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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    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dog Lover's Symphony
    A toxic combination of obvious bromides and talentless filmmaking, writer-director Ted Fukuda's schmaltzy, tone-deaf romantic drama sets your teeth on edge from the outset and doesn't let up for 103 minutes.
  2. My Grandmother's House
    An accomplished miniaturist's documentary -- 80 finely wrought minutes in alternating increments of wonder and loss.
  3. Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna
    As a director of melodramatic peak moments, Karan Johar has no peer: He stages a chance encounter on a New York street between an adulterous husband and the two women in his life with the slow-motion virtuosity of a soap-opera De Palma.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The L.A. Riot Spectacular
    This vision of the riots as a kind of Kentucky Fried Movie doesn' lend itself to film the way, say, L.A.'s urban violence does to Sandow Birk’s apocalyptic paintings. Nor does it help that the gags are mortally unfunny.
  5. Who Needs Sleep?
    The result is (no pun intended) a powerful wake-up call, not just for Hollywood but for a nation that once fought passionately for the eight-hour workday and now, ever more willingly, works itself to death.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss
    Needless to say, this is one odd concoction, which should find its primary audience among college potheads who like to watch ’70s Hanna-Barbera creations on the Cartoon Network late at night.
  7. Hurricane on the Bayou
    A film free of political fury, but full of activist optimism, this tame but heartfelt documentary is a fine companion piece to a day at the science museum.
  8. Maple Palm
    Like a lot of recent queer-themed cinema that aspires to be politically charged, Maple Palm takes a hot-button issue (here, it's homophobic U.S. immigration policies) and reduces it to dry sloganeering and shameless emotional manipulation of the audience.
  9. Encounter Point
    In this fascinating documentary, directors Ronit Avni and Julia Bacha ask what kind of person counters malicious violence with activist conciliation, but offer neither pat answers nor false redemption.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Living the Dream
    An embarrassment of a vanity project, Living the Dream is a film written, directed and starring a real corporate headhunter.
  11. The Boy Who Cried Bitch: The Adolescent Years
    This is a decidedly bizarre movie, nicely photographed and designed -- someone spent some money -- but built entirely around dialogue so stilted and unrevealing that it’s little wonder poor LaVorgna screams it.
  12. Withdrawal from Gaza
    Withdrawal From Gaza lacks both the nuance and the muscle of Yoav Shamir's excellent 2005 "5 Days," which probes far deeper into the relationship between settlers and the soldiers who came, on the orders of supersettler Ariel Sharon, to remove them.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fighting Words
    For a little while, Fighting Words is a modest, agreeable character piece, illuminating those who ply their trade in an under-appreciated, intensely personal art form.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Banished
    This silly little flick is deadly serious. And seriously awful.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Inlaws & Outlaws
    Its 104 minutes of lukewarm-’n’-fuzzy comfort food will no doubt satisfy some, but those looking for deeper insight into our nation’s peculiar mating rituals will feel left out.
  16. American Pastime
    With such rich material about dreams deferred, it’s disheartening that co-writer–director Desmond Nakano’s nobly made but patchy drama mires itself in nostalgia tropes and storytelling clichés.
    • 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.
  18. The Last Confederate: The Story of Robert Adams
    A film that plays like warmed-over "Cold Mountain."
  19. Jhoom Barabar Jhoom
    Now this is more like it: Flirtatious repartee between glamorous stars in travel-poster international locations; a gratifyingly simple plot with puzzles and sleight-of-hand surprises; and, at regular intervals, outbursts of gaudy, energetic dancing infectiously exploding.
  20. Your Mommy Kills Animals
    These young American members of an international group that uses the combative tactics of anti-abortionists to vilify those who’re doing business with a major products-testing company were recently labeled terrorists by the FBI and put on trial. That one can’t quite decide if these charming men are heroes or villains is a mark of Johnson’s calm.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Moving McAllister
    Moving McAllister is a perfect storm of low-budget indie conventionality: a witless road comedy suffused with tons of phony Americana and forced romance featuring sheltered young white people whose minuscule worries about jobs and relationships are as inconsequential as the film’s negligible worldview.
  22. Laaga Chunari Mein Daag: Journey of a Woman
    The movie works so hard to transform its shocking subject into acceptable material for middlebrow melodrama that it never deals with it.
  23. Aaja Nachle
    Both in subject matter and form, this 25-minute music drama within the film tips its hat to the roots of Bollywood cinema’s most distinctive conventions -- with the inestimable assistance of its most seductive modern axiom.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sex and Breakfast
    Suffering from what could be called Garden State syndrome, Sex and Breakfast demands that we empathize with the anguish of straight, white, financially privileged young people and their significantly hot significant others.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Jack and Jill vs. the World
    More farce might have served the film well; as Parise draws from a playbook of medical melodrama and romantic-comedies clichés, her moral about living outside the box becomes harder and harder to swallow.
