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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    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Man of the Century
    Though the story is often silly to the point of ridiculous, its goofy tone and charming characters, especially Frazier's Johnny, create a lovely idealization of a long-gone era.
  2. The Legend of 1900
    The sense of loss aroused by the film is oceanic.
  3. Dreaming of Joseph Lees
    A film whose story movingly outfoxes any number of shopworn expectations on its way to a singular, heart-rending outcome.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Beefcake
    Dull, tacky docudrama
  5. The Suburbans
    Tiresome vanity project.
  6. Music of the Heart
    Oh, Mr. Craven, give us a "Scream."
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Speaking in Strings
    The less you know about the world of classical music and, specifically, about one of its more flamboyant denizens, the violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, the less the offense of Speaking in Strings.
  8. House on Haunted Hill
    Low-budget, high-camp.
  9. Princess Mononoke
    A Zeitgeist potpourri, strung with late-20th-century fear and anxiety.
  10. Being John Malkovich
    It's a cheerfully deranged stunt, executed in a spirit of infectious lunacy that powers the resulting film to its strongest laughs, and weirdest depths.
  11. Three to Tango
    Placing gay characters front and center in big Hollywood movies is supposed to inspire cheers, not the case of the creeps that comes with Three To Tango.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Body Shots
    A creepy clinical voyeurism and condescending empathy that can't help but alienate its intended audience.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Crazy in Alabama
    The two disparate yet thematically linked storylines are far too faithfully transposed for a feature-length treatment -- crammed together, they're denied the space to flesh out as a cohesive whole.
  14. 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.
  15. The Best Man
    The best parts of the film...are often distractingly slick enough to cover the film's overriding lack of soul.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    La Ciudad (The City)
    Lovely.
  17. Bringing Out the Dead
    (Cage's) performance feels embalmed in the accumulated shtick of an actor trapped in excess.
  18. Bats
    Overlong, hard look at the perils of tampering with Creation.
  19. 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.
  20. L'ennui
    As exasperating as it is insightful. The film ultimately falters, though, because it's so resolutely old-fashioned.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Source
    A witty exploration of cultural mythology, while simultaneously contributing to that mythology.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Defying Gravity
    An exhaustingly melodramatic yarn...a sorely misguided attempt at tender, heartfelt realism, given a WB-glossy sheen and saddled with a script in which every line is the single most hackneyed thing the character could possibly say.
  23. Joe the King
    Whaley successfully balances his scenes on a knife-edge of tenderness and anger that was Truffaut's trademark.
  24. That's the Way I Like It
    Goei's sharp-eyed satiric sense evokes the diversity and energy of Singapore, and his good-humored nostalgia makes disco rise from the dead.
  25. Julien Donkey-Boy
    Looks like no other recent release...certainly rich enough to warrant more than one viewing.
  26. The Straight Story
    Inspirational...unfolds gently with an evenness and rural patience.
  27. Fight Club
    On a purely visual level, it's the most powerful and viscerally exciting movie to come out of Hollywood this year. Which doesn't mean that it's all good.
  28. The Omega Code
    Bad photography, bad acting and bad dialogue.
  29. The Grandfather
    The picture's deepest strength, however, is the fire Fernán-Gómez conjures from deep within himself, as if "honor" were an extinct volcano he could will into exploding, given enough anger and time.
  30. Random Hearts
    Has spread itself so thin between plot, subplots and great scads of floppy pop-psych, it has nothing else to do but lie down and die of exhaustion.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Molly
    This movie's already been entertaining (or boring) airline passengers for months.
  32. The Limey
    A disappointed meditation on the '60s.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Whiteboyz
    Can never quite decide whether it's after the humor implicit in what seems conceived as satire, or the agitprop frissons of race and class theory.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Superstar
    It isn't so easy to laugh at Mary Katherine Gallagher and her disgusting antics when she actually has feelings.
  35. Boys Don't Cry
    Free of the disclaiming jokey sneer that defaces so much of contemporary neo-noir.
    • 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.
  37. Bandits
    Equal parts big-house B-feature, hammer-down road movie, post-feminist consciousness-raiser and rock & roll pipe dream.
  38. The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland
    The film is nothing if not benign, but its merits are moot for those above 7 or so.
  39. Happy, Texas
    A very cynical exploitation of the current Hollywood vogue for things queer. Still, the film is a must-see.
  40. Mystery, Alaska
    Thoroughly mediocre.
  41. Plunkett & Macleane
    Lewd, crude and occasionally too brutal to take, it's also gorgeous, heartfelt.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Drive Me Crazy
    Nothing in this craven exercise... will register in the memory for longer than the walk back to the car.
  43. Three Kings
    Better than the usual Hollywood rot, but dialectical it ain't.
  44. Double Jeopardy
    All promise and no payoff.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    On the Ropes
    Jolts with a quiet intimacy.
  46. Out of Season
    In a major miscalculation, writer-director Jeanette L. Buck has underwritten Micki [the protagonist], making her so mysteriously sullen and distant that audiences may feel violently alienated.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    One Man's Hero
    Basically a TNT Western with Tom Berenger in the lead.
  48. Mumford
    How refreshing it is to see a studio picture where plot development is revealed not so much by grandiose action as by the small, interior shifts that are witnessed through a character's eyes.
  49. Jakob the Liar
    Just avoid this ghastly, insulting farrago at all costs.
