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. Intimacy
    Although much has and will be made of the film's sexual explicitness -- and, yes, it is a bit -- this less-than-perfect but deeply felt film is finally most daring for its hard-core insistence on our need for connection.
  2. The Cuckoo
    Recalls the structure of Danis Tanovic's 2001 black comedy, "No Man's Land," but not that film' hyperknowing urbanity or strident political savvy.
  3. Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator
    Stickler goes straight to the source, combining terrific archival footage with interviews of Tony Hawk, Stacy Peralta and others who knew Rogowski back in the day.
  4. Changing Lanes
    Although what ensues is generally unsurprising and as pro forma down-and-dirty as the genre dictates, it's also on occasion rather affecting.
  5. Monsieur Ibrahim
    Excusez-moi, but I'd rather see Omar Sharif punching out croupiers in a casino than dispensing comfort and joy in this sugared-up tale.
  6. Adorenarin doraibu
    Not to mention the good-when-moody, best-when-raucous art-band soundtrack!
  7. Ong Bak
    However shrewdly he's been packaged, Tony Jaa is the real thing.
  8. Infamous
    Infamous is the better Capote film, yes, but also the less easily digestible one, the more eccentric one and -- yes -- the gayer one.
  9. Primo Levi's Journey
    Fascinating.
  10. North Country
    The movie’s old-school feminism is true to its subject, and Theron proves charismatic enough to stand alone as an emblematic working-class heroine doing what she has to do without benefit of feminist theory. I’m even willing to forgive this rousing drama its coy, flirty ending, if only because its heroine has the grace not to drive her pickup truck off a cliff.
  11. The War Zone
    Roth can obviously direct actors sympathetically, and he paces the movie adroitly.
  12. Così ridevano
    Writer-director Gianni Amelio masterfully chronicles the ways two people can betray each other, and especially themselves, in the name of love.
  13. Chain Camera
    Hilarious, unnerving and remarkably intimate portrait of multiethnic adolescent life that lends vigorous new meaning to the term "teen movie."
  14. Jump Tomorrow
    One of the sweetest comedies in a long time, which doesn't mean it's sugary or fey.
  15. A Housekeeper
    There is, however, a more compelling, more melancholy story itching to break out here, one of two wounded people finding each other at the exact wrong moment in both their lives. But by the time Berri gets around to that idea, The Housekeeper is already finishing up.
  16. In My Skin
    The movie surely owes something to Polanski, Cronenberg, et al., in its use of an apparently placid, upper-middle-class setting as the background for perverse horrors, but De Van's fearless, high-wire performance is uniquely its own.
  17. The Yes Men
    An uproarious and appalling piece of consciousness-raising.
  18. Afterglow
    It's a first-rate chamber piece for actors, but Julie Christie brings a particularly layered depth to what could have been a very flat role; a combination of bereaved mother and castaway wife. Her torment and her intermittent joys are so fully communicated that they anchor the film.
  19. Pierrepoint
    Like most television directors, Shergold is good with actors. Jowly, impassive and rigid with righteous dignity, Timothy Spall makes a wonderfully meticulous Pierrepoint.
  20. Apocalypto
    For those of us who prefer to judge Gibson solely in terms of his art, the movie is a virtuosic piece of action cinema -- particularly in its second half...And while there has been no shortage of recent films that decry the horrors of war and man's inhumanity to his fellow man, I know of none other quite this sickeningly powerful.
  21. Girls Can't Swim
    The film's intimate camera work and searing performances pull us deep into the girls' confusion and pain as they struggle tragically to comprehend the chasm of knowledge that's opened between them.
  22. Burnt Money
    Those who hang in for the long haul are rewarded with a sexy, moving love story.
  23. Alice et Martin
    Miraculous photography.
  24. Chopper
    Grotesquely violent, horribly funny.
  25. Becket (re-release)
    There's much to be said for a film that, however cheesily realized, sticks in memory for four decades.
  26. The World's Fastest Indian
    A warm, spacious road movie with a stirring sense of the wide-open landscapes of the American West.
  27. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    This sophomoric stuff is pure self-indulgence, a drone to accompany the admittedly eye-popping sound-and-light show. Oshii looks like yet another director who has gone off the deep end, believing too absolutely his own good reviews.
