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. The Sculptress
    A hodgepodge of psychosexual horror gimmicks, from the virginal psychic artist to the impotent psychotic actor.
  2. From Justin to Kelly
    Full of gumption, Clarkson and Guarini soldier on, seemingy unaware that the perfectly adequate singing voices that brought them to the big screen are being drowned out, on a half-dozen same-sounding songs, by an overlayered backup group.
  3. Glitter
    Glitter is, if nothing else, comfortable with what it is, namely earnestly made, wholehearted schlock.
  4. Dungeons & Dragons
    A cheap "Star Wars" rip-off with swords instead of light sabers.
  5. The In Crowd
    Lifeless, desultory slog.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Daddy Day Camp
    Depressingly shrill.
  7. Fascination
    So tedious is Fascination that the plot, the embittered characters and, yes, the sexuality are merely insipid.
  8. Freddy Got Fingered
    Lurches from one set-piece stomach-lurcher to the next with nary a nod to narrative coherence.
  9. Down to You
    One of those puppy-love movies that make you feel like you're slowly drowning.
  10. New Best Friend
    This movie could have easily been shot as porn, a transition that would have given it a modicum of respectability and, better still, true social purpose.
  11. The Avengers
    It's shockingly inert.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Strange Wilderness
    No snob to low-brow ridiculousness when it’s actually unexpected, I’ll admit to being amused exactly once, when Zahn gets deep-throated by a gigantic prop turkey who, despite the mouthful, keeps on flapping.
  13. Slackers
    Barely proficient on a craft level, this jumble of putatively comic misunderstanding and overly familiar crude burlesque achieves its nadir with a cameo from Mamie Van Doren, a degrading, shameful turn that lays bare, all too literally, the filmmakers' contempt for women.
  14. The Adventures of Pluto Nash
    Murphy slogs his way through this dismally dull sci-fi comedy.
  15. The Master of Disguise
    The Master of Disguise represents Adam Sandler's latest attempt to dumb down the universe.
  16. King's Ransom
    Remarkably unfunny.
  17. 3 Strikes
    Three strikes maybe, but no stars and no thumbs up (except the one way, way up its own ass).
  18. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
    It's cynical and it's depressing, and I would lock a child in a room before I'd show him Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.
  19. Date Movie
    This anemic genre parody from two of the six writers of "Scary Movie" strives for the goofball precision of the brothers Zucker and, long before it reaches the end of its 70-odd minutes, gives you newfound respect for the comic genius of the brothers Wayans (two of the other writers of "Scary Movie").
  20. Pinocchio
    Visually sumptuous but intellectually stultifying.
  21. Whipped
    As repellent as their characters are, one feels a degree of pity for the three male leads, who give fresh evidence that hungry actors can't say no to a studio feature, no matter how humiliating the script.
  22. Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
    A stinker.
  23. Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
    As for anyone else who may experience a sudden need for therapy after sitting through this, you're on your own.
  24. Alone in the Dark
    Director Uwe Boll (House of the Dead) pulls off a nicely staged fistfight in an open-air market at the start, but soon loses his way amid mind-glazing exposition and endless gunfire aimed at bulletproof giant lizards.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Meet the Spartans
    Meet the Spartans is a mild improvement over their "Epic Movie," which is like saying that a debilitating fever is more fun than appendicitis, but what’s shocking is how lazy it is, which is a shame for former UK child star/pop singer Sean Maguire, whose Gerard Butler impersonation is spot-on.
  26. Dirty Love
    The sex-comedy-for-girls idea never quite takes off.
  27. State Property
    It almost appears like a little thought went into this otherwise grim exercise in soullessness.
    • 8 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Transylmania
    With stronger actors and real writers, this might’ve been a vintage comedy you could sink your...nope, not going there.
  29. Baby Geniuses
    There are ticklish moments, but no real laughs.
    • 7 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Miss March
    Only a moron would expect a dude road-trip-sex comedy to be more than an aggressive expression of male sexual anxiety. But really, when did women become such vile creatures.
