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. 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.
  2. Dear Frankie
    The movie’s glib trafficking in illness, death and pinched little faces to jury-rig our emotional responses (Gibb was inspired by the equally likable, equally pandering Czech film "Kolya") lost me at hello.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Underdog
    Even the promising team of Peter Dinklage’s mad scientist Simon Barsinister and Patrick Warburton’s henchman Cad turns out to be a bust.
  4. Lucía, Lucía
    After a lively first half-hour, the scenes start to feel heavy, as though Serrano suddenly decided he was actually making a meaningful drama, and the ensuing, halfhearted political satire is like an extra weight on top of that.
  5. The Invisible Circus
    Something there is about the '60s that undoes the most intelligent of filmmakers.
  6. Winter Solstice
    Too sensitive for this world or any other, this stifling portrait of a family stuck in bereavement offers the painful sight of at least two highly accomplished actors frozen for lack of direction from novice writer-director Josh Sternfeld.
  7. Madagascar
    Anemic.
  8. Phone Booth
    At only 84 minutes, Phone Booth's brevity turns out to be its only saving grace.
  9. A Sound of Thunder
    The barometer of the film's undoing is Burns' super-low-key performance, which starts out as a pokerfaced spoof on heroic cool, but takes a misstep more fatal than mere time travel can undo.
  10. Night at the Golden Eagle
    The director pulls back from the hotel, placing it against the skyline of our beautiful city, which appears to be waiting, patiently, for a more original exploration of its inhabitants.
  11. Remember the Daze
    Remember the Daze has the irony-free, instant-nostalgia earnestness of your high school yearbook, but watching it is not likely to conjure your own youthful emotions -- it’s more like flipping through the generic memories of a complete stranger.
    • 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.
  13. Gender Bias
    What really sink the film are the script's reductive, outdated psychological implications (molestation leads to queerness/transsexualism) and its clumsy melodramatics.
  14. In Search of Peace
    The film at times feels less than objective, in part due to Douglas' often breathless narration.
  15. Raising Helen
    Raising Helen is the kind of movie you watch on a plane while muttering “utter crap” under your breath -- and then burst into tears.
  16. Swing
    If there's any reason to watch this otherwise inept romance, it's to witness the late Nell Carter nail a Louis Jordan tune, and to see master comic Jonathan Winters downplay his more manic tendencies and effortlessly spin gold from straw.
  17. The Wedding Date
    Anemic.
  18. Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    Even more problematic is the script's clumsy, sprawling architecture, Sheridan's clubfooted sense of pacing and his grubby, indistinct visuals. The only upside? The Chieftains aren't on the soundtrack.
  19. Let It Snow
    In lieu of developing a plot, the brothers opt to cram their cache of forced quirks and hit-or-miss sketches into a framework of predictabilities.
  20. The Life of David Gale
    The movie's one unalloyed pleasure is a funny Goth Girl, played by Melissa McCarthy, who grasps, as Parker apparently doesn't, that the script is energetic rubbish, not The Greatest Story Ever Told.
  21. Assassination Nation
    While sometimes messy, this material is emotionally resonant and cinematically alive.
  22. 24 Hours on Craigslist
    Intermittently amusing, rarely illuminating and ultimately tedious documentary.
  23. Dark Blue
    My own view is that, like me, the LAPD was defeated by the movie's incestuously proliferating plots. I've seen Dark Blue twice, and I still don't have a handle on all its comings and goings.
  24. Garfield
    Under Peter Hewitt's phoned-in direction, Garfield chugs along like the slow train to Chattanooga, with only Jennifer Love Hewitt, as the local vet, twittering pertly in a desperate effort to raise Jon's feeble pulse.
  25. Swiri
    Though the two-hour film can go slack with excess explication, Shiri compensates with an overheated drive that forces the myopia of current events toward a broader field of vision.
  26. 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.
  27. Tamara
    Tamara simply doesn't cover all the bases in its drive to be both a grubby teen splatter flick and a more high-minded thriller.
  28. The Truth About Charlie
    The story itself falls to earth with a thud, not least because of a casting catastrophe. The boyish, goofily smiling Wahlberg is egregiously out of place as the kind of charming-ambiguous dreamboat you'd have to be Cary Grant to pull off.
  29. It Runs in the Family
    The question is not how bad this excuse for a domestic comedy is (medium cringe), but how the gifted Fred Schepisi got suckered into directing a vanity project.
  30. Blue Hill Avenue
    The film is naive in its glorification of violence and vengeance.
  31. How Stella Got Her Groove Back
    This upscale Harlequin fantasy film works much the same terrain as Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, a '50s weepy about an affair between an older woman and a younger man, though without an iota of its wit or intelligence.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Delta Farce
    You could make a case that any movie in which Mexicans and rednecks become best of friends is a net positive for society. But to do that, you'd have to ignore the severe boredom that sets in about halfway through this comedy.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
    In the age of creationism, a sympathetic mix of science and religion sounds like a promising premise. But in this genre-blending cocktail of drama, documentary and computer-graphic animation, quantum physics is so subordinated to the service of an anything-goes mysticism that little remains of the science except the terminology.