  28. $9.99
    The stop-motion animated puppets in Tatia Rosenthal’s beguiling first feature look like clay-mated slabs of glazed meat, at once unreal and hyper-real.
  29. Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
    If you can't think of a crisis in your life that's tied to a Leonard Cohen song, then Canadian director Lian Lunson's velvety, exuberantly hagiographic film of a 2005 Sydney tribute concert to the Prince of Pain may not be the movie for you.
  30. Monster House
    Becomes one of those wonderfully weird adventure stories beloved of children who don't mind getting a good old-fashioned case of the heebie-jeebies. It's kind of a blast for adults too.
  31. Born Romantic
    Kane believes in happy endings, but he makes his characters earn theirs, as each couple is forced, ever so subtly, to face its own inner nonsense. The filmmaker has divine actors at his disposal.
  32. Shaolin Soccer
    The movie has a rambunctious and likable energy that compensates for its unsteady, only intermittently amusing narrative.
  33. Slums of Beverly Hills
    While Slums of Beverly Hills may sound like a downer, Jenkins tempers the family's downbeat circumstances with sympathetic humor, a quirky camera style and lo-fi retro flavor.
  34. Goodbye Lenin!
    Director Becker and his sharp screenwriter, Bernd Lichtenberg, come less to bury communism than to hurl darts at the Western commodity culture that floods East Berlin.
  35. Family Fundamentals
    It's potentially strong material, but the film is so determined not to demonize the conservatives that it winds up being an inadvertent profile in the banality of bigotry.
  36. The Edukators
    Put simply, this second feature by the young Austrian director Hans Weingartner is a put-on -- a glib anti-capitalist rant in which the rhetoric rarely rises above the you-too-can-save-a-child-for-less-than-the-price-of-coffee level.
  37. There's No One Like You
    Paying off a somewhat laborious buildup in the first act with an escalating series of revelations and reunions in the final reel, Krrish is hearty pulp cinema that really sticks to your ribs.
  38. The Illusionist
    The movie is leaden and self-serious, with an unusually hollow performance from Norton, who's not for a moment convincing as a man of raging passion. Far better is Paul Giamatti.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Office Space
    Mike Judge’s live-action directorial debut not only whittles the high-strung festering soul of ‘90s Orthodox Corporationism down to the quick and quintessential but wraps its veins around his fingers and flosses our teeth.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pulse
    Whether you take it as horror show or social commentary (or both), this is sublimely terrifying stuff.
  41. For Your Consideration
    Doesn't risk ruffling any feathers, and that's exactly what's wrong with it: It's less a satirical bite at the hand that feeds Guest than it is a toothless nibble, and it isn't particularly funny.
  42. Hustle & Flow
    But while some may leave the theater tapping their toes and whistling the lyrics to such inimitable original ballads as "Hard for a Pimp" and "Whoop That Trick," they should hang their heads low and mourn the sorry state of the contemporary African-American movie.
  43. A Civil Action
    A well-chewed gumbo of every lawyer flick you’ve ever seen.
  44. Winter Sleepers
    Though it was made before "Run Lola Run," feels like the work of a more seasoned heart and mind.
  45. Bread and Tulips
    Maglietta, whose soulful countenance and offhand grace are soothing to behold, and Ganz, who says more with a shrug and sigh than most poets do with a sonnet.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heaven
    The final product is so eccentric and resolutely uncommercial -- and so faithful to the spirit of Kieslowski's oeuvre -- that it's hard to doubt the purity of Tykwer's intentions.
  47. The Bourne Identity
    Though it's clearly meant to be character-driven, the movie is thrown out of whack by a total lack of chemistry between the leads, and some great acting (Clive Owen, Chris Cooper, Brian Cox) on the side.
  48. Miracle
    At the movie's core, disguised with pitch-perfect Minnesota accent and bushy comb-over hairdo, the perpetually underrated Kurt Russell (as the late coach Herb Brooks) delivers a brilliant performance of immaculate control.
  49. Bon voyage
    The cast's sometimes capable, sometimes gross mugging is overwhelmed by lavish costumes, shiny vintage cars, hordes of meticulously directed extras, and the here-incongruous seriousness with which the French still regard this momentous, if humiliating, chapter of their national history.
