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. 54
    If it's difficult to pinpoint exactly where this maladroit drama about the infamous New York discotheque went wrong, it's because everything in the film is lousy: The writing, the directing, the acting, the casting (Neve Campbell?), the moral posturing, the Capote clone, the Andy lookalike, even the glitter that clings to Salma Hayek's lashes like tears.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Soul Plane
    Director Jessy Terrero's spasmodically funny air-travel parody unfailingly counters every one of its genuinely uproarious gags with at least two or three others rooted in retrograde racial panic.
  5. Sleepover
    Devotes too much time to a shrill, unfunny security guard who's pursuing the girls, but he does stage some zippy sequences, from the red-clad Julie's skateboard dash home to witty bits involving an energy-depleted electric car.
  6. Garmento
    Maher's filmmaking is competent -- the sets are inventive, and all the camera angles match up -- but someone should have warned her that neither she nor her young cast is experienced enough to pull off the line “The only people buying it are the faggots.”
  7. Rennie's Landing
    By the time the final gotcha plot twist unfolds, it's not the intended tears but a yawn that is produced.
  8. The Punisher
    As bad as the movie is, when it tries to be funny -- a hired killer who sings to his victims, a fat man named Bumpo, and an interminable fight scene choreographed to “La donna è mobile” -- it somehow manages to get several degrees worse.
  9. The Wedding Date
    Anemic.
  10. The Brothers Solomon
    There is nothing sadder, either in real life or on the movie screen, than an unlikable idiot, and what we have with this dreadful comedy -- the longest 90 minutes of the film year -- is the sight of not one but two charm-free fools.
  11. The Sweetest Thing
    So badly written, so poorly directed and performed, and so garishly visualized -- attention Kmart shoppers! -- it defies explanation.
  12. 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.
  13. September Tapes
    Intentionally blurs fiction and reality.
  14. It's All About Love
    Vinterberg's execution is overstuffed, unoriginal and often downright incomprehensible. And what's Sean Penn doing dangling off airplanes -- pontificating, as usual, from a great height?
  15. Play It to the Bone
    Throws us directly into the ring for one of the most brutal fight scenes in American film.
  16. Down to Earth
    The film seems to argue that Rock's real-life manipulation of the race card is little more than exploitation, rather than the essence of his incendiary comic critique.
  17. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
    After a first hour that plays like a bad TV show, Sommers hits his groove with an over-the-top Paris chase sequence that, in turn, leads to an underwater finale that’s absurdly overproduced, momentarily diverting, and then instantly forgettable.
  18. Masked and Anonymous
    After a zippy first hour, the wackos wear out their welcome and the director, perversely, fails to show the big concert.
  19. Carlos Castaneda: Enigma of a Sorcerer
    The obvious, cliché-ridden visual style of this probe into the life, work and legacy of Carlos Castaneda ends up working very much against its subject.
  20. Teddy Bears' Picnic
    A satirist such as Shearer should need a license to go hunting on terrain so rich with easy targets; he tries to bag them all, and it leaves the film to founder in aimlessness.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause
    This is all really a big waste. At least the out-takes at the end are actually funny.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Night of the Living Dead 3D
    They do deliver on the gore and nudity fronts, and you don't often see such things in 3-D. The familiar title helps with the marketing, but hurts by inviting comparison with a classic; as a 2-D remake, it wouldn't pass muster. (Tom Savini's 1990 redo is far more respectable.)
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last Man
    The result is a Brooks Brothers comedy -- part Albert, part Mel.
  24. The Rising Place
    As a first-time filmmaker who juggles such duties as writing, directing, producing, even playing piano solos on the soundtrack, Rice is in over his head.
  25. Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London
    Muniz has a great face and body for physical comedy, but the numerous one-liners shoehorned into the script fall flat, unassisted by Anderson's numbing “street” ad-libs.
  26. Beyond Borders
    As kitsch, however, it's pretty enjoyable. Jolie and Owen perform with such conviction, and the film -- blissfully unaware of its own badness -- takes its paperback-romance shenanigans with such goofy gravity, that it's easy to get caught up in the whole, soap-opera thrust of the thing.
  27. Land of the Lost
    It ends up sagging into a pleasantly undistinguished pudding. The big news is that Matt Lauer, playing himself, can act. A little. Hardly at all, really. But he’s a jolly good sport, and quite handy with a fire extinguisher.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Beyond Honor
    Terrible movies about trivial subjects are commonplace and inconsequential, but a terrible movie that grapples with potentially inflammatory subject matter is far worse, because its aspirations are higher - which makes the failure of Varun Khanna's moralistic drama all the more spectacular.
  29. Swordfish
    The cinema of morons made by morons for morons, Swordfish is everything you expect but worse.
  30. Price of Glory
    It's outclassed by the memory of just about every prizefighting flick you've ever seen.
