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. The Fluffer
    Saturated with deep, rich color and low-key visual wit, and graced with sympathetic performances.
  2. The Wash
    What the film suffers from most, though, are its own low aspirations: stroking the libidos and funny bones of brain-dead 12-year-old boys immersed in the shallow end of hip-hop.
  3. I Remember Me
    Startlingly affecting -- What emerges is a picture of an illness that causes enormous suffering but whose origins and treatment continue to elude even those doctors who pay attention to it.
  4. Snide and Prejudice
    The Marat/Sade irony of setting these scenes in a madhouse helps, but Macfadyen's volcanic magnetism and spot-on mimicry of Hitler's body language and speech patterns make insight flesh.
  5. 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.
  6. Shallow Hal
    Shallow Hal is "Shrek" for grown-ups, a fairy tale right down to its reverse-Cinderella plot.
  7. Heist
    Can he do the thing? Well, yes and no. He -- Mamet, David, celebrated celebrity playwright and less-certain maker of movies -- can do some of the things, like assemble a cast sleek as a cat.
  8. King of the Jungle
    Overall, King of the Jungle never quite achieves a necessary, culminating insight about charity, or mercy -- though Leguizamo's performance puts one in reach.
  9. The One
    There's nothing like a feature-length video game to make you feel you're being played.
  10. Everything Put Together
    Mitchell -- gives a harrowing, beautifully conceived performance, the depth and arc of which can't be fully appreciated until the film's final scene.
  11. Happenstance
    Fate plays both prankster and deliverer in Firode's never-too-clever scheme, buoyed, like his often-winsome images, by romantic fancy.
  12. Punks
    For a film purporting to tell it like it is for black gay men, race is the most poorly handled aspect in Punk's equation; it's almost as if it had no relevance. That might have flown if its most telling moment didn't suggest otherwise.
  13. Monsters, Inc.
    The story's charming, the set pieces are wildly inventive, and even the throwaway one-liners, about everything from movie-animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen to the old Oscar Meyer jingle, are hilarious.
  14. Amélie
    Sucks -- because it's a frenetic bore that insists on its audience's adoration while making no demands upon their intelligence.
  15. Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV
    Nauseating, tasteless and offensive -- but in all the best ways.
  16. Tape
    A tedious exercise in ethical hand wringing.
  17. Domestic Disturbance
    Absurd beyond belief or reason.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Man Who Wasn't There
    The Coens have resurrected a hardscrabble California of wooden porches and gravel driveways, of rolling, oak-wreathed hills and one-lane roads, and of a restless people whose meager dreams are wrecked the moment money, sex or a bottle get in the way. Never has the past seemed so familiar.
  19. K-PAX
    Manipulative, feel-good drivel wrapped around a cloying performance by Kevin Spacey.
  20. High Heels and Low Lifes
    Director Mel Smith (Bean) struggles to make up for the lack, clumsily juggling screwball dames and criminal elements, and trying to disguise the film's marked lack of vitality with split-screen tricks, jokey camera angles and a limp musical montage.
  21. On the Line
    Bass isn't a gifted actor, but he retains his dignity, mostly by keeping his head down and avoiding the eyes of the idiots around him.
  22. The Town Is Quiet
    Leaves you reeling from the force of the humanity it captures and -- in its own gut-wrenching way -- honors.
  23. Life as a House
    There's nothing particularly wrong with this movie, except that it's too nice for words.
  24. 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.
  25. Thirteen Ghosts
    A brutish affair replete with sliced bodies, a diced storyline and enough clanky dialogue to wake the dead.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Donnie Darko
    It is funny, sad and beautiful. And it's right on time.
  27. Bones
    Director Ernest -- doesn't skimp on style in a film that bluntly exploits social conscience to pump up its taste for gore.
  28. Trembling Before G-d
    Remarkable exploration of sexuality and the Jewish faith.
  29. Intimacy
    Although much has and will be made of the film's sexual explicitness -- and, yes, it is a bit -- this less-than-perfect but deeply felt film is finally most daring for its hard-core insistence on our need for connection.
  30. Focus
    A hyperreal, visually layered period style that finds film noir shadows creeping in at the edges of a blue-sky, get-along-to-go-along America.
  31. Burnt Money
    Those who hang in for the long haul are rewarded with a sexy, moving love story.
  32. A Galaxy Far, Far Away
    Jalil penetrates a carnivalesque subculture of self-reinvention and obsession, emotional need and materialist greed, with a camera that is, by turns, cruel, kind and incisive.
  33. From Hell
    Their discretion makes From Hell less a horror movie than a classical film noir.
  34. The Last Castle
    Lurie manages, despite these obstacles, to inspire Redford to give one of the most layered and interesting performances of his career.
