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 8.7 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. Stolen Summer
    A promotional gimmick that's being slipped into theaters with the sort of stealth accorded only the unprofitable or the unwatchable.
  2. Big Bad Love
    Held together by the blues -- Brown's prose and Howard's performance, Big Bad Love is a mess, but it's a sincere mess, beautifully shot by Paul Ryan and faithfully adapted by screenwriter James Howard.
  3. Mean Machine
    It does, however, fairly bubble with speed-freak energy and a dry, laddish wit that keeps the jokes coming.
  4. Drift
    Like "Run Lola Run," Drift circles back on itself to present a trio of possible outcomes, but it's R.T. Lee's sterling performance that rivets.
  5. How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog
    A movie with a lot on its plate, but nothing interesting on its mind.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Cherry Orchard
    Cacoyannis lays on the atmosphere a bit thick with multiple repetitions of a lyrical Tchaikovsky motif underscoring unrequited love, one that is nonetheless beautifully rendered by pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy.
  7. Queen of the Damned
    Townsend and Aaliyah are sexy as hell, and clearly willing and able to explore the darker truths of villainy, but they can't compete against the unwieldy script.
  8. Maryam
    Where the young writer-director impresses is in the unforced sketching of era details (gas lines, the tacky energy of roller-skating rinks), in the sharp psychological insight into his lead characters, and in the performances he pulls from his actors.
  9. Monsoon Wedding
    Nair, who, in this film as in so many others, aims for the beating heart of the predictable movie moment.
  10. Dragonfly
    Despite the film's aspirations to soul healing, its uplift remains mechanical, like an escalator's.
  11. Hart's War
    A decent thriller trying to overcome a rather preposterous premise.
  12. Crossroads
    So dull, a road-trip movie that's surprisingly short of both adventure and song.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last Man
    The result is a Brooks Brothers comedy -- part Albert, part Mel.
  14. Scratch
    Simultaneously hilarious and deeply informative thanks to the vibrant personalities at its center.
  15. Super Troopers
    Begins so well that it's painful to watch it degenerate into tried-and-true frat-boy humor.
  16. John Q
    A coercive script by James Kearns, and some middling direction by Nick Cassavetes, can't rob the movie of an undeniable, headlong crowd-pleasing power.
  17. Wendigo
    The film's best and scariest moments come when Miles is confronted with scenes that he translates into proof of the Wendigo's power.
  18. Return to Never Land
    Cleverly structured, fast-paced, funny, even moving.
  19. Collateral Damage
    A pretty decent action picture.
  20. 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.
  21. Scotland, Pa.
    It's a setup so easy it borders on facile, but keeping the film from cheap-shot mediocrity is its crack cast.
  22. Rollerball
    Rollerball pushes the Hollywood action movie to stratospheric new levels of incoherence; pounding at the senses, it's mashed story, character, time and space into a chunky hash.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Big Fat Liar
    Old people are made to look ridiculous; clowns are brutalized; characters talk in rapid-fire vaudeville shtick.
  24. A Rumor of Angels
    A Rumor of Angels beats its wings furiously, only to sink back into spiritualist goo.
  25. Birthday Girl
    Kidman, who speaks Russian for much of the movie, turns in a technically impeccable performance, but the movie gets far more out of her than she out of it.
  26. Slackers
    Barely proficient on a craft level, this jumble of putatively comic misunderstanding and overly familiar crude burlesque achieves its nadir with a cameo from Mamie Van Doren, a degrading, shameful turn that lays bare, all too literally, the filmmakers' contempt for women.
  27. 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.
  28. Maelstrom
    Dark, wickedly funny tale.
  29. The Son's Room
    The film portrays a family undone by grief over the death of a loved one; that, in any event, is its plot synopsis. More accurately, the film is a wallow of authorial narcissism, and a tedious, unrelenting, uninteresting wallow at that.
  30. The Count of Monte Cristo
    Reynolds, working in close harmony with cinematographer Andrew Dunn (Gosford Park), brings an infectious brio and an occasional sweeping grace to the classic trappings of Dumas.
  31. Beijing Bicycle
    Had Xiaoshuai trusted audience sympathies to stay with a slightly more forceful character, he'd likely have crafted the heart tugger that the film aims to be.
  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. Metropolis
    This muscular anime melodrama is so visually splendid that on that level alone it qualifies as a breakthrough.
  34. Escaflowne: The Movie
    A smoothly structured, earth-toned and well-drawn Japanese anime.
  35. A Walk to Remember
    West delivers the emotional goods when tragedy strikes in the final reel. If 17-year-old pop star Moore isn't a skilled actress, she's at least unassuming.