  31. Alex & Emma
    It's like a three-times-too-long sitcom pilot missing the laugh track.
  32. Wrong Turn
    The film does, in the end, raise something of an existential dilemma: If you set out to make a new version of something you know to be bad, and you make something that is in fact bad, have you somehow succeeded?
  33. The Painting
    The Painting is a sleekly crafted quilt of moldy racial insight and feel-good kumbaya-isms set against the backdrop of the civil rights era. The acting is competent, TV-movie-of-the-week quality (network, not cable), while every single character is a type you've seen a million times before.
  34. Crime and Punishment in Suburbia
    A cut above the usual teenage-wasteland movie.
  35. Someone Like You...
    In supporting roles, Ellen Barkin and Marisa Tomei are marvelously light-footed.
  36. 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.
  37. Men Cry Bullets
    Writer-director Hernandez is comfortable with violent, perverse emotions, and can find humor in them -- a refreshing quality that keeps one watching long after her movie has jumped its own tracks and zoomed to a private world of obscurely motivated quarrels and uninvolving reconciliations.
  38. 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.
  39. Showtime
    Showtime is better than the fourth "Lethal Weapon," which was pretty bad, but not as good as the original "Lethal Weapon" or the superior "48HRS."
  40. Games People Play: New York
    A big-screen reality show that flashes plenty of t-- and d--- but little integrity.
  41. Boogeyman
    Unexpectedly gripping horror movie.
  42. Don't Tempt Me
    Perhaps only a filmmaker from a country steeped in Catholicism could turn out a consistently sharp and profane "divine comedy" (the title means "blessed hell") that is also, for the most part, theologically correct.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Max Payne
    The role requires Wahlberg to run the gamut of emotions from A to A.
  44. Say Uncle
    You'll be begging for mercy well before the end of this self-righteous, thoroughly unsavory "farce" about a lonely gay man who - gosh darn it - can't seem to stop getting mistaken for a pedophile.
  45. Venus and Mars
    Sometimes the predictability of a romantic comedy is reassuring, and sometimes it makes you want to scream, as with this witless wonder.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Letters to God
    With little in the way of story or spectacle to offer nonbelievers, the film itself just preaches to the choir.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    In the Mix
    The movie pitches itself as a modern-day "Romeo and Juliet," but its execution is so lazy and inept that if the lovers were to die horribly it would come more as relief than tragedy. Sadly, in this respect, as in every other, In the Mix disappoints.
  48. Silent Hill
    Buried beneath Silent Hill’s hyper-stylized stupidity (the film looks like a collaboration between David Fincher, Trent Reznor and music video director Mark Romanek) is the hollow effort to bottle something of the zeitgeist unease surrounding religious fundamentalism.
  49. The Honeymooners
    This appalling multiculti upgrade of the ’50s sitcom is about as funny as a bus accident.
  50. Lucky Numbers
    Airless, joyless, worse than you could even imagine.
  51. Cursed
    Poor special effects, a silly looking werewolf and clunky comic writing help to spoil what should have been a fun B-movie.
  52. The Big White
    The clammy eccentricity on display -- is like a wet blanket, while Colin Friesen's lazy screenplay has all the wit of a slushball. "March of the Penguins" was funnier and edgier.
  53. Fix
    The slathered-on visual textures aren’t quite enough, however, to distract us from the glib, leftie posturing, the lazy writing and the drug-deep existential platitudes.
  54. House of 1000 Corpses
    Zombie wants his film to be gleefully demented, but he fails to grasp that loud, inbred evil people torturing stupid, grating benign people isn’t disturbing as much as tedious.
  55. They
    The film stinks from start to finish, like a wet burlap sack of gloom.
  56. Gossip
    Gossip is trash, but it's well-written, slickly directed trash.
  57. 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.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    New Rose Hotel
    The first two-thirds are turgid enough; in the last, Ferrara begins replaying scenes we've already seen earlier in the film.
  59. Antitrust
    As a film, it essentially bites.
  60. The Big Hit
    The television commercials for the movie say something about this being the same team that brought you “Face/Off,” which is about as relevant to this picture as noting that Paul Thomas Anderson got Wahlberg to drop his pants in “Boogie Nights.”
  61. Oxygono
    It's a mean-spirited exercise in stilted outrageousness.
  62. 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?
  63. Monster-in-Law
    This is a gay men's movie whose primary function is to doll Fonda up like a drag queen and let her rip.
  64. The Weekend
    Shrill and gloomy.
  65. In Search of Peace
    The film at times feels less than objective, in part due to Douglas' often breathless narration.
  66. Life or Something Like It
    Jolie hogs the spotlight as usual, leaving romantic interest Ed Burns struggling to register and only Shaloub -- fetid, dirty, soulful -- with his dignity intact.
  67. The Flip Side
    An intriguing failure that promises more than it delivers.