  26. Kiss the Bride
    Complete predictability is avoided only thanks to its openness to the fluidity of sexual identity -- which isn’t enough to make this anything more than the most ignoble outing in bi-curious screen hijinks since France produced Poltergay.
  27. A Plumm Summer
    A Plumm Summer isn't remotely in the same league as "My Dog Skip," "Fly Away Home," "Lassie" or any of the handful of traditional family dramas that have restored luster to a genre that's been overtaken by techno-acrobats.
  28. Lower Learning
    Mostly, Lafferty is all about expletives and sexual innuendo of the frankest kind, some of it so raunchy (and unfunny) as to make one wonder if the parents of the film's many child actors bothered to read the script.
  29. Roadside Romeo
    It would be charitable to forgive this first attempt its technical shortcomings; while the virtual set design is first-rate, the character animation is often clunky and inexpressive. What's harder to excuse is the drabness of the storytelling, the repetitive sitcom dilemmas that are closer to "Top Cat" than "Ratatouille."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Alphabet Killer
    "Wrong Turn" director Rob Schmidt ably goes through the motions, though the hook for a sequel at the end is truly annoying. Still, The Alphabet Killer may well make enough money to justify a Part II.
  31. Bohica
    Has one thing to recommend it, but even that will likely appeal to a small subset of filmgoers: the cult of Brendan Sexton III.
  32. Dostana
    As it's been done, with this ingratiating cast, a retro peach-and-turquoise color scheme that makes every shot look like a 1986 fashion layout, and a brace of insanely catchy Vishal Dadlani dance numbers, the movie isn't half bad.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    C Me Dance
    In 2009, its hilarious ineptitude makes it border on becoming a cult classic for the ages ... and we're not talking religious cult.
  34. Baby on Board
    Feels like a movie made by men whose world views were shaped, primarily, by "Porky's" and "American Pie."
  35. My Heart Goes Hadippa
    Ultimately, what’s most noteworthy about this middling effort is how aggressively un-contemporary it is.
    • 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.
  37. Laila's Birthday
    Laila’s Birthday is beautifully shot and overlaid with a spare, lyrical score that lends rueful emphasis to Masharawi’s exasperated fidelity to a chronically malfunctioning city.
  38. From Mexico with Love
    Economy be damned, lack of originality is the silent killer.
  39. Across the Hall
    Merkin tries too hard for stylistic flourishes (as the hyper set-designed, claustrophobically seedy hotel underscores) and winds up almost sinking the noir-ish tale he’s telling.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The New Daughter
    Unfortunately, Berdejo doesn't seem to know the difference between "slow" and "suspenseful," erring on the side of the former far too frequently. It's mostly formulaic fare, too.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    3 Billion and Counting
    Perfunctorily shot and edited, the project hinges only on Rutledge-Taylor's findings, which begin to raise eyebrows once pragmatic activism is thrown out the window in favor of the blame game.
  42. I Want Your Money
    In Griggs's eyes, they're all fools. Only old Ronnie, dearly departed though he may be, is worthy of reverence.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Meskada
    Sternfield's direction isn't spry enough to handle the abrupt shift in genre when this moves from detective tale to social-problem film, and things bottom out with a town hall meeting tepidly shot as courtroom drama that stops the story's momentum dead in its tracks and leaves Meskada limping through its last half-hour.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Redland
    The depraved, desperation-trumps-morality, circle-of-life denouement is foreshadowed a little too heavily from the beginning, but with its hypnotic, singular aesthetic, Redland still casts a spell that's hard to shake.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Drummer's Dream
    The most pleasant surprise here isn't just watching these masters perform their craft - though it is quite a treat - but rather how eloquent and thoughtful they are when discussing it: each and every one of them emphasizes the importance of simple hard work and lack of any catch-all technique or "secret" to what they do.
  46. Black Site Delta
    For a movie that literally says it's full of "a bunch of degenerate maniacs," humdrum Black Site Delta bombs.
  47. Living in the Future's Past
    Director Susan Kucera and the film’s guiding spirit, Jeff Bridges, have created a wonkish lovefest, incorporating the diverse ideas of (predominantly white) scientists and academics, philosophers and authors, activists and politicians into a plea for equable reflection and sustained action.
  48. Shine
    While Saldivar and Burgos are better dancers than actors, Collado and Flores are incredibly charismatic performers who bring every scene they’re in to life, but it’s Zayas who anchors Shine. His gravitas shot through with mischief sets the film’s tone, showing that serious-minded storytelling can still be fun.
  49. Vaya
    The movie lays on the melodrama too thick.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    3100, Run and Become
    A curious, thoroughly reported, handsomely shot, ultimately frustrating portrait of the event.
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