  50. Off the Map
    A small masterpiece of tone and form.
  51. Romántico
    If this terrific documentary doesn't adjust your idea of what it means to have a hard life and a good attitude, you haven’t been paying attention.
  52. The Last Mogul
    Love him or loathe him, Avrich proposes, Wasserman mattered -- which is a lot more than can be said for most of the multinationals and their MBA-bearing surrogates who came to run the studios in his wake.
  53. Shanghai Ghetto
    One of the most fascinating and least documented tributaries of the Jewish experience in World War II.
  54. Why We Fight
    There may not be two equal sides to every argument, but in giving such little credence to those who might oppose him, Jarecki makes us wonder what exactly it is he’s so afraid of.
  55. Women Without Men
    Neshat employs dialogue that is often didactic, but that weakness is forgiven in the face of stellar acting from the ensemble and gorgeously composed and shot images.
  56. Theeviravaathi: The Terrorist
    A heartbreaking reminder of all the wars whose frontlines are currently held by the very young, wars that have robbed them not only of family and friends, but of their childhoods as well.
  57. Son of the Bride
    Although it's better written and directed than the average Nora Ephron bagatelle, it's easy to imagine Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan slipping into a remake of Son of the Bride.
  58. Friends with Money
    If Friends With Money is about the meaning of success in a town obsessed with wealth, it is also, more universally, about our defining incompleteness, and the sad, uproarious inconclusiveness of life.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Casting About
    A nicely contemplative documentary about actors and their ambivalent relationship with that intimidating space.
  60. X2: X-Men United
    Singer's approach to X2 is very much of the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" school, resulting in a movie that, even at its best -- a thrilling jailbreak scene that's the closest thing in either X movie to a rousing set piece -- seems tame and unmemorable.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers
    Greenwald's sense of indignation carries the day: He preaches to the choir -- and apparently passes the collection plate -- with evangelical furor.
  62. Paranormal Activity
    Grounded by strong performances by newcomers Featherston and Sloat, who pretty much have the movie to themselves, Paranormal Activity, which demands to be seen in a crowded theater, is refreshingly blood-free.
  63. Honeydripper
    Honeydripper is classic Sayles cinema: an insightful sketch of assorted common folk whose criss-crossing dreams and agendas unfold against larger, more powerful (and sometimes crushing) sociopolitical and cultural forces.
  64. I Remember Me
    Startlingly affecting -- What emerges is a picture of an illness that causes enormous suffering but whose origins and treatment continue to elude even those doctors who pay attention to it.
  65. Erleuchtung garantiert
    Enlightenment Guaranteed is a parable of alienation and rediscovery told with such affection, insight and visual elegance, it could never be taken as preachy or stern.
  66. Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet
    Tavernier's documentary about the famed Paris Opera Ballet is itself a graceful thing, a fleet-footed yet substantial examination of what it means to devote one's life to the art of dance.
  67. The Beauty Academy of Kabul
    There's great charm, and also discomfort, in watching these highly motivated, excited women learn the tricks of a trade practiced very differently from their own, and casually swap horror stories of life under the Taliban.
  68. Memories of Tomorrow
    This heartfelt tale of disintegration and acceptance, seasoned with family devotion, will both raise and soothe the anxieties of those of us who regularly ask ourselves why we came into the kitchen two minutes ago.
  69. Notting Hill
    The result is two films: a big, dreary star vehicle that sags whenever its leads spend quality time together, and a mettlesome British caper whose nutsosecondary characters walk away with the movie.
  70. Purple Butterfly
    Hectic, lyrical, swooningly romantic and almost unwatchably brutal, Purple Butterfly deploys a modern Asian gangster-movie aesthetic to tell a love story of Shakespearean dimensions.
  71. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    Laced with brilliantly knotted ideas on race, masculinity and cults of violence.
  72. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    Lucas is a major figure, and Revenge of the Sith may be some kind of historic achievement -- the first movie in which it is fully impossible to tell where flesh ends and digital paint begins.