  68. 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.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Deception
    This vision of Gotham is as fastidious as the cockpit of a BMW. But rather than sell luxury sedans, Deception offers a fantasy even big money can't buy -- Wall Street as a cross between a James Bond adventure and a Victoria’s Secret spread.
  70. The Bachelor
    Catalog of ugly female stereotypes and rotten jokes.
  71. Some Fish Can Fly
    In the end, Some Fish Can Fly doesn't.
  72. Sonny
    Preposterous and tedious, Sonny is spiked with unintentional laughter that, unfortunately, occurs too infrequently to make the film even a guilty pleasure.
  73. National Security
    The career of the lovably tense Zahn may benefit more from this movie than that of Lawrence, who’s funny, here and there, but who appears to be working at half speed.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Idle Hands
    Many in the youthful target audience won’t be able to identify the "homages," and the script is far too lazy for seasoned horror fans to stomach.
  75. 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.
  76. Abominable
    Not quite aptly titled, but close, writer-director Ryan Schifrin's cheapo horror opus pits everyone's favorite hirsute hominoid against the denizens of a remote town nestled at the base of a mountain called Suicide Peak. It's not much of a contest.
  77. Slutty Summer
    The drama is unintentionally humorous, the humor incredibly labored and the acting rarely better than one might find in a Chi Chi LaRue XXX production.
  78. Harry + Max
    It's one of those rare movie failures that truly warrants being called ambitious.
  79. A Day Without a Mexican
    A terrific premise is mangled to a pulp, then beaten to death in this forced mockumentary.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cave
    Despite the striking underwater photography and production values, much of this feels like Alien: Stalagmite Edition. But if it isn't original, The Cave does demonstrate that you can always elevate threadbare material by keeping your ambitions modest.
  81. The Final Destination
    Ellis and screenwriter Eric Bress even go all meta on us with an "Inglourious Basterds"–esque finale set inside a 3D cinema, though their set pieces never quite muster the giddy brio of "Final Destination 1" and "3" auteur James Wong at his best.
  82. Off the Lip
    What comes off as clever at first quickly wears out -- even the sudden cutaways to spectacular surf footage can't save this wipeout.
  83. Saw VI
    Taken just as an objet d’art, Saw VI — gray, grisly, solemn, stupid — would be about the most dismal thing I’ve ever laid eyes on, the argument against film preservation. But it vaults into the realm of real detestability through pretensions of relevance.
  84. Over Her Dead Body
    Many a comic potentiality is underworked, and the film's prevailing tone is obnoxiously erratic -- surely the supporting eccentrics (Jason Biggs and Lindsay Sloane) aren't supposed to be so off-putting? -- but it rests safe when entrusted to the charisma of its principals.
  85. Love in the Time of Money
    The film ultimately offers nothing more than people in an urban jungle needing other people to survive. Kane's character observes that "We’re all connected by love" -- and that sounds familiar, too.
  86. Gods and Generals
    By highlighting the human costs of slavery to everyone BUT the enslaved -- here, relations between African-American domestics and their owners are cordial, even respectful, on both sides -- Maxwell risks being pilloried as an apologist for that institution.
  87. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
    Extraordinary is the very last adjective that comes to mind.
  88. The Art of War
    Slick, noisy thriller.
  89. 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.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Waiting...
    McKittrick cites "Dazed and Confused" as well as "Clerks" as influences, yet he lacks the raw edge of early Smith and the existential drift of Linklater. And if side-splitting laughter is what you crave, Waiting . . . will leave you hungry for a slice of American Pie.
  91. White Noise
    No, this isn't an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s great 1985 novel, but a muddled talking-ghosts movie.
  92. Exorcist: The Beginning
    The “surprise” ending, when it comes, is more of a hoot than a holler.
  93. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning
    Few surprises lie in store for connoisseurs of torture cinema, though unlike its 2003 predecessor, this Massacre owes less to Bay’s attention-deficient aesthetics than to the measured, Georgia O’Keefe-on-acid sensibility that guided Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel’s much-cannibalized original.
  94. Marmaduke
    Brad Anderson’s long-running saga of the melty-looking Winslow family and the gangling, interfering Great Dane that should’ve been put to sleep ages ago gets a film treatment.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror
    Ungerman and Brohy spread themselves a little thin across the map of U.S. intrigue, abruptly losing sight of Iraq while retreading familiar ground about early American backing of the Taliban.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore
    About as unremarkable as a film about talking animals organized into competing intelligence agencies can be.
  97. 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.
  98. Blackwoods
    Whatever the cause, everyone involved takes this blend of slick Verhoeven sleaze and Deliverance-brand musk way too seriously.
  99. Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
    It's short, this movie, an attribute Sandler himself might take heed of, and if the teenagers in the back row are laughing harder and more often, you might at least find yourself smiling (guiltily) every few minutes.
  100. 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.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »