing harp seals in a meat locker.
  55. Renaissance
    The director is Christian Volckman, whose skills as an animator greatly exceed his grasp of an idea worth pursuing.
  56. How High
    There is something fun about a movie that so brazenly portrays excessive pot smoking.
  57. Harrison's Flowers
    A premise so patently absurd, so implausible, they might as well have pitched it to the Oxygen channel.
  58. Stuck on You
    By the time of its medical-operation climax, Stuck On You has focused so much on ennobling the disabled that it comes to resemble a segment of the Jerry Lewis telethon.
  59. The Phantom of the Opera
    Watching the passionless Phantom, with its geriatric story-framing device, gooey dimestore romanticism and tawdry pop ballads about unrequited yearning, feels akin to dying and waking up in your parents’ easy-listening-radio hell.
  60. Texas Rangers
    A blandly competent dramatization of the famed Texas lawmen's post–Civil War history starring the blandly handsome tube stars
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The New Daughter
    Unfortunately, Berdejo doesn't seem to know the difference between "slow" and "suspenseful," erring on the side of the former far too frequently. It's mostly formulaic fare, too.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Perfect Game
    Barely dramatizing off-the-field struggles like visa problems and the boys' first taste of good ol' American racism, the film does a disservice to the community it depicts by rendering an inspiring cultural story entirely uninspired.
  63. Event Horizon
    The worst thing about Event Horizon--written by Philip Eisner, directed by Paul Anderson--isn't all the gore decorating the 21st-century space ship that gives the movie its name, but the filmmakers' reliance on shock edits and headache-inducing sound F/X to obscure the fact that this is one of the most derivative movies to hit screens in memory.
  64. Manic
    Melamed's debut film, Manic, set in a juvenile mental institution, has all the uncertainties of a first run-through.
  65. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
    Only once, in a quick sketch of "Planet of the Apes" -- does the humor seem to spring from pure movie love. In nearly every other respect, the film is so lazy, solipsistic and overpleased with itself it's hard not to believe that this time the Evil Empire has won not just the battle, but the war.
  66. 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.
  67. Undertaking Betty
    It's rarely a good sign when a movie feels obliged to add the words "a fable" beneath its main title -- and Undertaking Betty is no exception.
  68. Daddy Day Care
    Feels like a movie cribbed together from outtakes of other hapless Hollywood comedies -- rejected scenes where the line readings fell flat, the chemistry expired or the adult actors couldn't wipe the "get this brat away from me" scowl from their faces.
    • 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.
  70. Open Water
    Open Water is just one tedious scene stretched out to feature length. It's terrifying all right, but only for what it says about the extents to which a couple of hungry actors and a bullish director will go to turn themselves into overnight celebrities.
  71. Testosterone
    The cutesy opening of writer-director David Moreton's Testosterone (co-written with Dennis Hensley) turns out to be a crippling miscalculation.
  72. Auggie Rose
    None of it rings true, and it distracts from the film's real heart, which, on its own, would have made for a strikingly original first film.
  73. Basic Instinct 2
    Basic Instinct 2 pushes diligently along in a murder-and-mayhem-stuffed effort to demonstrate that (a) a sillier and more hackneyed movie than "Basic Instinct" is possible and (b) that shrinks have ids too, by golly.
  74. Big Girls Don't Cry
    Sleek, not-quite-trashy-enough melodrama.
  75. Sex, Politics & Cocktails
    This peculiar little comedy, shot on digital video, gets points for editorial pizzazz, but earns a big zero for content.
  76. Along Came a Spider
    By the time it hits you, you're worn out by all the dead ends and false trails the movie has put you through.
  77. The Limey
    A disappointed meditation on the '60s.
  78. Bon voyage
    The cast's sometimes capable, sometimes gross mugging is overwhelmed by lavish costumes, shiny vintage cars, hordes of meticulously directed extras, and the here-incongruous seriousness with which the French still regard this momentous, if humiliating, chapter of their national history.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The King and I
    The tale has been tidied, buffed, waxed and polished into a harmless but relatively boring adventure.