  31. Screwed
    Miraculously seems a great deal longer (this is not a good thing) as it careens from shit joke to corpse joke to ass joke to dog-turd joke and back.
    • 6 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    National Lampoon's Gold Diggers
    A May-September sex farce so prodigiously unintriguing that audiences could be forgiven for stampeding from theaters to strangle its writer-director, Gary Preisler, in his sleep.
  33. Strippers
    That clunky, God-awful bit of exposition-heavy dialogue perfectly encapsulates all that's wrong with this dismal film.
    • 5 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Vulgar
    First-time director Bryan Johnson's failure to resolve the film’s two moods -- psychopathic sexual brutality and light social satire -- proves fatal.
  35. The Singing Forest
    Bad movies can be a hoot, but rather than campy, Ameer appears to be dead serious; and it's hard to feel anything but fury toward a filmmaker whose opening title sequence intersperses black-and-white flashbacks of his sexy young lovers with actual concentration-camp photos of stacked, emaciated corpses.
  36. Chaos
    Writer-director David DeFalco's ugly, pointless and dishonest remake of Craven's remake.
  37. Dirt Boy
    The film essentially grinds along in second gear. A promising debut, Dirt Boy nevertheless fails to fully deliver.
  38. Going By
    If one were to parody Iranian cinema, packing into one film its common tropes and themes to the point of bursting, it would probably be a lot like Iraj Karimi’s Going By.
  39. White Boy
    Here, Lohman's luminous presence rises above the badly directed violence and mayhem -- even if the movie's a dud, she's a star.
  40. Sorority Girls' Revenge
    It's a nice try, but the film remains a pinhead's idea of softcore fetish material.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Carman: The Champion
    Drags through one tough-love moment after another without much energy or originality from its single-monikered star.
  42. Low Heights
    Hatamikia isn't just a button pusher; he's a skilled craftsman with a dynamic wide-screen shooting style, who draws us into the story with visceral devices such as speedy tracking shots and gliding slow motion -- flashy elements the fastidious new wavers wouldn't touch.
  43. Downward Angel
    Screams straight-to-video.
  44. The Mesmerist
    The actors do what they can with direction, from Gil Cates Jr., that calls for yelling, flailing and rapid-fire delivery of stale bons mots, but none of the film is as funny or clever as Cates and screenwriters Ron Marasco and Michael Goorjian (adapting Edgar Allan Poe's short story) seem to think.
  45. Creature
    It's this trip home that lifts this unpolished, homegrown documentary above the ordinary.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Brown's Requiem
    Flat-footed.
  47. Snide and Prejudice
    The Marat/Sade irony of setting these scenes in a madhouse helps, but Macfadyen's volcanic magnetism and spot-on mimicry of Hitler's body language and speech patterns make insight flesh.
  48. No One Sleeps
    Intriguing yet muddled thriller.
  49. Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel
    A little too familiar to be wholly satisfying. What makes it worthwhile is Julia Jay Pierrepont III's direction.
  50. My 5 Wives
    The deliriously deficient new excuse for a comedy.
  51. A Galaxy Far, Far Away
    Jalil penetrates a carnivalesque subculture of self-reinvention and obsession, emotional need and materialist greed, with a camera that is, by turns, cruel, kind and incisive.
  52. Under the Moonlight
    A flat, middlebrow variation on some of the central themes of recent Iranian cinema.
    • 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.
  54. Looking Through Lillian
    Torem drifts into formula and his initially promising film goes unbearably soft.
  55. Sakura Wars
    As a story it’s nothing much, but as eye candy it is world-class.
  56. Hansel & Gretel
    For trashing a classic, Tunnicliffe and his writing cohorts deserve a Grimm-style fate -- perhaps a long, slow boil in the witch’s vat?
  57. The Lonely Affair of the Heart
    A tedious viewing experience.
  58. Khab-e sefid
    The movie often seems as innocent and goodhearted as its subject. Still, Jebeli is possessed of an impish visual sense. He also has the Iranian gift for bringing to vivid life people we wouldn't give a second glance.