  36. Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
    If, for whatever reason, you do find yourself watching it, you may begin to ponder one of life's larger dilemmas: the fact that something can be done does not necessarily mean it should be done.
  37. American Adobo
    The film's failings are only highlighted by the fact that while, occasionally, we're granted real glimpses of interior lives, largely emanating from de Leon, Davao and Picache, those lives are never given the chance to take shape.
  38. Snow Dogs
    Relies almost exclusively on the gushing exuberance of Gooding Jr., and the aw-shucks factor of his digitally expressive, face-licking canine co-stars, leaving such potentially game actors as James Coburn and M. Emmet Walsh out in the cold.
  39. Ha-Hesder
    A capable, soulful thriller with a love story as steamy as is possible when its lead characters are Orthodox Jews.
  40. Italian for Beginners
    With its ludicrous parallels and brisk, funny script (pardon my provincialism, but it sounds all the funnier in Danish), Italian for Beginners is full of larky charm while drawing its emotional vitality from urban loneliness.
  41. State Property
    It almost appears like a little thought went into this otherwise grim exercise in soullessness.
  42. Orange County
    This genial comedy is as unambitious and, at times, as funny as its high concept.
  43. Brotherhood of the Wolf
    Brotherhood has its goofy side -- it's a sleek, creepily atmospheric popcorn entertainment.
  44. What Time Is It Over There?
    Takes raw grief as its point of departure only to play out as a comedy of deadpan heartbreak.
  45. Impostor
    Written by a team of three, the script is more plagued by groupthink than is the film's future Earth.
  46. Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    Very few art documentaries are as deeply in tune with the spirit of their subjects, and the implications are enormous, since Goldsworthy is the rare contemporary art star whose work (what a radical notion) is actually about something.
  47. Black Hawk Down
    In the end, neither the appealing cast -- nor the force of Scott's stunning imagery is enough to make us understand why these men died.
  48. Charlotte Gray
    Charlotte Gray is not a subtle movie, but it is an honorable and surprisingly gripping one.
  49. I Am Sam
    By-the-numbers Oscar bait -- but Penn does manage, against such odds, to make us see Sam as a person, not a performance.
  50. Dark Blue World
    The uneasy meeting of cultures is mirrored all too well in the stiff and clumsy direction.
  51. Monster's Ball
    In its exploitation of human misery, Monster's Ball doesn't just invite cynicism; it provokes hostility.
  52. Gosford Park
    At his best, Altman turns us into interlopers who have stumbled into a world that seems to predate us and persuades us it will continue to teem with life long after we leave the theater.
  53. Ali
    Ali boasts a whole tribe of outstanding secondary performances, of which Jon Voight's Cosell, in an outrageous rug and several tons of pasty-face makeup, is easily the funniest.
  54. 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.
  55. Kate & Leopold
    This winning confection, from a director (Heavy, Cop Land) not known for the lightness of his material or his touch, shows a fine understanding of what the screenwriters of the '40s instinctively grasped, that good screwball is about dialogue and chemistry.
  56. Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
    A witty, well-crafted comedy that combines primal slapstick with sharp satiric banter to keep children and parents laughing together.
  57. How High
    There is something fun about a movie that so brazenly portrays excessive pot smoking.
  58. A Beautiful Mind
    While I don't doubt that Howard's done the best he can, it's sad to see a beautiful mind whittled down by such a plain one.
  59. The Majestic
    May just be the most boring movie ever made; certainly it's the most boring movie I've suffered through to the bitter end.
  60. Joe Somebody
    It all misses the mark emotionally, hindered by one-dimensional characters and telegraphed developments.
  61. Little Otik
    Magnificently twisted black comedy.
    • L.A. Weekly
  62. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    The film is a virtuosic triumph, but parlor tricks don't make movies, and it's Jackson's unwavering sincerity that elevates The Fellowship of the Ring into the increasingly rare Valhalla of the rousing, well-told tale.
    • 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.
  64. Iris
    The film is not a biopic or a portrait of a famous marriage so much as it is an imaginative essay on what made a union between two radically different people work as well as it did.
  65. Lantana
    Notable for its power of surprise and its refusal to immediately clarify the confusion of these lost souls.
  66. In Search of Peace
    The film at times feels less than objective, in part due to Douglas' often breathless narration.
  67. The Royal Tenenbaums
    In a film that verges on greatness, it is a sign of terrific faith, as well as of Anderson's promise as a director, that when one of the characters in The Royal Tenenbaums wears hospital pajamas after a detour into grief, the words over his heart read "recovery area."
  68. Not Another Teen Movie
    Of course, this is just another teen movie -- with tons of dick jokes that don't know when to quit, and buckets of realistic-looking "excrement" splattered all over its "juvenile" cast, and even a couple of gags that actually fly.
