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. Bubble Boy
    Playfully quirky film takes equal-time potshots at its many easy targets -- fundamentalism, intolerance, ethnic stereotypes.
  2. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
    Achieves a generic period look, but there's nothing lived-in about its rooms, nothing persuasive or necessary about its time and place -- there's no longer even a movie fan's nostalgia to give it some spark, or a reason for being.
  3. Lisa Picard Is Famous
    The makers of Lisa Picard Is Famous -- having mastered the obvious early on, set their sights on the unfunny and repetitive.
  4. Innocence
    Cox's own directorial style is innocent, in the sense of being original without ever straining for effect.
  5. Blood: The Last Vampire
    This is one of the few treatments of the macabre in animation that is authentically unnerving, rather than merely gross or campy.
  6. Aberdeen
    Writer-director Hans Petter Moland (The Last Lieutenant, Zero Kelvin) has a fine eye for landscapes, but an even surer touch with actors.
  7. Captain Corelli's Mandolin
    To be fair, it's not solely Cage's fault that his new film, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, is lousy -- director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) deserves most of the heat for this listless dud.
  8. American Outlaws
    Occasionally the Woo-inflected action sequences - particularly a horse stampede through town on hanging day, and an escape from a moving train - rouse the film from its anti-historic, even mythophobic torpor.
  9. Rat Race
    The good news is that this off-the-wall ensemble comedy may just be the summer's happiest surprise.
  10. The Turandot Project
    For a film hinged on one of the more passionate art forms, it's all a little bloodless.
  11. All Over the Guy
    Sitcom humor substitutes for wit, and tedious angst supplies the drama.
  12. American Pie 2
    There's no real story and that would be fine, if Rogers and screenwriter Adam Herz could keep from pretending otherwise.
  13. 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.
  14. Session 9
    A deft exercise in atmospheric horror and insanity. Which is why it's unfortunate that, ultimately, Anderson steps back from the brink.
  15. The Others
    Isn't much more than a proficient gothic mystery with a final twist that offers a satisfying little frisson before you start counting how many times it's been used before.
  16. The Deep End
    A fetchingly improbable match of material and directors.
  17. Audition
    How Miike gets us from amiable point A to debilitating point B is a remarkable act of manipulation and control that may leave you feeling sucker-punched, even brutalized, but you won't forget the experience anytime soon.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Thomas in Love
    Although he's invisible, his poignant desire to overcome his isolation makes this film an interesting, frequently funny, and cautionary riff on our increasingly computer-bound society.
  19. Original Sin
    The director belabors every moment, forgetting that pulp tales need to be told quickly, lest the viewer have time to second-guess.
  20. Under solen
    Try as they might, the two central performers can never overcome the film's underdeveloped core, and are left flailing about amid Nutley's listless, glacial pacing.
  21. Rush Hour 2
    The best parts of the movie occur during the outtakes, which are genuinely funny. The movie proper is insufferable.
  22. The Princess Diaries
    The director is Garry Marshall, but The Princess Diaries is no where near as nauseating a fairy tale as Marshall's "Pretty Woman."
  23. Apocalypse Now Redux
    To look at Apocalypse Now is to realize that most of us are fast forgetting what a movie looks like -- a real movie, the last movie, an American masterpiece.
  24. Planet of the Apes
    Overly familiar industrial product, a big-budgeted entertainment defined by its putatively big concept (apes rule), an underwritten script and a few flashes of Burton's visual genius and gently askew worldview.
  25. The Monkey's Mask
    What makes the film compelling is the filmmakers' ability to blend a studied (occasionally academic) dissection of cultural and sexual decadence with a potboiler plot.
  26. Bread and Tulips
    Maglietta, whose soulful countenance and offhand grace are soothing to behold, and Ganz, who says more with a shrug and sigh than most poets do with a sonnet.
  27. Cure
    Less outright terrifying than under-the-skin shivery, this psychological thriller from sui generis Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa breaks nearly all the rules -- including those of narrative logic.
  28. Jackpot
    The mood is hermetic to the point of claustrophobia, embellished with a sense of everyday surrealism indebted to David Lynch.
  29. Wet Hot American Summer
    Like, you know, genius. But, like, you know, why?
  30. Greenfingers
    Ingratiating trifle.
  31. Reykjavík
    First-time director Baltasar Kormakur -- balances tones with a smooth, mature confidence.
  32. 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.