  50. Simon Sez
    A pretty miserable time at the movies.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dog Park
    It is in the "serious" moments that the film's sentiments don't ring true.
  52. Taxman
    Writer-director Avi Nesher and co-screenwriter Roger Berger -- upon whose real-life investigations the film is based -- deliver on the hard-boiled promise of this low-key thriller with plenty of gritty twists and turns.
  53. Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember
    Nearly three and a half hours in length, but owing to its freedom of movement, the film feels weightless.
  54. Sugar Town
    Lovely, lovely, lovely.
  55. Romance
    There's never been a movie director like Catherine Breillat, a fearless visionary and one hell of a woman.
  56. For Love of the Game
    The film's larger, surprisingly mature emotional rhythms are strong enough to pull it through.
  57. Blue Streak
    (Lawrence)'s not just unfunny, he's coarsely anti-funny. The film just lurches from one dull skit to the next without bite or much of a point.
  58. Lucie Aubrac
    Aside from isolated flares of unchecked emotion ...Bouquet's Lucie is too far removed from our ken of romance and overriding purpose, or from Berri's for that matter, to be embraced entirely.
  59. Breakfast of Champions
    It's great unruly fun.
  60. Splendor
    It's dirty and delightful, if a tad on the slight side.
  61. American Beauty
    Surprises you with a kind of hardheaded romanticism.
  62. The Minus Man
    A film without attitude or mystery...an exquisitely executed, and exquisitely banal, treatise on the banality of evil.
  63. B. Monkey
    Unfortunately, none of the characters -- despite the film's strong cast -- ever seems worthy of the attention.
  64. Love Stinks
    There's more than a hint of self-pitying male-castration fantasy in writer-director Jeff Franklin's portrayal.
  65. Earth
    Both visually and emotionally, a panoramic picture; Mehta wields a master's hand as she weaves together vistas of urban and pastoral India with thoughts on the nature of man as it keeps cycling out in the specifics of history.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Best Laid Plans
    Manages to be a fun twist-within-a-twist movie.
  67. Black Cat, White Cat
    Kusturica's always masterful orchestration of chaos, coincidence and caricature really pays off as a sweet, soulful celebration of old friends, new loves and the mad scramble of life at the fringe.
  68. 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.
  69. All the Little Animals
    Three leads do their best with simplistic characters.
  70. Outside Providence
    Baldwin's perfectly impacted performance as a tough-love provider (the actor gets some of the best lines in the movie).
  71. Chill Factor
    These bantering would-be heroes mostly live at the tops of their voices.
  72. The 13th Warrior
    For the most part it delivers the goods.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Dog of Flanders
    Brodie assembles a grab bag of themes formulaic to films about poverty.
  74. The Astronaut's Wife
    This hypersleek film is surprisingly lax for its first half... The ending is dumb.
  75. The Muse
    If only the whole thing were as funny as an Albert Brooks movie.
  76. The Very Thought of You
    This bright farce is spun from interlocking coincidences that only seem far-fetched.
  77. Dudley Do-Right
    This whole movie is fun, and smart too, a fitting tribute to Jay Ward's original cartoons.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In Too Deep
    Enough gunfights, vicious beatings, and pissing matches for five films.
  79. Teaching Mrs. Tingle
    A dark, biting comedy-- funny, smart and full of unpredictable twist and turns.
  80. Mickey Blue Eyes
    An abbondanza of busy, situation comedy twists that snip one's suspended disbelief and send it crashing like a chandelier.
  81. Universal Soldier: The Return
    A mind-numbing exercise in high body counts and big tits.
  82. Brokedown Palace
    An exploitation flick, but without the thrills or cleavage.
  83. Bowfinger
    A terrifically clever film; has a soft-boilded heart.
  84. The Acid House
    Sympathy is disturbingly cast aside so we can wallow in the pathetic. It’s a bad trip, man.
  85. The Thomas Crown Affair
    An improvement on the original, but that isn't saying much.
  86. Mystery Men
    Mystery Men gives proof that satire isn't dead.
  87. Illuminata
    Very much a fully realized cinematic experience. John Turturro, even if you have to act less, be sure to direct more, and often.
  88. The Iron Giant
    One of the best films of the year thus far.
  89. The Sixth Sense
    Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan lets the tension rise slowly, leads you everywhere you don't expect, doesn't rip you off and totally freaks you out -- all without stale effects or gore.
  90. Dick
    The limp title says it all.
  91. 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.
  92. Twin Falls Idaho
    Proves that it's possible for a movie to be reckless and adventurous merely by being sedate, unhurried and contemplative.
  93. Inspector Gadget
    Within a few minutes of the film's frenetic opening set piece, however, it's obvious that director David Kellogg and screenwriters Kerry Ehrin and Zak Penn have no idea how to capture the spirit of the source material.
  94. 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.
  95. The Wood
    What feels genuine in the film -- mother-son bonds, the wedding party -- is surrounded by overdetermined and formulaic scenes lifted from other films.
  96. Eyes Wide Shut
    It's good -- when it's not adrift in an absence of meaning.
  97. The Blair Witch Project
    It's a small film whose power is derived from its stripped-down scale.
  98. 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.
  99. Arlington Road
    Despite its flaws, Arlington Road romps home as an absorbing, unpredictable thriller.
  100. American Pie
    The movie lover in you will recoil; your inner sophomore will rejoice.
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