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. Twisted
    Insipid embarrassment.
  2. Little Man
    There's no question, though, that the Wayanses have dialed down the outrageousness to nearly sub-PG-13 levels.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Babylon A.D.
    If nothing else, it's nice to see an action movie that takes Europe, not America, as its grounding point.
  4. Echelon Conspiracy
    Given the passivity of computer use, the "hacker thriller" is film history's great running joke, but special attention should go to Echelon Conspiracy's authors for conceiving a climax that tries to juice tension out of someone using a search engine and staring at a download countdown.
  5. Trixie
    Director Alan Rudolph kills this promising film off with a combination of bad writing and wrong-headed direction.
  6. Dracula 2000
    Although it's not half bad -- which doesn't mean it's half good -- this horror cheapie comes equipped with a few ideas, a little atmosphere and a couple of serviceable scares.
  7. Van Wilder
    The film's sheer likability and very impressive gag-to-giggle ratio derive more from sweetness and sharpness than from shit jokes.
  8. Basic Instinct 2
    Basic Instinct 2 pushes diligently along in a murder-and-mayhem-stuffed effort to demonstrate that (a) a sillier and more hackneyed movie than "Basic Instinct" is possible and (b) that shrinks have ids too, by golly.
  9. Patch Adams
    Williams is a great clown, and Oedekirk and Shadyac give him room to really cut loose, and cure the movie. That’s as it should be.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tideland
    This Southern Gothic Alice in Wonderland is not for the faint-hearted, to be sure, yet amid the swaying chaff there are moments of piercing grace and beauty when we'e reminded of the lost, lonely child at the heart of this tale. If nothing else, it's liberating to see one of cinema's unrepentant fantasists going out on a limb like this and cutting loose.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Zoom
    Tim Allen gamely brings some humanity to the role of the retired, powerless hero Captain Zoom, but is thwarted at every turn by bad special effects, slapdash editing, interminable pop-song montages, and a goofy performance by Courteney Cox.
    • 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.
  13. Fish Without a Bicycle
    Though Green is engaging, the rest of the cast are unlikable and tediously self-involved, especially Mattison, who, not surprisingly, wrote this tripe.
  14. Supercross
    When huge chunks of character development and narrative exposition are relegated to a track announcer's running commentary, it can never be a good sign.
    • 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.
    • 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.
  17. River Runs Red
    The acting is stiff, the pacing sluggish, the framing uncertain, the music an intrusive mush and the scenario schematic. But it’s an interesting schematic, at least, complete with thoughtful/exhaustive discussion of the difference between justice, revenge and forgiveness.
  18. Phantoms
    Since neither (Chapelle nor Koontz) seems to have any idea as to how to make an actual movie, they abandon form and reason and throw every stock trick in the book at the screen to see what sticks. And what sticks is the murky goo of storytelling gone bad.
  19. 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.
  20. Gloria
    It’s hard to know what’s more depressing -- a senseless remake or the idea of a once-great director doing such shockingly slack work.
  21. Shadow Hours
    The pits.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Skyline
    The military eventually shows up to nuke the joint (L.A., incidentally), but there's no urgency, suspense or charm with all that back-row rattle.
  23. Pavilion of Women
    So many romantic cliches it's laughable.
  24. Case 39
    Has there ever been a more inept trio of big-city caseworkers? Go ahead, Lilith. Unleash the hounds.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Here on Earth
    Complete and utter horseshit.
  26. The One
    There's nothing like a feature-length video game to make you feel you're being played.
  27. The Million Dollar Hotel
    How this hopelessly muddled and tedious dirge got released -- unless it was through the clout of Mel Gibson, who's grafted on as an FBI agent in a neck brace, with no discernible connection to the action -- is the real mystery.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Benchwarmers
    It's hard to buy the movie as an underdog success story, since even the actors barely seem to exert themselves.
  29. 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.
  30. American Outlaws
    Occasionally the Woo-inflected action sequences - particularly a horse stampede through town on hanging day, and an escape from a moving train - rouse the film from its anti-historic, even mythophobic torpor.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Comebacks
    Isn’t as obnoxiously awful as, say, "Epic Movie"; it’s simply not funny in the least.
  32. Sorority Boys
    If only they had the courage of their crassness.
  33. Knockout
    There's little to recommend Knockout.
  34. The Next Best Thing
    No one ever turns into a real character, and none of the scenes have either dramatic or comedic resonance.
  35. A Cinderella Story
    Under the charmless direction of Mark Rosman, the actors seem to be frozen at the rehearsal stage, with the blessed exception of a sublimely funny Jennifer Coolidge as the Botoxed horror of a stepmother.
  36. Pokémon 4: The Movie
    It's animated cockfighting for children.
