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. Grind
    A crass, condescending piece of corporate bamboozling, Grind plays like a movie conceived by monkey-suited honchos who regard their targeted audience as impressionable nincompoops susceptible to every new trend in sports, clothing and music that comes down the pike.
  2. The Butterfly Effect
    An undercooked allusion to chaos theory -- gives every appearance of having been conceived, planned and executed out of a high school locker room.
  3. Daltry Calhoun
    Traub does her plucky best, coming off as part Judy Blume heroine, part post-WB hipster, and she provides the film with its few and infrequent moments of emotional truth.
  4. Knockaround Guys
    Koppelman and Lieven's toneless, generic direction style is slack, not slick, and they handle actors like livestock. Only John Malkovich, as Matty's psychotic uncle, retains his dignity.
  5. Never Again
    Schaeffer fails to develop the relationship beyond clichéd signpost events.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour
    It’s as not-unpleasantly amateurish as the regional genre movies that four-walled rural theaters in the days before video. But do-nothing Sarah may be the dullest, most featureless and inactive protagonist in recent movies.
  7. The Replacements
    Although this movie doesn't have an ounce of depth, it's so thoroughly amiable and upbeat that you'd have to be in a fighting mood to find fault with it.
  8. Dude, Where's My Car?
    A film where everyone -- white, black, gay or otherwise -- is equally, lovably dumb.
  9. The Tuxedo
    The film is ultimately more labored than inspired. A cameo by James Brown is amusing, but it can't keep The Tuxedo from earning the distinction of being Chan's worst Hollywood film to date.
  10. Where the Heart Is
    Although its lushness and penchant for melodrama are the cinematic equivalent of Billy Sherrill's syrupy string arrangements for George Jones, Tammy Wynette and Charlie Rich circa 1973, the movie deftly manages to remain sweet without becoming saccharine.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Meet Bill
    Is Meet Bill the worst movie ever? Probably not, but it's certainly incoherent enough to give "Gigli" a run for its money.
  12. She Hate Me
    Lee hits almost every note wrong, from Terence Blanchard's overplayed score, to underdeveloped roles for Ellen Barkin and John Turturro, to stale one-liners.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Crossover
    As they pursue their goals, no movie cliché is left unturned. The streetball scenes offer some nifty trick plays, but the rest of Crossover features poorly dressed sets, cheap-looking costumes and locations, and silly histrionics.
  14. Eban and Charley
    Drab and muddled romance.
  15. Thirteen Ghosts
    A brutish affair replete with sliced bodies, a diced storyline and enough clanky dialogue to wake the dead.
  16. The Amati Girls
    The cast, which includes Cloris Leachman as the sisters' mother and Paul Sorvino, Jamey Sheridan and Mark Harmon as their various men, emote like pros, even as they deplete any audience goodwill left over from past triumphs.
  17. Without a Paddle
    Burt Reynolds, whose near-vaudevillian comic timing, is refreshing but not enough to carry the picture.
  18. Noel
    Sentimental, borderline-bizarre Christmas movie that boasts just enough good acting to make up for the treacle.
  19. Premonition
    They only want us to play that tiresome guessing game: Is it all a dream or is it really happening? Instead, you may find yourself asking: Is this cinema or merely Cinemax?
  20. Texas Rangers
    A blandly competent dramatization of the famed Texas lawmen's post–Civil War history starring the blandly handsome tube stars
  21. The Hot Chick
    Marks no discernible improvement on its predecessors "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo" and "The Animal," though the sight of the deeply unprepossessing Schneider all dolled up for girlie business is good for a few shallow chuckles.
  22. Domestic Disturbance
    Absurd beyond belief or reason.
  23. Johnson Family Vacation
    The picture shows vital signs only in a few scenes where Cedric takes on the additional role of his own lecherous uncle, but it's too little too late.
  24. The Collector
    Making his directorial debut, Dunstan displays a knack for building suspense. And yet, weirdly, amidst all the requisite blood spray, one senses a reluctance on the filmmaker’s part to linger lovingly over the pierced skins and protruding entrails of the killer’s various victims.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Backstage
    An entertaining trip, one for which fandom in the genre isn't necessarily a prerequisite, though it doubtlessly helps.
  26. Timeline
    Scenes stop and start abruptly, and the sub–"Lord of the Rings" action is more dulling than rousing -- and yet it can be funny.
  27. Civil Brand
    There are also strong flickers here of a film that might have been.
  28. Driven
    Racing flick results in a wreck as horrifying as the film itself.
  29. Eye of the Beholder
    Intriguing for a while, then steadily more confusing and finally just incoherent.
  30. Undiscovered
    Undiscovered is beaten on all counts by TV’s "Entourage" and "Unscripted" in its portrayal of the aspirational lifestyle and its end-of-the-rainbow spoils.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Ethan Mao
    Nobody onscreen seems to realize that this deadeningly self-serious treatment of family dysfunction is so overwrought that it becomes a spot-on satire of low-budget ineptitude.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem
    Chopped down to 40 minutes, this could be a wickedly cool short; as is, it’s a passable slasher that’s still nowhere near the interspecies smackdown we geeks have long imagined.
