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. What Planet Are You From?
    Shandling comes off as a sleazebag -- all that's missing are the gold chains, tufted chest hair and English Leather.
  2. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    Laced with brilliantly knotted ideas on race, masculinity and cults of violence.
  3. Drowning Mona
    The only vaguely funny moments are courtesy William Fichtner, as the dead woman's husband, and Jamie Lee Curtis in full metal drag as his furtive squeeze.
  4. The Next Best Thing
    No one ever turns into a real character, and none of the scenes have either dramatic or comedic resonance.
  5. 3 Strikes
    Three strikes maybe, but no stars and no thumbs up (except the one way, way up its own ass).
  6. Theeviravaathi: The Terrorist
    A heartbreaking reminder of all the wars whose frontlines are currently held by the very young, wars that have robbed them not only of family and friends, but of their childhoods as well.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Brown's Requiem
    Flat-footed.
  8. The Closer You Get
    Oddly anemic and muted -- BBC Saturday-night material.
  9. Mifune's Last Song
    A mood of anarchic spontaneity and freshness that thrills.
  10. Wonder Boys
    It's striking on several counts.
  11. Reindeer Games
    A cleverly plotted, cleanly crafted matinee item -- pure entertainment on a romping continuum with Frankenheimer's "Ronin."
  12. Judy Berlin
    Where "American Beauty" was smug and obvious in its dissection of suburban life, Judy Berlin is hilarious, heartbreaking and -- in its graciousness -- unlike any American film we've seen in a long time.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pitch Black
    This is damaged goods from the opening Poly Gram logo.
  14. Beautiful People
    Dizdar maintains a knife-edged balance in tone throughout the film
  15. Hanging Up
    That we are supposed to find something to admire in this callow crew is insufferable.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg
    Places Greenberg in historical context -- as a pioneering Jew and as an all-American sports hero.
  17. The Whole Nine Yards
    Well-tuned wisecracks and clever plot twists.
  18. Not One Less
    Zhang's work is always worth watching, but this is the first of his films in which the sorrows are so heart-rending, its many comic moments so laugh-out-loud human.
  19. Boiler Room
    You come away from Boiler Room eager to see what Younger will do next.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Tigger Movie
    A gas, full of just enough whiz-bang animation, but not too much to ruin what has always made Pooh and friends -- adventures work in the past.
  21. Cotton Mary
    Richer and cleverer than any Merchant Ivory movie in memory.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Snow Day
    Fortunately, everything comes together splendidly in the last act, and the kids and grown-ups are all first-rate.
  23. Sex: The Annabel Chong Story
    Now that's exploitation.
  24. The Beach
    An intermittently gripping, good-looking movie.
  25. Gun Shy
    A smooth little comedy deserving of more studio support than it got.
  26. Knockout
    There's little to recommend Knockout.
  27. Scream 3
    It's a pleasure to report that Scream 3 is an absolute riot, jammed with spicy cameos.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Grizzly Falls
    When you don't find yourself wondering about dialogue that's drowned out by rushing rivers and footfalls in the brush, something is very wrong.
  29. The Big Tease
    How nice to see a new comic lead (Ferguson) with the confidence not to hog the screen.
  30. The Cup
    Though The Cup is lovely to look at, it has none of the ceremonial rigor mortis of Scorsese's "Kundun."
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Santitos
    Springall also deftly weaves the film's most dramatic moments with lighthearted comedy, and the result may be Mexico's best film in years.
  32. Isn't She Great
    Lame comic-strip excuse for a biopic.
  33. Eye of the Beholder
    Intriguing for a while, then steadily more confusing and finally just incoherent.
  34. The Boondock Saints
    (Duffy's) assembled a fine cast -- it's hard to take your eyes off the two young leads -- but he's given them little to do but squeeze triggers and mouth platitudes.
  35. Down to You
    One of those puppy-love movies that make you feel like you're slowly drowning.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Wirey Spindell
    The strangeness is sometimes amusing, often showy, and laid on so thick that it's difficult to make the connection.
  37. Supernova
    Given the tainted history of Supernova, it's difficult to figure out where to place blame for either the undernourished screenplay or the moribund action.