  37. Stealing Harvard
    Whenever Green shows up to do his semi-improvised, non-acting shtick (detaching pit bulls from testicles, kamikaze wheelchair rides, etc.), this otherwise sprightly and intermittently amusing movie suddenly feels like a ship dragging its anchor.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Obsessed
    Isn't half as dramatic as what probably went down after she (Beyoncé Knowles) kicked LaTavia and LaToya out of Destiny's Child.
  39. Modigliani
    A tiresome, hammy and ultimately annoying portrait of the artist as a young drunk.
  40. Venom
    Although, in the end, this is basically just a moss-strewn remake of his 1997 hit, "I Know What You Did Last Summer," director Jim Gillespie appears invigorated, sending his capable young cast into a series of nicely staged suspense sequences.
  41. My Soul to Take
    All might be good for a flask-to-the-theater laugh, if not for the unconscionable price gouging.
  42. Jason X
    The film has spunk. Unfortunately, the gore comes with brutal regularity, so that, despite Farmer and Isaac's attempts to liven things up, the film still just wears you down.
  43. Dragonfly
    Despite the film's aspirations to soul healing, its uplift remains mechanical, like an escalator's.
  44. Double Take
    An ostensible action-comedy that can't seem to get either side of its genre equation right.
  45. Enough
    Mechanical revenge fantasy that skirts every serious issue it raises along a slick, cynical trajectory.
  46. Autumn in New York
    When it comes to real people living and loving in the real world, the studios don't have a clue.
  47. 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.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    London
    Perhaps the best compliment that can be paid to Hunter Richards' directorial debut is that it nearly manages to make some of the most irritatingly shallow human beings on Earth seem tragic.
  49. The Suburbans
    Tiresome vanity project.
  50. A Sound of Thunder
    The barometer of the film's undoing is Burns' super-low-key performance, which starts out as a pokerfaced spoof on heroic cool, but takes a misstep more fatal than mere time travel can undo.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Redline
    The cars and stunt work are real, and so is the rather endearing retro cheesiness. This is the movie that really belongs with Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof."
    • 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.
  53. The Whole Ten Yards
    Miserably unfunny, wholly unnecessary affair.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    One Man's Hero
    Basically a TNT Western with Tom Berenger in the lead.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Skulls
    Screenwriter John Pogue and director Rob Cohen expose only the dullness of their own imaginations.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Sorority Row
    Call me the sarcastic sister, but the only things screaming in any convincing way here are the cheap look, epileptic direction and off-key, “edgy” humor. It’s all so ‘80s, I could die.
  57. Get Carter
    If you've never seen the original, you may have no idea what's going on.
  58. Mr. Deeds
    Sandler is -- à la "The Wedding Singer" -- in his washout romantic mode here, and no amount of spastic-colon jokes, cartoon violence or good-buddy cameos (Al Sharpton, John McEnroe) can distract from the fact that Gary Cooper he ain't.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bride Wars
    A step backward for Hathaway, Bride Wars is one more step into the quicksand for Hudson, who's spent the nine years since ""Almost Famous wandering the rom-com wasteland in search of an exit strategy; this movie, which she exec produced, ain't it.
  60. Jawbreaker
    It’s like watching an annoying young drag queen who flubs the quips she’s stolen, refuses to shut up and thinks attitude is wit.
  61. 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.
  62. Juwanna Mann
    So what in this high-concept lame-a-thon makes screenwriter Bradley Allenstein think he can diss the Clippers?
  63. Universal Soldier: The Return
    A mind-numbing exercise in high body counts and big tits.
  64. Sex, Politics & Cocktails
    This peculiar little comedy, shot on digital video, gets points for editorial pizzazz, but earns a big zero for content.
  65. See Spot Run
    It's finally a hilarious and cuddly flashback from the dog's point of view, to his training as a pup, that marks the moment when the film finds its sweetly moronic legs.
  66. Speed 2: Cruise Control
    The last half-hour is a decent enough ride, with Dafoe controlling the ship by Powerbook and product placement, while Bullock and Patric demonstrate the triumph of American gumption over high tech, the better to save all hands on deck.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Stay Alive
    Stay Alive is death porn without the porn: Director William Brent Bell's pre-gore cutaways should enrage even those horror buffs for whom suspense is irrelevant, to say nothing of the fact that the movie's only real scare tactic is playing what sounds like a reverbed electric razor on the soundtrack.
  68. Hollow Man
    If only the rest of the movie were as good as its cast.
  69. Godsend
    Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos appear to be vying for the title of filmdom's least-convincing married couple, while Robert De Niro, as the movie's modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, takes his own expert career slumming to a new depth -- he's become an evil clone of a once-great actor.
  70. Doogal
    Doogal is one of those pickup-and-redub jobs, the original version having been made by European studio Pathé based on a 1960s British children’s show, "The Magic Roundabout." And lacking even the minimal pop-cultural pizzazz of "Hoodwinked," the story, dialogue and animation here really are for-kids-only.