  35. Riding in Cars with Boys
    In many ways, Marshall and Barrymore are an equal match -- while both have a flair for the small touches that build a good comic scene, each lacks the complex layering of motive and emotion that make a human life believably real.
  36. Waking Life
    Individual artists were assigned their own characters and given free rein -- characters and locations shift on a dime from naturalistic to baroque -- with the result that the movie's formal imagination surpasses and redeems the banal tedium of some of the dialogue.
  37. My Voyage to Italy
    Has power not only as film scholarship, but as an inquiry into cinema's interplay with our collective memories and the nature of history itself.
  38. Dancing at the Blue Iguana
    Iguana runs hot and cold, being engaging and dull by turns depending on the plausibility of the character before the camera.
  39. The Human Body
    There's no denying the overwhelming force of the giant IMAX screen, as we're reminded that each of us is the coolest special effect ever.
  40. Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop
    Belongs to the small rank of hip-hop films that actually have something to say -- and that say it with both style and intellectual bite.
  41. 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.
  42. Ha-Chaverim Shel Yana
    There's some funny erotic business with gas masks, but neither that nor the unfolding love story is quite as engrossing as the raucous bunch of former Soviet citizens.
  43. Corky Romano
    What at times feels like a maniacal romp becomes just another sporadically funny, but mostly lame, piece of disposable product.
  44. Iron Monkey
    A pure font of high-flying kung fu artistry, the likes of which has since transformed the way Hollywood's good guys and bad kick the crap out of one another.
  45. Mulholland Dr.
    Not just everything you want in a David Lynch movie, but damn near everything else you want in ANY movie.
  46. My First Mister
    Christine Lahti, making her directorial debut, wrings good laughs and strong emotion throughout, largely through the performances.
  47. Max Keeble's Big Move
    Its overall view of 12-year-old life is essentially one of high-spirited fun.
  48. The Learning Curve
    Opens the floodgates of cartoonish villainy and pitiful sentiment.
  49. Grateful Dawg
    Grisman's warm, loving home movie in the guise of a documentary.
  50. Chop Suey
    Chop Suey really captivates with surfaces; look away for an instant, and the spell is broken.
  51. Joy Ride
    Director John Dahl ("Red Rock West," "The Last Seduction") has a pronounced knack for snap reversals and out-of-the-blue shocks.
  52. The Hidden Half
    Ultimately, The Hidden Half is shopworn feminist soap opera, enacted in a political echo chamber.
  53. The Debut
    Having built his cast from friends and family, the director is left with some stilted acting, but that's easily outweighed by the film's infectious enthusiasm.
  54. Training Day
    One of those movie equivalents of a freeway pileup -- it's a mess, at once insistently watchable and a total dead end.
  55. Serendipity
    As Serendipity moves into the final stretch, Chelsom's direction becomes frenzied but still lethargic; he never breathes life into the film.
  56. La Ciénaga
    Martel's off-the-cuff candor and intelligent eye for the quietly telling detail charts the progressive rot not only of a family, but of an entire social class.
  57. Va Savoir (Who Knows?)
    Va Savoir doesn't so much flow as wander, trailing off into drama one minute, slapstick the next; it tries your patience, but ever so gently, masterfully.
  58. Born Romantic
    Kane believes in happy endings, but he makes his characters earn theirs, as each couple is forced, ever so subtly, to face its own inner nonsense. The filmmaker has divine actors at his disposal.
  59. Diamond Men
    But its quiet, solid center is Forster's Eddie, a man who can keep his cool under pressure and, with the merest twitch of a facial muscle, reveal a capacity for change.
  60. Jabberwocky (re-release)
    Jabberwocky is not a Python film, a fact most obvious in its marked lack of humor.
  61. Sobreviviré
    The film's jarring shifts in tone ultimately serve well the complexity of the film's narrative entanglements; they feel more honest than similar Hollywood offerings.
  62. Don't Say a Word
    Director Gary Fleder can only fling the camera about and indulge in some familiar screen sadism (and no wonder -- his last feature was "Kiss the Girls") as he tries to squeeze a few thrills from material as desiccated as his leading man.
  63. Zoolander
    One's laughter builds on such a rising curve that memories of its flaws burn away.
  64. Hearts in Atlantis
    For all the highfalutin dialogue and mysterioso goings-on, the only true mystery Hicks and Goldman conjure up is whether the mellifluously voiced outsider is dangling his new friend a little too closely on his knee.
  65. Extreme Days
    The only time the actors appear to have accelerated their own heartbeats is in two paintball scenes, as well as -- professionals all -- the fart-lighting contest. It's pretty pathetic.
  66. Dinner Rush
    It's fitting, then, that Dinner Rush boasts Hawks-ian virtues: fiery energy, swift, character-driven chitchat and a tough, upbeat sense of how the world works.
  67. Sorority Girls' Revenge
    It's a nice try, but the film remains a pinhead's idea of softcore fetish material.
  68. Vampire Hunter D
    Kawajiri's doom-laden action epic is a heady brew indeed.
  69. The Endurance
    Not only relates the astounding story of the expedition and its unimaginable hardships, it presents a thoughtful study of a time when there were adventurers who might actually respond to an advertisement reading "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold . . ."
  70. Liam
    At once a heartfelt story about a family undone by violence and an overburdened allegory of fascism.
  71. Glitter
    Glitter is, if nothing else, comfortable with what it is, namely earnestly made, wholehearted schlock.
  72. 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.
  73. Go Tigers!
    Among the film's other drawbacks are how conventional it feels in its structure and strategy, often misguidedly going for the epic high-key feel of classic NFL Films on a low-key, DV budget.
  74. The Glass House
    Ludicrous but not quite the howler it could and should have been.
  75. Wisconsin Death Trip
    What could have been a fascinating exploration of geographical mayhem becomes instead an exercise in tedium.
  76. Haiku Tunnel
    The Kornbluths don't offer much visual style -- the film is as flat and sterile as its corporate environs -- but they build an excruciating tension from Kornbluth's confounding inability to lick a few stamps.
  77. China: The Panda Adventure
    The true star of the film -- areas whose mind-boggling size and immense beauty are still too overwhelming to be fully captured by the supersize IMAX screen.
  78. Kill Me Later
    Shawn is clearly meant to have deep feelings, yet the filmmakers have saddled her -- and Blair -- with a shallow angst that bums out the whole movie.
  79. 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.
  80. Tell Me Something
    Director Chang builds some chilling suspense into the cop's grim investigative routine -- as well as generous helpings of blood: It runs, splashes and sprays as the amputations continue.
  81. Two Can Play That Game
    Ultimately neither freewheeling enough to work as a diverting entertainment nor barbed enough to strike home as any sort of social commentary.
  82. The Musketeer
    Hyams ("End of Days," "Timecop"), who is his own cinematographer, has no idea how to shoot or compose Xiong's wired choreography.
  83. Our Lady of the Assassins
    A scathing, darkly funny political essay wrapped inside a tragic love story (or vice versa).
  84. The Iron Ladies
    A surprise hit in Thailand, the film is nonetheless a reductive mess.
  85. A Matter of Taste
    Rapp's creepy, ghoulishly funny and, finally, touching new film.
  86. Soul Survivors
    A horror movie that's not horrific enough, Soul Survivors plays like a "Twilight Zone" by way of "Touched by an Angel."
  87. Rock Star
    Wahlberg has turned into one of the most sympathetic and persuasive young actors around, and while his new movie remains safely, even shrewdly, in the middle of the road, he rocks.
  88. Vengo
    On its own, the story is tepid, and less than original. What draws us in is the way in which Gatlif sets it against a rich Andalusian backdrop.
  89. The American Astronaut
    The result is a sui generis, love-it-or-hate-it exercise in homegrown American surrealism.
  90. O
    The makers of this malnourished teen drama haven't just dropped six letters from the title of Shakespeare's Othello, they have excised everything that gives the original its troubling power -- principally a point but also furious passion.
  91. Jeepers Creepers
    Salva falls back on dull, jumbled action and an awkward subplot as he lurches toward a sequel.
  92. Speedway Junky
    Never quite gets up to speed, lurching its way through a glossing, superficial take on street life and teenage sexuality.
  93. Fighter
    A humane and precociously wise documentary by the young Los Angeles director Amir Bar-Lev.
    • L.A. Weekly
  94. Tortilla Soup
    It is, however, Tortilla Soup's cultural transposition that feels most phony. Where Lee brings depth and subtle observation to his middle-class ensemble piece, Ripoll has simply added a thin Latino glaze.
  95. Together
    Moodysson's movie, one part mash note and three parts scathing piss-taker, is hugely compassionate toward the well-meaning fools in his tale, but he doesn't suffer their nonsense gladly; his film is, in large part, about grown-ups needing to grow up.
  96. Ghosts of Mars
    It's cheap thrills all the way, served up with the kind of situational purity that only Carpenter seems to care for these days. It's that simple and that much fun.
  97. Maybe Baby
    A film we hereby proclaim the finest fertility comedy ever made, in the faint hope that another will not be attempted.
  98. Happy Accidents
    Looks drab and doesn't take very good advantage of its New York locations, but the neurotic intensity and emotional honesty of its two leads more than make up for it.
  99. 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.
  100. Summer Catch
    To help Prinze sail past the eventually unbearable clichés of Kevin Falls and John Gatins' script, director Mike Tollin has assembled an impressive supporting cast.
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