  38. Creature
    It's this trip home that lifts this unpolished, homegrown documentary above the ordinary.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Dog Skip
    Adds to the current crop of great kids' fare with a most-welcome old reliable.
  40. Next Friday
    After enduring 30 minutes of awful slapstick, shit jokes, gags revolving around used condoms, cholo caricatures, and women who are all psychos, sluts or Latina fuck-dolls, I walked.
  41. Fantasia 2000
    What's missing from Fantasia 2000 is the shamelessly pandering Disney cutesy that made the original such a full-blooded nostalgic memory.
  42. The Hurricane
    This is the deepest of Jewison's three racially themed films, the other two being "In the Heat of the Night" and "A Soldier's Story."
  43. The Third Miracle
    Harris and Heche are simply electric together, and "Hill Street Blues'" Charles Haid is wonderfully brash as the venal bishop.
  44. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
    Leuchter is such a riveting, disturbing and finally pathetic character that his story hardly needs embellishing with Morris' fancy visuals and ominous mood music.
  45. Play It to the Bone
    Throws us directly into the ring for one of the most brutal fight scenes in American film.
  46. Titus
    Taymor has done an inspired job of resurrecting one of Shakespeare's unruliest works, just in time for the new century.
  47. Galaxy Quest
    Dean Parisot's direction of the funny, affectionately satirical script by David Howard and Robert Gordon is crisp and assured.
  48. The Talented Mr. Ripley
    Although he never matches the book in either brilliance or sheer perversity, Minghella has remained essentially true to his source.
  49. Any Given Sunday
    The director has created a slick, newer-than-new, faster-than-fast entertainment to end all entertainments.
  50. Angela's Ashes
    140 minutes of flat vignette, as dreary and uninvolving as the driving rain that never lets up on the benighted streets of Limerick.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Man on the Moon
    The sort of sick humor even Andy Kaufman would have recognized as well beyond the pale.
  52. Snow Falling on Cedars
    The narrative chronology is so heavily hacked about, its tenses so addled and the material so thinly spread across so many characters, one can scarcely keep it straight in one's head without going cross-eyed.
  53. 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.
  54. Topsy-Turvy
    We never seem to be looking at actors, but at people; never at scenes, but at life unrehearsed.
  55. Stuart Little
    It's (Stuart's) utter believability that lets us follow him into the ecstasy of absurdity that is the rest of the film.
  56. Simpatico
    Demands full attention, if only for the pleasure of watching great actors mine Shepard's harsh, beautiful language for all it's worth.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bicentennial Man
    With this desperately eager-to-please fable based on a short story and novel by Isaac Asimov, director Chris Columbus clinches his berth as the master of shiny-happy message movies.
  58. Magnolia
    Part poem, part jungle blossom, all brilliance.
  59. The War Zone
    Roth can obviously direct actors sympathetically, and he paces the movie adroitly.
  60. The Cider House Rules
    It's Tobey Maguire, doing fine, subtle work, who holds it all together -- he puts a human touch to what is otherwise expertly wrought hokum.
  61. Cradle Will Rock
    Robbins has made a drastically different film from the one Welles envisioned -- it's wacky where Welles is absurd, cynical where Welles is canny.
  62. Diamonds
    Kirk Douglas turns 83 this very week, and surely the fact that he's pulled a rabbit out of the hat at this late date deserves a deep bow.
  63. The Green Mile
    A fascinating tragedy, easy to underrate.
  64. 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.
  65. Miss Julie
    A solidly filmed great play.
  66. Stir of Echoes
    The ghost story is not half as satisfying as the lovely indie mood piece tucked inside it about a community tending to itself in the wake of a recent wound.
  67. Agnes Browne
    Anjelica Huston, a gifted and sometimes extraordinary actress, has given herself the title role in her second outing as director---a bitof miscasting for which the director, and not the actress, must be blamed
  68. The End of the Affair
    Watching this well-behaved adaptation of one of Greene's most personal novels, you can't help but wish that the novelist had been around to write his own script.
  69. A Map of the World
    If director Scott Elliott falters, it's only in the spots where he tries to comment on her (Alice's) persecution without being complicit in it.