  59. Going Down
    Going Down is woefully lacking in the comedy (or the sex for that matter), and even some of the teens look a little long in the tooth.
  60. Soap Girl
    Silly and pretentious would-be romance.
  61. To End All Wars
    The dialogue and voice-over narration (by Gordon) are homily-heavy, and the staging sometimes awkward. The prison extras in particular are often left to stare blankly at the gut-wrenching action before them, with many, including Sutherland, looking awfully fit for men who've been starving for years.
    • 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).
  63. Charly
    It simply takes faith for granted as a motivating factor, and thus pulls off the neat trick of never making us feel we’re being preached at -- Yet, as directed by first-timer Adam Anderegg, from Jack Weyland's 1980 novel, the movie is too amateurishly square to make the most of its own ironic implications.
  64. Suddenly Naked
    In this lively romantic comedy from Canada, actors Wendy Crewson and Joe Cobden give off sparks -- in bed and out.
  65. The Big Empty
    More amiable than laugh-out-loud funny, the film pokes along, buoyed by the motel's bright Hawaiian color scheme, and a moonlit desert finale that's awfully pretty.
  66. Blindness
    As a calling card for the stylistic talents of a new filmmaker, writer-director Anna Chi's first feature is a success. As drama, it's a dud.
  67. Man of the Year
    Bad improv is bad improv, and it’s a potent virus.
  68. Hotel Room
    Judging by the stilted nature of both the dialogue and acting, that's what this film is -- a thesis project better suited to a grad-night exhibition.
  69. What Boys Like
    And like, the movie's got all these bright colors and shit, so it's not some fuckin' boring art film, and the new wave soundtrack is awesome.
  70. Tube
    Korean cinema may be a rising force in Asia, but Tube isn’t the place to take your first ride.
  71. Close Call
    Lee has heaped so many social ills on his heroine that it's difficult to buy any of it, especially when the story slips into silliness involving bad guys and missing drugs.
  72. Pride and Prejudice
    Scottish director Andrew Black keeps the pace brisk and the images sunny, while screenwriters Anne Black (his wife), Jason Faller and Katherine Swigert afford lively dialogue that, without pressing the issue, hones in on some insightful parallels between the morals of Austen's society and those of contemporary Mormon culture.
  73. After Freedom
    The filmmaker shares with Martin Scorsese an obsession with that classic male triangle of hard man, soft heart and childlike loser, but where so many Scorsese wannabes jettison sociology in favor of mayhem, Babaian burrows into the hearts of these first- and second-generation immigrants.
  74. Bought & Sold
    Straight off the streets of Jersey City, writer-director Michael Tolajian’s affable debut charms with its scruffy characters and nuanced multiculturalism.
  75. Big Girls Don't Cry
    Sleek, not-quite-trashy-enough melodrama.
  76. Vlad
    It all adds up to pleasantly nonsensical mayhem.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Missing Young Woman
    The film is shocking, and, for better or worse, Portillo's refusal to offer solace kindles a potent rage that's not easily forgotten.
  78. Ambush
    Director Olli Saarela, who co-wrote the script with Antti Tuuri, offers up a trembling romanticism that gradually hardens -- like Eero's consciousness -- with exposure to the horrors of war.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hard Luck
    Though the effect is Bergman esque, Rubio doesn't always sustain the necessary gravity his story requires.
  80. One More Round
    As producer, writer and star of his first movie, Ray Jahangard gets points for confidence and nerve, but at the end of the day, it must be said that not everyone is meant to work in the movies.
  81. Sex Sells: The Making of 'Touché'
    Tiresome, and with no discernable edge or wit, Sex Sells is most powerful when it dawns on us we're watching Barnes, the leggy replacement for Suzanne Somers on "Three's Company," and Zmed, the beefcake cop from "T.J. Hooker," arrive at this point in their careers.