  73. El Crimen Perfecto (The Perfect Crime)
    Writer-director Alex de la Iglesia's bouncy, swaggering satire of ethics-deficient, survival-of-the-fittest free enterprise, peopled by broad grotesques and hysterical caricatures, adds Chabrolian callousness to a cartoonish worldview reminiscent of Frank Tashlin or Joe Dante at their most frenzied.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Santitos
    Springall also deftly weaves the film's most dramatic moments with lighthearted comedy, and the result may be Mexico's best film in years.
  75. Reykjavík
    First-time director Baltasar Kormakur -- balances tones with a smooth, mature confidence.
  76. The Italian Job
    Not only are the action sequences well-paced and witty, but Gray neatly draws out the comic high spirits in Wahlberg's ensemble of crooks.
  77. Come Undone
    A melancholy valentine to broken hearts and lost innocence.
  78. The Inheritance
    Director Fly works with a delicate touch, probing the slow, insidious corruption of this fundamentally decent but weak man.
  79. Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
    The movie starts to drag near the end and feels longer than its 90 minutes - but that's cool. It's a love letter to the faithful in the first place.
  80. Chak De India!
    It weaves its familiar story with some fresh textures and even manages to invest the conflict on the field with a resonance that transcends the tick-tock turnover of the numerals on the scoreboard.
  81. The President's Last Bang
    This meticulously well-made picture is disarmingly funny at times - not least during the ballet of bloody absurdity that is the assassination itself - but also subdued and straight-faced, with one eye planted on 1979 and the other on the violent student demonstrations looming in the distance.
  82. Primer
    A dense and dazzling science-fiction mind-bender unassumingly dressed up in a tech geek’s short-sleeved oxford shirt, pocket protector and safety goggles.
  83. The Good Thief
    Indeed, The Good Thief is a fairy tale, not just in the plotted fun of the heist and counterheist, or in the clever twist thrown in at the end, but in the grandiloquent myth, so passionately espoused by Melville, of the crook as a man of honor and elegance.
  84. Monsters and Men
    Monsters and Men seems as if it was made for the world that existed a few years ago. I honestly can’t tell if my dissatisfaction is with the movie or the era into which it is released.
  85. Gladiator
    Filled with brilliant filmmaking and features outstanding performances, but it's neither profound enough nor pop enough to be great -- it's mournful, serious, beautiful and, finally, pointless.
  86. Summer of Sam
    Brilliant, goofy, vindictive, incoherent and compassionate, Summer of Sam begins as a work of startling ambition, spins out of control, and finally limps to a bland halt.
  87. Thirteen Days
    A refreshing breakaway from both idolatry and cynicism.
  88. Ha-Chaverim Shel Yana
    There's some funny erotic business with gas masks, but neither that nor the unfolding love story is quite as engrossing as the raucous bunch of former Soviet citizens.
  89. Ghosts of the Abyss
    During the all-important underwater sequences, the three-dimensional effects are surprisingly muted.
  90. Almost Peaceful
    Modest, wise ensemble piece.
  91. Slither
    It's the kind of movie that used to be called "trashy good fun," only there's nothing trashy about it: Gunn, who scripted the 2004 "Dawn of the Dead" remake, is clearly punch-drunk with horror-movie love; Slither is, among other things, a freewheeling homage to "The Blob, Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and just about everything by George Romero.
  92. Been Rich All My Life
    Utterly captivating.
  93. Russian Dolls
    Precisely observed, charming and - for better and worse - light as air.
  94. In Search of Mozart
    The film sniffs mightily at Milos Forman's "Amadeus," but even if you found that film over the top and off the wall, you might find yourself wishing for a little more "Volfie" and a little less Saint Wolfgang.
  95. The Door in the Floor
    The film’s beauty is that, like any good novel, it refuses to sew up its meanings for the audience.
  96. Fellini: I'm a Born Liar
    Pettigrew assumes that Fellini was a genius, and while this film won't convince any skeptics, the maestro's fans can sink into it like a hot bath.
  97. Stir of Echoes
    The ghost story is not half as satisfying as the lovely indie mood piece tucked inside it about a community tending to itself in the wake of a recent wound.
  98. Fahrenheit 9/11
    Even as you're laughing, you get the uncomfortable sense you're being recruited, and not always honestly, to Moore's us-and-them point of view.
  99. 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mondovino
    Will get you thinking about wine, and what is and isn't important about it.
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