  33. America's Sweethearts
    The film isn't just banal, it's aggressively, arrogantly banal.
  34. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
    Mitchell retools his play magnificently, opening it up into a vibrant cinematic work.
  35. Ghost World
    Zwigoff pulls off something in Ghost World that seems a minor miracle -- he creates someone with a complex inner life.
  36. Jurassic Park III
    More of the same -- only less so.
  37. Downtown 81
    Poignant, funny, and proof of Basquiat's magic.
  38. The Score
    You begin to wonder whether a story is ever going to show up. When it does, it's worth the wait for a long and well-turned set piece coordinating the heist, and two lovely flips in the plot.
  39. Made
    Made may look like a Wong Kar-Wai movie -- the cinematographer, Chris Doyle, has brought to the film the dark, rich romanticism of the movies he's shot for the Hong Kong prodigy -- but the sensibility is Woody Allen, only sweeter.
  40. Legally Blonde
    With her ductile physicality and undeniable charm, Witherspoon remains acutely present even when everyone else -- director, writers and cast -- has checked out.
  41. Bully
    The film's start-and-go rhythm can be as maddening as the characters' amorality and sheer wallowing stupidity, but Clark has an uncanny talent for putting atmosphere on celluloid.
  42. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
    A soulless affair.
  43. Everybody's Famous!
    The one saving grace is a sweet, affecting performance by Werner de Smedt.
  44. Kiss of the Dragon
    The inventive, often comically horrible fight set pieces will have you standing on your seat cheering like a Viking, and the result is a supremely kinetic and amusing guilty pleasure.
  45. Lost and Delirious
    Blessed with a lovely score and strong acting, but crippled by an awkward, mawkish script.
  46. Jump Tomorrow
    One of the sweetest comedies in a long time, which doesn't mean it's sugary or fey.
  47. Cats & Dogs
    Plays cleverly to adults, but will fly straight over the heads of minors, who have little but a lone fart joke and wave upon wave of flying fur to keep them laughing.
  48. Scary Movie 2
    The Wayanses can be crude beyond crude, but they're so clever that their inventiveness takes the place of taste.
  49. The Crimson Rivers
    Never lets up: A door can't shut without sounding like a bomb going off; mutilated bodies show up with clockwork punctuality, gratuitously underscored by a relentlessly overbearing soundtrack.
  50. Pandaemonium
    Temple doesn't just highlight the contemporary relevance of Coleridge's liberated words and themes, he shows us how high they still soar.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Closet
    Auteuil is as charming as ever, with a surprising aptitude for physical humor that keeps the tone cheerfully light and the laughs plentiful.
  52. Pootie Tang
    Never quite deciding if it wants to parody or uphold the ongoing cultural romance with the Pimp, Pootie Tang mostly feels like a sad retread.
  53. Quadrophenia (re-release)
    This ode to wrestling one's way out of youth's shell holds up surprisingly well.
  54. Crazy/Beautiful
    Crazy/beautiful has a leisurely local specificity, and Stockwell has a tender way with his actors.
  55. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
    Spielberg's infidelity to Aldiss (and perhaps to Kubrick, who knows?) would be pardonable if it didn't ruin his movie. In the end, he has failed to make a persuasive, smart movie about robots and people.
  56. Come Undone
    A melancholy valentine to broken hearts and lost innocence.
  57. Lumumba
    Genuine thriller -- with one crisis hurtling after another, heightened by hauntingly brief moments of peace.
  58. Baby Boy
    Singleton has neither the emotional nor intellectual depth to do justice to his thesis. He is too in awe of the stereotypical hood lifestyles and macho posturings that he's trying to critique.
  59. Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade
    Where Okiura leads the art of animation into truly uncharted territory is in his character work, the precise behavioral strokes that bring people to life in two dimensions.
  60. The Princess and the Warrior
    Tykwer may want meaning to go with his special effects, but the problem with his filmmaking, both here and earlier, is that he's more interested in his own bag of tricks than in actually saying something.
  61. Chain Camera
    Hilarious, unnerving and remarkably intimate portrait of multiethnic adolescent life that lends vigorous new meaning to the term "teen movie."
  62. The Fast and the Furious
    The best cheap thrill to come out of Hollywood in ages -- it's a shot of tonic for the current blockbuster bloat.
  63. Dr. Dolittle 2
    The best that the good doctor (Murphy) can do, encumbered as he is by Larry Levin's screenplay and its low joke quotient, is discipline the dog, lay into the lizard and shtick it to the bear.