  69. Vanilla Sky
    Crowe, for his part, is decency itself, but unlike Amenábar he's a pop romantic with no stomach or aptitude for noir.
  70. Behind the Sun
    That tragedy looms heavily in Behind the Sun only makes its life-affirming moments -- resonate more deeply and powerfully in a film that is one of the year's best.
  71. Eban and Charley
    Drab and muddled romance.
  72. 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.
  73. Segunda piel
    Lukewarm melodrama disappoints.
  74. Baran
    Though Baran is more forgiving of the Afghans' Iranian hosts than they may deserve, writer-director Majid Majidi ("The Color of Paradise") handles his unassuming material with surpassing delicacy, and the poetic eye for the rhythms and routines of hard labor that has become the hallmark of Iranian film.
  75. Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel
    A little too familiar to be wholly satisfying. What makes it worthwhile is Julia Jay Pierrepont III's direction.
  76. Princesa
    By the time Princesa finally slides into halfhearted melodrama in its last quarter, we're only too happy to follow Fernanda back to the rim and a little excitement.
  77. Last Orders
    Superbly adapted by Fred Schepisi from the Booker Prize-winning novel by Graham Swift, Last Orders pays quietly passionate tribute to the unsung working-class generation that fought World War II and survived to take up apparently humdrum lives.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    No Man's Land
    Tanovic steers his story away from feel-good brotherhood clichés and toward the darker reaches of human nature. The principal cast is excellent.
  79. Ocean's Eleven
    The most purely entertaining movie to come out of Hollywood so far this year, and if that doesn't seem worthy of Soderbergh's talents, it's worthy enough for a night's amusement.
  80. Tuvalu
    Allusive as all hell, Tuvalu's slapstick allegory of European socioeconomic upheaval in the 20th century opens with a spoof of "Breaking the Waves" lofty coda, then races through a mise en scène that's equal parts Tarkovsky, Méliès and the Brothers Quay.
  81. The Business of Strangers
    Stettner's vision of both women lacks fullness, relying on stereotypes of feminine strength and vulnerability.
  82. The Affair of the Necklace
    Jeanne is no fun at all. This is no fault of Swank, who's caught in the overall confusion of a movie crippled by its ambitions to be both caper and heartfelt melodrama, to say nothing of a cautionary tale about the politics of celebrity in our own culture.
  83. Texas Rangers
    A blandly competent dramatization of the famed Texas lawmen's post–Civil War history starring the blandly handsome tube stars
  84. Behind Enemy Lines
    A slag heap of outrageous coincidence and shimmering be-all-that-you-can-be posturing, the film is for all intents and purposes another Top Gun retread, which is why its lies don't register as deeply or offensively as those put forth by films like "Mississippi Burning" -- it's too silly to take seriously.
  85. Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys
    The kind of art film that's rarely seen anymore -- the kind that trusts the audience to be as intelligent as the director.
  86. 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.
  87. ABCD
    An observant comedy of cross-cultural befuddlement in a half-assimilated immigrant family, with occasional spasms of propagandistic pleading on behalf of the younger generation.
  88. Trouble Every Day
    A taut mess -- beautiful, gory, tedious and puzzling.
  89. Bangkok Dangerous
    The editing looks like it was done in a blender, and the images of death and grief are so genre-primal that the Pangs hardly bother with dialogue.
  90. In the Bedroom
    Goes the distance to avoid banalizing the dilemma of a reasonable couple unhinged by unreasonable events.
  91. 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.
  92. The Devil's Backbone
    Here is a ghost story so dynamic you could call it a ghost poem.
  93. Così ridevano
    Writer-director Gianni Amelio masterfully chronicles the ways two people can betray each other, and especially themselves, in the name of love.
  94. Spy Game
    The supremely attractive leads, exotic locations (Vietnam, Berlin and Beirut) and fetishized violence imbue the whole intelligence game with undeniable glamour.
  95. Black Knight
    "It's no longer funny, but he refuses to give up the joke." That just about sums it up except for the film's shopworn plot -- and its wretchedly cheap production design.
  96. 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.
  97. Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy
    A refreshing antidote to those E! True Hollywood Story documentaries on adult-film figures like John Holmes, Savannah and Traci Lords.
  98. Novocaine
    If Novocaine fulfilled the promise of its premise and cast, it could be great. As it is, the film is sabotaged by writer-director David Atkins' failure to set a consistent tone and follow through.
  99. The Simian Line
    The interactions between the realms of the magical and the everyday are carried off with an easygoing charm.
  100. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
    A clumsily directed, painstakingly faithful adaptation thats heavy on plot, light on nuance, and features in its title role a young newcomer whose most striking quality is an almost preternatural absence of oomph.
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