  82. Window Theory
    This film looks so good, thanks to some impressive production work (nice rainstorm) as well as Andrew Huebscher's vibrant cinematography, that one wonders, as one dull scene after another rolls by, why director Andrew Putschoegl - and co-writers Large and Kyle Kramer - didn't lavish half as much attention on the script.
  83. Black Cloud
    A determinedly old-fashioned boxing/coming-of-age film, only perfunctorily hitting its marks.
  84. Fabled
    Quickly reveals itself to be a hyper-stylized flick (lots of odd angles and studied production design in the service of flashbacks and dream sequences), but the glossy sum effect is that of a film student straining for a weightiness he can't pull off.
  85. Lost
    Writer-director Darren Lemke's likable thriller shows surprising smarts for a low-budget debut, cribbing from all the right sources.
  86. Wasabi Tuna
    Fox does have a sharp sense of the absurd that comes out in silly subplots.
  87. America Brown
    Director Black is competent with the camera, but he seems to have instructed the entire cast to deliver their lines in hushed tones and pauses pregnant with hoped-for meaning -- except for Kwanten, whose overenthusiastic impersonation of a red-state rube is as grating as horseshoes on a blackboard.
  88. Undertaking Betty
    It's rarely a good sign when a movie feels obliged to add the words "a fable" beneath its main title -- and Undertaking Betty is no exception.
  89. Neal 'N' Nikki
    Nepotism can't account for the movie's stylistic horrors. Writer-director Arjun Sablok, a TV veteran with visual ADD, has pitched the candy-colored cuteness at a frenzy that verges on hysteria.
  90. FAQs
    The dialogue is blunter, and harder for his amateur cast to pull off, while Lewis' stridency, however justified, ultimately jars against the film's tender, all-is-love fantasia.
  91. Americano
    Watching Americano is like hearing a long story about someone else's holiday, and while it seems everyone had a nice time, it's too bad they didn't shoot a better film while they were there.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Film School Confidential
    Even most chemistry majors could probably assemble a more entertaining 76-minute picture than Underdahl's flimsy and dated story.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Surge of Power
    Self-conscious camp like this can weather (even requires) a certain degree of amateurishness. But there are limits, and Surge of Power's sloppy writing and talent-show performances quickly exceed them.
  94. Buddha Wild: Monk in a Hut
    Wilding's genuine curiosity about the monks' beliefs and daily routines, as well as her willingness to ask questions that sometimes make her look like a bit of a dip, gives the film a homespun honesty and sincerity that make it a surprisingly pleasant trip.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    One Last Ride
    It's typical poor-schnook-in-over-his-head stuff, spiked with some nervy, Pi-esque montages of eyes, horses and racing forms that illustrate Michael's fraying nerves (and distract us from the flatness of the other scenes).
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Almost Guys
    If Fleming actually believes in this stuff, he should beware: When you put a movie this lazy and uninspired out into the world, you've got something coming to you - and it ain't good.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Erosion
    For those turned on by the thought of such “sexually charged” scenes as men describing techniques for picking locks to women while drawing on their bodies with mascara pencils, Erosion may provide some pleasure. Everyone else though, will be worn down by the film’s tedious hand-wringing about infidelity and bursts of unerotic sex.
  98. Fanaa
    The movie’s entire first half turns out to be an elaborate fake-out, a setup for a plot reversal so extreme it could induce whiplash even in seasoned Bollywood hands. As clumsily engineered by writer-director Kunal Kohli (Hum Tum), the sudden changeover from romance to political techno-thriller is likely to be especially startling for non-Indians.
  99. The Conrad Boys
    Heartfelt but insipid drama, the naiveté quickly becomes exasperating.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Long Weekend
    Rather than simply releasing the uncomfortably amusing clips on DVD as a "Jackass"-style compilation, executive producer Vin Di Bona and Gold Circle Films president Paul Brooks have spliced them into the umpteenth unfunny cinematic variation of the "sensitive guy and obnoxious womanizing best friend try to get laid" story, with nary a laugh to be had unless you're one of those who finds toilet scenes and prison-rape jokes to be automatically hilarious.
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