  80. The Cat's Meow
    An inert, respectable bore.
  81. Season of the Witch
    The makeup department's glommed-on plague pustules are fantastic, but the concession to modern technology in a badly rendered last-act CGI demon, cut and pasted from a Diablo II screen-grab, is so eminently lame as to cure all fear of hellfire.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Men in Black II
    Smith and Jones sometimes have to paddle hard to keep their heads above the toilet water in which screenwriters Robert Gordon (Galaxy Quest) and Barry Fanaro (Kingpin) occasionally dunk them. But if the presence of Smith and Jones is indeed the tinker-proof ingredient of the Men in Black formula, little else seems to have survived the production unaltered.
  83. How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog
    A movie with a lot on its plate, but nothing interesting on its mind.
  84. Tape
    A tedious exercise in ethical hand wringing.
  85. Johnson Family Vacation
    The picture shows vital signs only in a few scenes where Cedric takes on the additional role of his own lecherous uncle, but it's too little too late.
  86. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    This sophomoric stuff is pure self-indulgence, a drone to accompany the admittedly eye-popping sound-and-light show. Oshii looks like yet another director who has gone off the deep end, believing too absolutely his own good reviews.
  87. Revolution #9
    So riddled with unanswered questions that it requires gargantuan leaps of faith just to watch it plod along, while McCann's overly broad strokes miss crucial details as he tries to mount an attack on both the power of the media and an indifferent medical profession.
  88. Abandon
    Aiming to elicit a last-minute shiver from the audience, Gaghan is likely to get instead a mood-destroying giggle.
  89. Oliver Twist
    Lacking energy and pace and enslaved by a ghastly score, this tepid movie left me longing alternately for David Lean's thrillingly grim 1948 masterpiece, and Carol Reed's chipper 1968 sing-along, with pretty tunes by Lionel Bart.
  90. Out Cold
    There’s no point slamming this fart-and-burp teen flick, since the chortles of the 11-year-old boys -- and the men with an 11-year-old's disposition -- at a recent mall screening can't be denied.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hard Luck
    Though the effect is Bergman esque, Rubio doesn't always sustain the necessary gravity his story requires.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Superstar
    It isn't so easy to laugh at Mary Katherine Gallagher and her disgusting antics when she actually has feelings.
  93. Soft Fruit
    The characters...are so unlikable that one longs for a bit of cheap sentiment if only to make them palatable.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Break-Up
    Sadly, The Break-Up is simply an exercise in confusion. To call it erratic would be to imply there was a course it went off, but the film's intentions are impossible to fathom.
  95. Peaceful Warrior
    You'd have to be either an avid New Ager or willing to see Nick Nolte in absolutely anything to get fully onboard for this visually overexcited tale of salvation-by-gas-station-guru.
  96. Bug
    Our traumatized soldiers deserve better representation than this irretrievably ridiculous drama, which will do nothing to revive the flagging fortunes of the man whose career lay down and died after "The Exorcist" and "The French Connection."
  97. Skinwalkers
    The only thing more boring than a vampire with moral issues about biting people in the neck is a werewolf who’d rather become fully human than howl at the moon once a month.
  98. Shade
    The flashes of warm, human talent that pulse periodically from the ensemble -- Byrne and Foxx, particularly -- only make their presence in this terrifically bad movie all the more baffling.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Pink Panther
    With the exception of one scene with an accent coach, his (Martin) Clouseau is flabby and obvious, like your dad doing an impression at the dinner table.
  100. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
    Welsh director Sara Sugarman and the great cinematographer Stephen Burum (Hoffa, The Untouchables) keep the visuals bouncing along in bright, primary-color-intensive fashion, but the movie has no real heart and even less soul.
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