  64. Life and Debt
    Black's cool-headed but blistering indictment of globalization and the racist international economic policies that have shoved that country into crushing poverty.
  65. Russian Doll
    Kazantzidis struggles for the flavor of classic romance, with a string of standards on the soundtrack to little avail.
  66. 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.
  67. The Adventures of Felix
    It would all be too obviously feel-good if Ducastel and Martineau weren't also tuned in to the liberating drift of the open highway and a sharp native humor that adds needed flesh and blood to their walking metaphors.
  68. Down from the Mountain
    The music, it goes without saying, is great.
  69. Songcatcher
    Best seen as a performance movie, featuring music (by Iris DeMent and Taj Mahal, among others) too wonderful to be overpowered by director Maggie Greenwald's plodding direction and leaden screenplay.
  70. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
    Ultimately, Jolie's efforts to establish a character are dashed against the film's increasingly inane dialogue.
  71. Sexy Beast
    Glazer shoots with the dreamy impressionism much favored in his principal line of work, all floaty slo-mos and in-your-face close-ups punctuated by a hard-driving rock score.
  72. Divided We Fall
    Divided We Fall briskly, often hilariously, forbids us to wallow in the specious comfort of untainted local heroes or irredeemable villains.
  73. Erleuchtung garantiert
    Enlightenment Guaranteed is a parable of alienation and rediscovery told with such affection, insight and visual elegance, it could never be taken as preachy or stern.
  74. Swordfish
    The cinema of morons made by morons for morons, Swordfish is everything you expect but worse.
  75. Dead or Alive
    Not for the squeamish (a guy rips out his own arm, for goodness' sake), the film is nevertheless more than just a gonzo gross-out. But not by much.
  76. 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.
  77. Evolution
    Amiably goofy, but it isn't especially funny.
  78. The Anniversary Party
    It's no great surprise that the best part of The Anniversary Party is the acting, even if Leigh and Cumming don't always direct themselves as well as they do some of their co-stars.
  79. Atlantis: The Lost Empire
    Has the comfortable, old-fashioned, earnest idealism of a '50s Disney action-adventure.
  80. Bride of the Wind
    She is known as one of the great muses, yet director Bruce Beresford, Wynter and screenwriter Marilyn Levy are never clear if this is by design or chance.
  81. The Animal
    The Animal is tailor-made for last-resort Friday-night rentals.
  82. What's the Worst That Could Happen?
    Comes off as a desperate attempt to breathe life into dull proceedings.
  83. Rape Me
    A small revolution tucked inside clichés and willful artistic ineptitude.
  84. Big Eden
    A rosy, hearthside fantasy of acceptance that's so assured in its writing and direction, it's nearly impossible not to believe.
  85. 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.
  86. No One Sleeps
    Intriguing yet muddled thriller.
  87. Himalaya
    Captured extraordinary performances from a cast of non-actors, as well as magnificent images of a vast landscape.
  88. The Road Home
    By all current standards it's a startlingly ingenuous film.
  89. Pearl Harbor
    A Michael Bay movie: bang bang, paper-thin characters, wooden screenplay.
  90. The Man Who Cried
    A star ensemble is preposterously miscast.
  91. Our Song
    So gently told, so deceptively simple a story, that its considerable emotional power sneaks up on you.
  92. Fast Food Fast Women
    The film's power lies in the fact that the façade is crumbling on the actress even as she clings to it. That this is not a pathetic sight is due to the grit that we glimpse through the cracks. It's Barbie, becoming human.
  93. Angel Eyes
    A sappy love story wherein nary a gun or action sequence is seen after the first 10 minutes.
  94. Shrek
    Shrek's first 20 minutes are so devilishly funny that letting go of pure belief doesn't seem like such a bad thing.
  95. Moulin Rouge!
    Drowns in baroque mise en scène camp, frenetic musical numbers and a precious dialogue conceit that wears out its welcome very fast.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Startup.com
    Startup.com goes from being a mildly interesting true story to a ripping good train wreck in the making.
  97. The Trumpet of the Swan
    At times, both swans and humans appear oddly out of sync with their flat backgrounds, while the film's few musical flights of fancy never achieve visual liftoff.
  98. Bread and Roses
    There are scenes here that fill one with rage or bring tears to the eyes.
  99. Sordid Lives
    Some of the performances are remarkably natural amid so much farce.
  100. 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.
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