  71. Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
    As before, there are moments, when Schneider is turned loose to do his anything-goes, creepy-funny shtick, that are crudely inspired.
  72. Walking on the Sky
    But Walking, which is well-acted and fast-moving, takes a tumble from which it never fully recovers once Josh's diary is found, and the rest of the film is spent tending to spilled secrets and their collateral damage.
  73. Couples Retreat
    The movie’s cumulative idea is that, forgetting the delusions of midlife panic, this is all there is, you’re already living the best possible life -- a message of sedentary wisdom betrayed when the actual film is as undeniably dreary as a plate of gummy Chicken Parmesan Tanglers.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Poor White Trash
    Essentially a single-gag movie: Namely, trailer trash are funny; we laugh at their bad taste and social ineptitude.
  75. Bats
    Overlong, hard look at the perils of tampering with Creation.
    • 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.
  77. My Baby's Daddy
    Strictly Urban Comedy 101, as if the filmmakers had neither the inclination nor the chops to move the genre past timeworn stereotypes.
  78. Formula 51
    A waste of the filmmakers' time and ours, and offering further evidence that, outside the art house, much British cinema has its head jammed tightly up its own arse.
  79. Caffeine
    Cosgrove and screenwriter Dean Craig aim for the kind of close-quarters chaos that John Cleese and Connie Booth turned into high comic art on "Fawlty Towers," but Caffeine's roundelay of sophomoric urination, masturbation and pedophilia gags isn't half as funny as the atrocious British accents of the largely American cast.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Condemned
    Flaws, double standards, strange detours and all, this is still the most entertaining WWE release to date.
  81. The Celestine Prophecy
    The film taps the same spiritual thirst and anxiety that has made cultural phenomena of "The Da Vinci Code" and the "Left Behind" series. And it’s just as cheesy.
  82. The Roommate
    It's exactly what you thought it would be: A plagiarized, campus-set "Single White Female" pitched to teens.
  83. Beautiful
    Made with the slick, shorthand complacency of a TV movie, Beautiful is so overstuffed with contrivance, you can hardly breathe.
  84. Darkness Falls
    Black cats, ill-timed power outages and children in peril are just a few of the hoary scare tactics ineffectively rendered in the style of so many films buried in the dark recesses of January.
  85. Eight Crazy Nights
    In the end it's only "The Chanukah Song, Part 3," playing over the closing credits, that manages to capture the joy of the season.
  86. Half Past Dead
    The most exhilarating fight by far is an acrobatic wall climber between Ja Rule and Nia Peeples, choreographed by Hong Kong's Xin Xin Xong (The Musketeer) who, in terms of thrills per minute, is the movie's real star.
  87. Love Stinks
    There's more than a hint of self-pitying male-castration fantasy in writer-director Jeff Franklin's portrayal.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Bounty Hunter
    The script has all the spunk of Ikea-bookcase assembly instructions.
  89. South of Heaven, West of Hell
    Oxymoronic musings of a vain country singer.
  90. Running Free
    Let horses be horses, scrap the tin-eared Lukas Haas narration.
  91. The Ladies Man
    The story sinks, along with any deeper laughs, under boringly formulaic motivations and plot twists.
  92. Saving Silverman
    This is harmless stuff, and sometimes it's actually pretty funny, too.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Pokémon 3: The Movie
    Equally as brainless, shrill and calculated as its two predecessors.
  94. Black Christmas
    The flashbacks are wittily gothic, and the present-day murder scenes have the absurdist, chain-reaction intricacy of the "Final Destination" deaths.
  95. Merci Docteur Rey
    This is less a coming-out tale than a showcase for late-middle-aged hysterical divas in flowing caftans to yell, scream and ride roughshod over the young homosexuals who are nominally the movie's center.
  96. Out Cold
    There’s no point slamming this fart-and-burp teen flick, since the chortles of the 11-year-old boys -- and the men with an 11-year-old's disposition -- at a recent mall screening can't be denied.
  97. Don't Tell
    Might make a fun Lifetime TV movie -- if it weren't quite so morose.
  98. Christmas with the Kranks
    Other lumps of coal in this celluloid stocking include director Joe Roth's leaden pacing - like trudging through heavy snow - and screenwriter Chris Columbus' tireless affinity for pain gags.
  99. The Watcher
    Fails to fulfill.
    • L.A. Weekly
    • 22 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Tortilla Heaven
    If it was simply a jokey commentary on the dangers of greed and religious fervor, Tortilla Heaven would be forgivable. But Hecht Dumontet deserves special derision for her hypocritical condescension toward Falfúrrias' simple-folk caricatures, rendering them as God-fearing dolts worthy of scorn until the patronizing finale, which tries for a spiritual uplift that's as disingenuous as it is incompetently executed.
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