  34. The War Within
    Mired in noir cliché, the movie manages to be simultaneously overwrought and undercooked, with the Bambi-eyed Akhtar giving such a relentlessly inscrutable performance, one wants to poke him with a stick.
  35. Malibu's Most Wanted
    Amiable but not especially funny film.
  36. The Ring Two
    Might have something interesting to say about cultural ambivalence by and toward the maternal impulse if only it had a spark of originality or verve.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Year of the Yao
    This glorified infomercial glosses over the underlying tension of a young man's introduction into a society whose materialistic, capitalist tendencies are diametrically opposed to his country's values.
  38. 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.
  39. Dude, Where's My Car?
    A film where everyone -- white, black, gay or otherwise -- is equally, lovably dumb.
  40. Sphere
    While the length and ridiculous finale are a drag, the only thing that stinks about Sphere is its pervasive boys-club snarkiness, especially since Stone is actually good. Levinson has always been a better director of men, but it would be nice if Attanasio could learn how to write a role for a woman that wasn't an embarrassment as well as an insult.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Titan A.E.
    An overproduced cartoon without a freeze-dried ounce of wit.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Domino
    Scott's lack of faith in the script is all too evident -- in most scenes, the lines are so dull, he has to up the ante of his already-infamous attention-deficit style.
  43. Bandits
    Too long, too slow, too self-consciously chatty and too much at the mercy of a slim premise that doesn't wear well under endless repetition.
  44. The Other Side of the Bed
    The dancing is dazzling in director Emilio Martínez-Lázaro's The Other Side of the Bed, but the movie itself is a dud.
  45. Friends and Family
    Coury has made a technically polished first film, but her sense of comic timing and sexual politics is strictly borscht belt.
  46. A Rumor of Angels
    A Rumor of Angels beats its wings furiously, only to sink back into spiritualist goo.
  47. Crazy as Hell
    It could have been a hoot in a bad-movie way if the laborious pacing and endless exposition had been tightened. As it is, only LaSalle's sizzling performance makes Crazy more than a by-the-numbers psycho-horror thriller.
  48. Ride
    Despite valiant effort from the performers — especially Usher, who's onscreen for nearly every scene — this three-hander is no joyride.
  49. Double Jeopardy
    All promise and no payoff.
  50. Knuckleball
    Knuckleball mostly fills up its running time by being a twisted, even more ridiculous Home Alone.
  51. In Paris
    Cliché, or experiment with cliché? Really, it’s not worth sticking around to find out, since the action mostly involves the monotonous Romain Duris standing around in his underpants or sitting on the toilet banging on about why love has fled.
  52. Bossa Nova
    This suffocatingly pleasant cross between "Sliding Doors" and "Six Degrees of Separation" is barely rescued by one beautiful scene.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    London
    Perhaps the best compliment that can be paid to Hunter Richards' directorial debut is that it nearly manages to make some of the most irritatingly shallow human beings on Earth seem tragic.
  54. Naqoyqatsi
    Incoherence reigns.
  55. Jeepers Creepers
    Salva falls back on dull, jumbled action and an awkward subplot as he lurches toward a sequel.
    • 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.
  57. Two Drifters
    The setup and execution of this quietly histrionic tale of the distorting power of thwarted love are so patently ridiculous that the urge to laugh gets in the way.
  58. A Bug's Life
    The most pleasure to be had from this high-tech bore is to compare the Disney world-view evidenced here (the triumph of collectivism) with that of DreamWorks’ own creepy-crawler animation, “Antz” (the triumph of individualism).
  59. The Grudge
    Isn't art, but as date-night fright flicks go, it's effective.
  60. Twist
    A stripling of 24, Tierney has a very young man's immature passion for unrelieved misery, which borders at times on the tedious, at others on the downright comical.
  61. 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.
  62. New York Minute
    Reverts to a fire-sale slapstick scenario that includes multiple tumbles into toilets/sewers/ dumpsters; a visit to a Harlem beauty shop that's all homily-spouting mammies and swishy, finger-snapping dandies; and the attempted inducement of a constipated dog's bowel movement.
  63. Without a Paddle
    Burt Reynolds, whose near-vaudevillian comic timing, is refreshing but not enough to carry the picture.
  64. Appleseed
    The film's snazzy new automated animation style falls short: The supposedly human face of our metal-plated robocop's partner -- the inevitable curvy female in a leather jump suit -- is an inexpressive, glossy doll mask, untouched by human hands.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Carman: The Champion
    Drags through one tough-love moment after another without much energy or originality from its single-monikered star.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Azumi
    Failing in its attempts at Zhang Yimou–like poetry, Azumi calls to mind a long, blood-splattered director's cut of a Power Rangers episode.