  33. How High
    There is something fun about a movie that so brazenly portrays excessive pot smoking.
  34. Swimfan
    The story may not be new, but Australian director John Polson, making his American feature debut, jazzes it up adroitly, with a nifty, staccato editing technique that suggests Madison's inner turmoil and, in the process, fills in some of the shading missing from Christensen's performance.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Boys and Girls
    Nice try, guys . . . now give me back my 97 minutes.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    AVP: Alien vs. Predator
    Make sense? No, it doesn't. But if you manage to endure the exposition, you'll get what you paid for: popping chests. Invisible stalkers. Nicely paced chases through corridors that constantly reconfigure in interlocking stone puzzles.
  37. L.A. Twister
    The film offers no new insights into its people or into the dynamics of the Hollywood machine -- the whole affair, played for low-intensity laughs, is numbingly familiar.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Pathfinder
    There is one redeeming skirmish -- the climactic fight involving a snowy cliff and an elaborate pulley system -- but from the guy who's directed videos for Cher, Amy Grant, Billy Joel, and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony? We expected more.
  39. Scary Movie 2
    The Wayanses can be crude beyond crude, but they're so clever that their inventiveness takes the place of taste.
  40. Just My Luck
    Looking tired and sallow and drained of her customary glow, Lindsay Lohan marches grimly through this mechanical tween comedy as if it were a particularly tedious homework assignment. Which it is.
  41. 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.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The King and I
    The tale has been tidied, buffed, waxed and polished into a harmless but relatively boring adventure.
  43. The Postman
    But since Costner canít save his movie, it's something of a stretch to think he might be able to save the world.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Pulse
    Here, the CG effects are plentiful, but the scare factor rarely rises above the level of a viral email, and the desaturated color scheme of Sonzero and cinematographer Mark Plummer makes every frame look as though it was developed in a solution of vomit and ash.
  45. Batman & Robin
    There's so much happening in the movie that it feels like nothing is happening at all. Which leaves you free to gaze, slack-jawed, on the true glory of Batman & Robin -- its fabulously color-coded set design.
  46. Blue Moon
    What this turkey produces in the way of hang-ups is a transparently phony class conflict.
  47. Anatomy of Hell
    Anatomy of Hell offers one of the most hateful and mechanical representations of sexuality I've ever seen.
  48. The Aryan Couple
    We get director John Daly's feel-good tedium and a waste of a performance by the magnificent Landau.
  49. You Again
    What follows is one set piece after another in which the women make fools of themselves as the script herds them toward a happy ending of hugs and tears.
  50. Waking Up in Reno
    Director Jordan Brady achieves the remarkable feat of squandering a topnotch foursome of actors -- particularly Theron, a very game and able comedienne -- by shoving them into every clichéd white-trash situation imaginable.
  51. Wildflowers
    The biggest problem is that the character of Sabine is such a lame male fantasy of the enigmatic woman-child.
  52. 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.
  53. Stigmata
    A better title for this flick might have been Astigmatism: Nothing ever comes into focus long enough ... to deliver even the faintest sense of fright.
  54. Mercy Streets
    Writer-director Jon Gunn and co-writer John W. Mann can't fashion a meaningful parable from their knot of dangling plotlines and absurd scenarios.
  55. Ghost Ship
    If you take your ghost stories garnished with a dressing of sadism, sanctimony and silliness, go ahead and squander the nine bucks.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Third World Cop
    Excels at suspense and atmosphere, despite the garden-variety plot and an unintentionally hilarious - credit sequence .
  57. Passion of Mind
    It's hard to imagine a movie at once more pandering and insulting to adult women
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Just Married
    As long on violent slapstick as a Three Stooges retrospective.
  59. Adored
    This feeble comedy-tragedy has Sirkian aspirations but never misses an opportunity to settle for being flesh-friendly gay-film-festival fodder. This is a vanity project, not so much acted as posed.
  60. Eating Out
    Deadening comedy.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pandorum
    Director Christian Alvart clearly attended horror’s new paint-shaker school of direction (motto: shaky = scary!), but the script’s twisty, end-of-the-world intrigue saves this otherwise leaden film from total self-destruction.
  62. Pokémon: The Movie 2000
    Only a 10-year-old could parse the plot.
  63. Drop Dead Gorgeous
    The film means to be a darkly funny look at the perils of winning at all costs, but there's nothing dark and searching about its take.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dirty Deeds
    Directed lifelessly by sitcom vet David Kendall (Growing Pains), Dirty Deeds never shows real curiosity about its characters' pubescent world.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Hitcher
    That leaves little to fill 83 expendable minutes, which barely register as a movie even with snazzy KNB gore effects, critic-baiting clips from "The Birds," a splattery variation on the '86 "Hitcher's" most notorious scene, and some out-of-place Bruckheimerisms on loan from producer Michael Bay.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Haunting of Molly Hartley
    From Freestyle Releasing, the self-service distributor that brought you "D-War" and "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale," comes a movie even worse than those two combined.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fireproof
    Then the film gets all religulous, suggesting that Caleb's devotion to healing means nothing without Jesus, and so Fireproof stops becoming relatable to us all and only to the already, or easily, indoctrinated.
  68. House on Haunted Hill
    Low-budget, high-camp.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Atlas Shrugged: Part I
    The book proves proudly indigestible on film.
  70. Season of the Witch
    The makeup department's glommed-on plague pustules are fantastic, but the concession to modern technology in a badly rendered last-act CGI demon, cut and pasted from a Diablo II screen-grab, is so eminently lame as to cure all fear of hellfire.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Barry Munday
    A dreadfully unfunny slog through contemporary dysfunctional family indie cliché.
  72. Pokémon Heroes
    Surprisingly, not bad.
  73. Head Over Heels
    Although rumor and marketing indicate that this is meant to be a comedy, there's little that's funny here.
  74. Imagining Argentina
    Like "Life Is Beautiful" before it, Imagining Argentina juxtaposes horrific images of torture and humiliation against gooey optimism and thinks it's saying something profound about human resilience in the process.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Zen Noir
    Along the way, Zen Noir commits a few crimes of its own, against noir, Buddhism and filmmaking.
  76. The Perfect Man
    Rosman and Wendkos run dry of ideas in the film's inert, overextended finale, when the "Believe in yourself" speeches grow so thick that even the Duff-devoted may start rolling their eyes.
  77. Sweet November
    This feeble remake offers little more than two pretty and willing leads who nonetheless can't hide their embarrassment over being set up as distractions to hide the film's thorough lack of coherence and appeal.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
    Everything from the Rube Goldberg sets to the Jim Henson creatures is aimed squarely at a preschool audience.
  79. Garfield
    Under Peter Hewitt's phoned-in direction, Garfield chugs along like the slow train to Chattanooga, with only Jennifer Love Hewitt, as the local vet, twittering pertly in a desperate effort to raise Jon's feeble pulse.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Revoloution
    Be aware that RevoLOUtion is a remarkably well-made 75-minute inspiromercial.
  81. Are We There Yet?
    Surely the only thing more excruciating than being trapped in a car with a bratty child is having to sit through a road-trip movie that features two of them.
  82. Crossroads
    So dull, a road-trip movie that's surprisingly short of both adventure and song.
  83. A Guy Thing
    Transcends its video-box-shelf-filler pedigree only when it's actually indulging in guy stuff, mostly of the frat-boy, beer-commercial variety.
  84. 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.
  85. Catwoman
    What the movie needs is a director, and what it gets instead is Pitof, a French visual-effects maestro so much fonder of technological wizardry than of human flesh that he manages to turn even his slinky, sinuous star attraction into a digitized synthespian frolicking about endless CGI cityscapes.
  86. Thérèse: The Story of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
    Skip the movie, stay home, read the book and say three Hail Marys.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gamer
    Neveldine and Taylor’s spazzy (but coherent) action scenes rely mostly on blood spurts instead of feats of badassery, but their dystopia is inventive and their visual schemes diverse.
  88. The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
    A degraded and degrading film, of interest only because it's symptomatic of so much that's wrong with the drearily repetitive tabloid mentality that has infected not just the news media, but the whole culture industry.
  89. Coyote Ugly
    A work of top-shelf schlock.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    When a Stranger Calls
    Amounts to an assault of jarring music cues and peek-a-boo scares that starts off mechanical and ends up utterly desperate.
  91. The Fog
    Nothing comes together after the first ten minutes.
  92. Taxi
    The glitch, beyond the rote story, is that while she's an infectiously upbeat screen presence, Latifah is not, inherently, a major laugh generator, and neither, it would appear, is Fallon.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Perfect Sleep
    The movie layers its fatalistic drama with absurdist horseplay and a few moments of Lynch-ian mysticism, but it's an awkward mix at best; even when The Perfect Sleep is trying to be funny, it's far too self-conscious to really be much fun.
  94. The Musketeer
    Hyams ("End of Days," "Timecop"), who is his own cinematographer, has no idea how to shoot or compose Xiong's wired choreography.
  95. Dead Man on Campus
    The fault lies mostly with the writers, who consistently come up short on wit and imagination enough to finish, let alone flesh out or polish, a joke.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Norbit
    It's an astonishingly crass and vulgar film, crudely directed on a cut-rate budget by Brian Robbins, never more than almost funny or less than disturbing.
  97. Heartbreak Hospital
    Gerber has a sharp cast at hand -- All work furiously, yet the director, with his fake backdrops and stately pacing, never settles on a consistent tone. Surely the novel had more bite.
  98. 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.
  99. View from the Top
    Just lies there, poorly lit and tone-deaf.
  100. Simply Irresistible
    A betrayal of all things Buffy, not to mention a complete waste of Gellar’s strengths as a young actress. Even the most hardcore of her fans would do well to give it a miss.
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