  70. Holy Smoke
    What transpires is so rich that I've seen this movie three times. The joy of being involved with two wholly truthful (if colorfully fucked up) characters is that exhilarating.
  71. Sweet and Lowdown
    Funny and light, all the more potent for seeming so effortless.
  72. Tumbleweeds
    McTeer's performance -- one of the best you'll see this year -- makes you realize anew how rare it is to see a female character this complex in American film.
  73. Ride with the Devil
    The film is beautifully shot and filled with fine performances.
  74. End of Days
    A dud.
  75. Toy Story 2
    No parent who's been roped into leading the troops to a matinee need fear being bored: gags are, Simpsons-like, conceived to tickle several generations at once.
  76. Flawless
    An appallingly crude film, with dialogue lifted off bumper stickers, characters stitched together from shorthand clichés (the brassy black drag queen; the fiery little Latin number) and a plot that's on cruise control from the opening credits.
  77. The World Is Not Enough
    The formula, with its comforting arrangement of familiar elements, is what we're after, and The World Is Not Enough certainly comes through on that front.
  78. Sleepy Hollow
    There's so little going on with either the film's story or its characters, however, that there is plenty of time to get lost in cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's eerily beautiful visuals.
  79. All About My Mother
    Just about everyone worth knowing in All About My Mother is female in spirit, which is to say they're all sexy, impossible, powerfully durable souls, quarrelsome and loyal, inventive at navigating the tragedies.
  80. Mansfield Park
    Rozema seems determined to defrill the Austen trend and charge it with a fiercer sort of femininity.
  81. Liberty Heights
    A lot here is genially entertaining, but it doesn't make for interesting or vital filmmaking, because while Levinson might honestly prefer rye, he makes movies the way Wonder Bread bakes.
  82. 42: Forty Two Up
    That nothing more monumental than an everyday life has occurred to any of the subjects is perhaps the film's most compelling aspect.
  83. Dogma
    A profession of faith, made with the confident disrespect of a true believer.
  84. Felicia's Journey
    As with all of Egoyan's films, this new one comes cloaked in an atmosphere of dread, but for the first time there's no real purpose, intellectual or emotional, to all the free-floating anxiety.
  85. Anywhere But Here
    Compared to the glib, pandering rosiness of most current chick-flicks, Anywhere but Here is a class act.
  86. Where's Marlowe?
    (Ferrer's) performance as the sensitive private dick borders on beatific as he stumbles about a nighttime Hollywood Boulevard waxing lyrical about "love, sex and betrayal."
  87. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
    The Messenger may be a caricature of theology, but then Besson is a cartoonist of genius.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Hungry Bachelors Club
    This spineless feel-good nonsense means to warm the cockles of your heart. Somebody check the oven: My cockles were charred.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Light It Up
    Little more than a movie of the week with slick visuals and an amped soundtrack.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pokémon: The First Movie - Mewtwo Strikes Back!
    Are the little ones really getting anything more out of this slightly flashier, exceedingly louder 75-minute version of their usual 30-minute dose of anime hijinks?
  91. The Bachelor
    Catalog of ugly female stereotypes and rotten jokes.
  92. Some Fish Can Fly
    In the end, Some Fish Can Fly doesn't.
  93. Portraits chinois
    The predicaments of this whiny, unprepossessing crew inspire about as much sympathy as a celebrity divorce.
  94. Rosetta
    A portrait of dispossession so acute that it's caused a few critics to cry, Let her eat cake!
  95. The Bone Collector
    By the last third, one is sick to death of seeing people tortured, no real catharsis is offered, and stupid is how one feels.
  96. Train of Life
    Gaily seduces you into its fantasy life, then whacks you over the head with a finale that, intentionally or not, functions as a rebuke to the mad optimism of Benigni's pandering film
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Last Night
    Strangely uplifting, a kind of ode to how on Earth we think we're passing the time.
  98. The Insider
    Has the glorious look and immaculate technique we expect from Mann, along with a wealth of superb secondary performances.
  99. Mein liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski
    (Herzog's) tribute to Kinski doubles as a life-affirming monument to creation in all its variety.
  100. American Movie
    This unassuming, insistently entertaining documentary has the virtue of a great subject.
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