  67. Ordinary Sinner
    What really hamstrings Sinner, though, is the hetero narcissism beneath its enlightened posturing.
  68. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
    Infernally boring for much of its running time, and then, just as the pulse starts to quicken: To be continued.
  69. 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.
  70. Hollywood Buddha
    The result is at once a woefully overfamiliar bashing of Hollywood superficiality and a seemingly unwitting paean to the self-absorbed enlightenment that passes among industry folk for personal growth.
    • 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.
  72. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights
    The dance sequences might have saved it, were it not for the fact that director Guy Ferland seems to have learned everything he knows about (over) shooting and (blindly) cutting such scenes from watching "Moulin Rouge" and "Chicago."
    • 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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Name Is Khan
    For a movie that preaches cultural understanding, it sometimes seems a little too comfortable perpetuating ethnic stereotypes.
  75. Cold Creek Manor
    Cold Creek Manor's prime reason for being seems to be a set piece involving poisonous snakes, directed by Figgis with a drunken gusto the rest of the film could use, and as a comeback vehicle for Stone, who tries hard at motherly warmth, but can't quite wash the Catherine Tramell out of her hair.
  76. Touch of Pink
    Touch of Pink is really a big glob of "The Wedding Banquet," with some "Will & Grace" mixed in to remind us that gay people are actually quaintly neurotic and funny once you get to know them.
  77. Saw
    A story that's so ridiculous you'll at least be entertained by the outrageous plot contortions to come.
  78. Just a Kiss
    A twisted black comedy -- The accomplished ensemble meshes nicely, but the actors all look pale and exhausted, an effect that may be a byproduct of the film’s photography, which is terrible.
  79. Loving Pablo
    Double-stuffed with kill squads, killer ’80s couture and mood-killing howlers, Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s Loving Pablo is more a greatest hits than a story, the kind of radically compressed life-of-a-legend movie where everything happens in a giddy, ridiculous gush — except for when it slows down to dwell on horrors.
  80. Secuestro express
    Too often, though, Jakubowicz falls back on his relentlessly pirouetting DV camera, attention-deficient editing and ear-splitting sound effects as a substitute for real tension, or a more piercing inquiry into the bubbling tension between South America's haves and its poverty-stricken have-nots.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Crazy in Alabama
    The two disparate yet thematically linked storylines are far too faithfully transposed for a feature-length treatment -- crammed together, they're denied the space to flesh out as a cohesive whole.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Way of the Gun
    Isn't a bad film, but as we watch it we're constantly rewriting it in our minds to make it a better one.
  83. The Perfect Man
    Rosman and Wendkos run dry of ideas in the film's inert, overextended finale, when the "Believe in yourself" speeches grow so thick that even the Duff-devoted may start rolling their eyes.
  84. Sidewalks of New York
    Burns, who made a career out of his mildly charming Irish-American rogue persona, has, with his latest and fourth feature, finally sloughed off the remaining traces of that charm, along with, apparently, the vestiges of a personality.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    3 Billion and Counting
    Perfunctorily shot and edited, the project hinges only on Rutledge-Taylor's findings, which begin to raise eyebrows once pragmatic activism is thrown out the window in favor of the blame game.
  86. 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Call + Response
    The result is like "American Idol" meets C.A.R.E. infomercial.
  88. 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.
  89. 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.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Piñero
    The main drawback is Claudio Chea's vertiginous camera work -- and the print's continual alternations between black-and-white and color add nothing but a distracting ornamentation.
  91. Monster's Ball
    In its exploitation of human misery, Monster's Ball doesn't just invite cynicism; it provokes hostility.
  92. The Illusionist
    The movie is leaden and self-serious, with an unusually hollow performance from Norton, who's not for a moment convincing as a man of raging passion. Far better is Paul Giamatti.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Arthur and the Invisibles
    Predictable and overly busy, this sci-fi adventure should nonetheless appeal to computer-game-savvy tots, especially those familiar with the source material, while boring their parents silly.
  94. Psycho Beach Party
    Ultimately, Psycho...can't overcome the redundancy of parodying a genre that long ago sank into its own satiric muck.
  95. Scream 2
    The less ticklish bad joke of Scream 2 is that self-referentiality has its limits.
  96. This Thing of Ours
    This Thing of Ours is infatuated with the romance of gangsterism -- with an absurdly straight face, it asks us to feel mournful for the loss of “respect” and “integrity” in the mob community.
  97. 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.
  98. One Night with the King
    Those viewers who found anti-Semitism lurking under every stone in The Passion of the Christ may rejoice in this celebration of Jewish heroism; all others should rest assured that falling asleep in the cinema is not a mortal sin.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Skyline
    The military eventually shows up to nuke the joint (L.A., incidentally), but there's no urgency, suspense or charm with all that back-row rattle.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Redline
    The cars and stunt work are real, and so is the rather endearing retro cheesiness. This is the movie that really belongs with Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof."
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »