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. Venus Boyz
    Empty details pile up, awful performance art is doled out, talking heads are intermittently identified, and the late Brandon Teena is evoked to little real purpose.
  2. Returner
    Silly, derivative stuff.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Messengers
    The end result looks heavily doctored: The Sam Raimi-produced feature is a badly acted, nonsensical patchwork of fake scares, crow attacks and wall-crawling CGI spooks, capped by a DVD extra of an ending that must have the real resolution gagged somewhere in a closet.
  4. Honey
    Hinges almost completely on the taut body and delectable beauty of Jessica Alba, but is otherwise so riddled with limp clichés that it doesn't even qualify as a guilty pleasure.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Zen Noir
    Along the way, Zen Noir commits a few crimes of its own, against noir, Buddhism and filmmaking.
  6. 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.
  7. Napoleon Dynamite
    If Napoleon Dynamite really is, as reported, a semiautobiographical exercise, it is one of the most astoundingly self-hating such exercises in memory.
  8. Bobby G. Can't Swim
    The movie rarely overcomes its terminal Scorsese- and Ferrara-isms, or fulfills the promise, evident in the film's early passages, that Montias might be a fine observer of local color with his own unique stories to tell.
  9. Camp
    The movie is so rigged to elicit the audience's empathy that it becomes difficult to watch; it's stifling.
  10. The Story of Us
    The wet blanket of undigested autobiography lies all over Rob Reiner's excruciating new opus about a marriage winding down into terminal atrophy.
  11. Joe Dirt
    Rich with comic potential that goes unfulfilled, time after stupefying time.
  12. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn
    While writer-director Jim Hosking’s commitment to weirdness (also seen in his previous outing, The Greasy Strangler) warrants appreciation, especially when so many others play it safe, his latest, comedy An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn, is a chore to get through.
  13. The Super
    Naturally, not everything is what it seems; there are a couple of necessary untruths even in this plot synopsis. But the part where it seems like some excellent actors have been roped into propping up a hopelessly by-the-numbers horror movie? That’s totally on the level.
  14. Hollow Man
    If only the rest of the movie were as good as its cast.
  15. One Missed Call
    If your cell phone vibrates while you’re watching One Missed Call, go ahead and answer, because even a wrong number will be more exciting than what’s happening onscreen.
  16. Trixie
    Director Alan Rudolph kills this promising film off with a combination of bad writing and wrong-headed direction.
  17. Phantom
    First-time director João Pedro Rodrigues' unwillingness to define his hero’s background or motivations becomes more and more frustrating as the film goes on.
  18. Jersey Girl
    Both stars are atrocious -- but the real blame for this cosmically self-indulgent disaster lies with Kevin Smith, who directs like a proud father who can't stop showing you pictures of his kids. And here's the thing: The brats are ugly.
  19. Hard Rain
    A nearly affectless Christian Slater, who carries a co-producing credit and seems to have lost his charisma along with his sneer, plays Tom, an armored-car guard who plays hide-and-seek with a gang of thieves, all of whom, outside of ringleader Jim (Morgan Freeman), are instantly forgettable.
  20. Nicotina
    Self-satisfied, incoherently busy farce.
  21. The Manson Family
    The movie is monotonous, and by the time it gets to its climactic re-enactment of the Tate-LaBianca killings, it seems little more than the heir to "Survive!, The Zodiac Killer" and other unsavory 1970s horror cheapies that tried to turn a quick buck on real-life tragedy.
  22. Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
    "Legally Blonde" was a splashy, wide-screen near musical, a movie made in the spirit of Elle Woods herself. Legally Blonde 2 is Elle Woods' eulogy.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Pretty Ugly People
    At first, Lucy seems so manic and crazed that the viewer might suspect this will turn into a slasher movie. Later, when it becomes clear just how annoying and unlikable each character is, you’ll pray that it turns into a slasher movie.
  24. Burning Palms
    Built-to-shock anthology film.
  25. 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.
  26. The X Files: I Want to Believe
    The truth is still out there, like an unsold lawn chair at a garage sale, in this just plain lousy second big-screen outing for erstwhile FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Angels with Angles
    Not even Gorshin's marvelously dead-on impression of Burns can save a movie that rewrites screwball comedy in the same way King Henry VIII rewrote Catholicism.
  28. Don't Come Knocking
    So radiantly awful that, given the egghead credentials of the director and his screenwriter and star Sam Shepard, I initially took the charitable route and assumed I was in the presence of parody.
  29. Runaway Bride
    In "Pretty Woman" Roberts played a tough whore with a soft heart. Here, she's a business owner whose sense of self is so tenuous she doesn't even know how she likes her eggs done.
  30. Loser
    Squeak(s) by to make Loser justify the price of admission.
  31. J'aimerais pas crever un dimanche
    Seems stuck in reverse.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Just Married
    As long on violent slapstick as a Three Stooges retrospective.
  33. Maximum Impact
    There’s something oddly fascinating (and — dare I say it! — watchable) about a movie being this defiantly dumb. I never thought I’d say this, but this guy could give Tommy Wiseau a run for his money in the best worst filmmaker department.
  34. Rugrats Go Wild
    Paramount Pictures proudly informs us that the PG rating is for “mild, crude humor.” Too mild, too crude by far. If I were you, I’d take the wee ones and run for the vastly superior “Finding Nemo.”
  35. The Peacemaker
    If I were a grief-stricken Sarajevan I'd take offense.
  36. Dopamine
    This feels like a movie that was grown in a petri dish -- poked and prodded with all manner of overcooked symbolism and thesis statements, but fatally absent the genuine human emotions about which it incessantly prattles on.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bewitched
    The film's funny for 15 minutes as it skewers Hollywood and prowls block after block of familiar L.A. scenery.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Saw II
    Saw II repels, morally and aesthetically, and while some -- including the filmmakers, perhaps -- may take this as a compliment, it isn't intended as one. Let the game stop. Please.
  39. My 5 Wives
    The deliriously deficient new excuse for a comedy.
  40. Original Sin
    The director belabors every moment, forgetting that pulp tales need to be told quickly, lest the viewer have time to second-guess.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Return
    The Return gets this year's award for most misleading poster, with its image of an empty-eyed, gray-skinned zombie/ghost that appears nowhere in the movie. You might, however, feel a little empty-eyed and zombie-like yourself after emerging from this languid story.
  42. The Flying Scotsman
    It has a terminal case of the cutes crossed with the labored earnestness of a disease-of-the-week melodrama.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Banished
    This silly little flick is deadly serious. And seriously awful.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Objective
    It plays like a disastrous Sci-Fi Channel castoff, thanks in no small part to Myrick's odd decision to include incessant voice-over narration by Ball, which plays like a really terrible in-character DVD commentary track.
  45. I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
    It's noisy, it's flashy, and it's deadly dull -- without the goofball, horror-nerd energy of Kevin Williamson, who wrote the first film, this essentially storyless picture, written by Trey Callaway and directed by Danny Gan-non, revolves doggedly around Hewitt's tits.
  46. Shaft
    What Jackson's Shaft can't do is talk the talk, or much of anything else, in director John Singleton's feature-length insult to one of the more cherished modern screen icons.
  47. The Iron Ladies
    A surprise hit in Thailand, the film is nonetheless a reductive mess.
  48. Scooby-Doo
    Director Raja Gosnell apparently doesn't even try to pump life into this wan film version of the beloved Saturday-morning cartoon.
  49. An Ideal Husband
    Parker has boiled An Ideal Husband into a thuddingly unimaginative costume drama laden with frocks, riding crops, servile butlers and very good actors desperately treading water.
  50. The Lonely Affair of the Heart
    A tedious viewing experience.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Bangkok Dangerous
    Another of those dopey crime thrillers where the hardcore, bad-ass antihero inexplicably decides one day to lower his guard and open his heart, causing all kinds of hell to break loose.
  52. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    Directed by Donald Petrie ("Miss Congeniality") with about as much substance and style as a ham sandwich. It's a heavy hand that damps down such airy creatures as Hudson and McConaughey.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    A Night at the Roxbury
    That Amy Heckerling produced and, supposedly, had an uncredited hand in scripting this turkey is the saddest thing I've heard all year.
  54. The Suburbans
    Tiresome vanity project.
  55. Company Man
    Unfunny comedy. Nearly everyone is terrible except for Cumming, who just does what comes naturally and steals his every scene.
  56. 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Death Race
    With its inexplicably watchable shotgun-riding bimbos, unconscious homoeroticism and "Shawshank Redemption" ending, The Fast and the Frivolous here is almost so bad it's good. Almost...
  58. America's Sweethearts
    The film isn't just banal, it's aggressively, arrogantly banal.
  59. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
    Extraordinary is the very last adjective that comes to mind.
  60. Thomas and the Magic Railroad
    If you're above the target age of 5, Thomas may coax you into a naplike stupor.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Blood and Chocolate
    If you care a thing about your evening's entertainment, you'll walk out of this howler before you ever buy a ticket.
  62. Soft Toilet Seats
    Is it possible for a movie to have a worse title? This might not matter so much if the film that followed were any good, but for the most part it's drudgery.
  63. Passion of Mind
    It's hard to imagine a movie at once more pandering and insulting to adult women
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    War
    What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Offering neither the enjoyably preposterous auto-heroics of the Transporter movies nor the lithe, legible athleticism of even second-tier Hong Kong thrillers.
  65. The Watcher
    Fails to fulfill.
    • L.A. Weekly
  66. Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat
    It's Lawrence who throws Runteldat (as in "run and tell that") off key, repeating an admonition about "the trials and tribulations of life" that sounds suspiciously insincere coming, as it does, from a guy smothered in diamonds.
  67. Restless
    Writer and director Gilfillan has an estimable biography, having studied at the Beijing Film Academy and worked as an assistant to John Woo, but there's nothing in her prosaic feature debut that suggests this means a thing.
    • 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.
  69. Mission to Mars
    Otherwise fine actors such as Don Cheadle and Gary Sinise spend nearly two hours of film time stand-ing around like department-store dummies mouthing dialogue so wooden it's petrified.
  70. Crime and Punishment in Suburbia
    A cut above the usual teenage-wasteland movie.
  71. Loco Love
    For a film that deals with adultery, racism, immigration and class struggle, Loco Love is a startlingly weightless work. It has the antiseptic look and feel of an Olsen Twins video.
  72. Autumn in New York
    When it comes to real people living and loving in the real world, the studios don't have a clue.
  73. An American Carol
    Astonishingly inept alleged satire.
  74. 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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Parallel
    An amateurish mashup of "The Butterfly Effect" and "The Family Man" (talk about unholy hybrids!) that strains patience from the get-go.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Mini's First Time
    Mini is too tame for Skina-max and too inane to survive on the art-house circuit. It's a pretentious erotic thriller that gives honest trash a bad name.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Ready to Rumble
    Even though Ready To Rumble isn't funny or good in any way, there's plenty of softcore gay porn (wrestling), loud music and women with large breasts.
  78. Underclassman
    Conceptually, Underclassman is the stillborn spawn of "Beverly Hills Cop" and "21 Jump Street." Except its star, Nick Cannon, possesses neither the biting cool of young Eddie Murphy nor the sullen mystery of Johnny Depp. And the script, by David T. Wagner and Brent Goldberg, is breathtakingly bad.
  79. 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.
  80. Hollywood Ending
    It isn't only that there is a dearth of ideas in Hollywood Ending -- however hateful, "Deconstructing Harry" was at least about something -- it's that the whole thing is almost entirely devoid of pleasure.
  81. The Cookout
    Queen Latifah gets co-producer and scenarist credits for this anemic comedy, and also a supporting role that amounts to the worst performance of her career.
  82. Urban Legends: Final Cut
    Wears its lack of originality in a crowded slasher marketplace like a red badge of desperation.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Better Living
    Talky and labored.
  84. Controlled Chaos
    The only real-life situations the movie evokes vividly are the circumstances of its own production: underrehearsed actors in hastily staged scenes speaking page after page of awkward expository dialogue.
  85. Friday After Next
    Loud, chaotic and largely unfunny (veteran actors John Witherspoon and Anna Maria Horsford seem at best indifferent to the material), Friday After Next is the graceless sodomizing of a cult classic.
  86. Beautiful
    Made with the slick, shorthand complacency of a TV movie, Beautiful is so overstuffed with contrivance, you can hardly breathe.
  87. 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.
  88. The Learning Curve
    Opens the floodgates of cartoonish villainy and pitiful sentiment.
  89. 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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Divorce: The Musical
    Dworman's comic style dangles in the abyss somewhere between sub-Woody Allen and Mel Brooks (his script borrows too heavily from both).
  91. 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.
  92. Lake Placid
    By the end of this mercifully short excuse for a horror movie, you'll be wishing the beast had chowed down on the entire ensemble.
  93. Urban Legend
    When will Hollywood learn that a genre trend can last for years if itís nurtured with decent scripts? No time soon, apparently.
  94. 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.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Epic Movie
    By the time this dud drops on NetFlix, it'll be as obsolete as a Chia pet jokebook.
  96. 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.
  97. The New Guy
    Various actors deserving of better (including Zooey Deschanel, Eddie Griffin and Lyle Lovett) suffer through the undercooked material, while love interest Eliza Dushku gamely gets through both a bikini-modeling montage and a mechanical bull ride, but none of their efforts can save this film.
  98. What's the Worst That Could Happen?
    Comes off as a desperate attempt to breathe life into dull proceedings.
  99. Mutant Aliens
    When Plympton isn't indulging his manias, the film just sort of nods off, and nothing much happens -- either visually or storywise -- for what seems like ages.
  100. Head Over Heels
    Although rumor and marketing indicate that this is meant to be a comedy, there's little that's funny here.
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