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. Once
    Once feels handmade in the best sense, an impressionistic feast for the senses cobbled together from lovely grace notes and a warm palette of reds and yellows.
  2. Lost in Translation
    Fraught with a deep sadness and sense of yearning. Yet, it is also an enormously -- at times, even uproariously -- comedic film, not because it feels any obligation to be "funny" in some contrived, screenwriterly sort of way, but because Coppola has set out to make a movie set to the rhythms of real (rather than reel) life.
  3. Me and You and Everyone We Know
    By turns comic and tender, tragic and absurd. But throughout, it gives off what is surely one of the greatest of moviegoing pleasures -- the sense of an artist seeing the world from some private vantage that is as original as it is truthful.
  4. Monrovia, Indiana
    Wiseman doesn’t engage with immigration or migrant labor in his town portrait, which helps make Monrovia, Indiana a stubborn entry into his canon. Many of his subjects are invested in the continuity of what they perceive as a timeless American normalcy, but they’re too polite — and cagey — to say what that means on camera.
  5. The Opposite of Sex
    Sex holds in perfect tonal balance, and without cynicism, a brew of maliciously transgressive comedy and tender sympathy for its tortured characters, all gripped by terror of love, or sex, or both.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Big Red One
    To see this seamless "reconstruction" - consisting of some 15 entirely new sequences as well as augmentations to 23 others - is to behold a masterpiece revealed.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Russian Ark
    High art, low comedy, hard labor and royal prerogative are here thrown together in an elegant unity, a breathtaking demonstration of Russian cinematic -- hence artistic -- brilliance.
  8. Amadeus
    Remains the most popularly successful film ever to render the inner life of an artist.
  9. Monsters, Inc.
    The story's charming, the set pieces are wildly inventive, and even the throwaway one-liners, about everything from movie-animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen to the old Oscar Meyer jingle, are hilarious.
  10. Army of Shadows
    The result is a brilliant and relentless thriller, painted in Melville's trademark shades of charcoal and midnight blue, marked by daring escapes, unimaginable moments of self-sacrifice and unconscionable acts of betrayal.
  11. Junebug
    Ensemble casts like this are not easy to come by. Adams is something more than that -- a brilliant young comedian bursting into bloom.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    It's a climax of truly epic proportions.
  13. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    Making an altogether impressive big-screen directing debut, Jones exudes quiet control over this full-bodied Western, taking pleasure in his measured pacing, mixing somber authority with flashes of surrealist wit and luxuriating in the magnificent, vanishing vistas of his home state.
  14. 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.
  15. Spirited Away
    Does full honor to Miyazaki’s teeming and often unsettling landscape, and to the conflicted complexity of his characters: Not a single frame was cut, and the voice casting and performances are uniformly excellent.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Queen
    Politically shrewd, unexpectedly funny yet immaculately tasteful docudrama.
  17. Behind the Sun
    That tragedy looms heavily in Behind the Sun only makes its life-affirming moments -- resonate more deeply and powerfully in a film that is one of the year's best.
  18. Mulholland Dr.
    Not just everything you want in a David Lynch movie, but damn near everything else you want in ANY movie.
  19. A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
    The second half proves somewhat darker but also more brazenly inventive in its scene craft. If Part One centered on the role of the arts in the lives of these characters and their community, Part Two finds their lives becoming art. Suddenly, song-and-dance numbers break out in parking lots and coffee shops.
  20. A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
    The film, a sort of cinematic state-of-the-arts speech, is endlessly warm, playful and lovable, a sprawling and prankish hangout comedy with no clear precedent.
  21. Monty Python's Life of Brian
    Astringently funny masterpiece.
  22. Kung Fu Hustle
    The movie refers glancingly to dozens of Hollywood classics, from "West Side Story" to "City Lights," but at heart it is a debt of honor richly paid by Stephen Chow to his martial-arts forebears and to the traditions that shaped his sensibility. His gong fu is the best.
  23. Old Joy
    The movie's scale is minuscule, but the physical and emotional landscapes it travels are as broad, deep and mysterious as the human psyche itself.
  24. The Apostle
    An effortlessly complex portrayal that relishes the contradictions and complexities of someone capable of both exalted and debased behavior, a shape-shifter it is possible to be fascinated, repelled and compelled by, all at the same time.
  25. There Will Be Blood
    With There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson has taken a stab at making The Great American Movie -- and I daresay he’s made one of them.
  26. A Simple Plan
    In one of the sweetest ironies of the entire film year, Sam Raimi has made an A-movie with the soul of a B-movie classic.
  27. Pan's Labyrinth
    Pan's Labyrinth Like his terrific 2001 "The Devil’s Backbone," Mexican horrormeister Guillermo del Toro's new movie offers us both real-life and fantastical monsters, and if you know his work, you won't waste time figuring out which to root for.
  28. Donnie Brasco
    There are moments here that are so distinct in emotional timber it's as if they were directed by someone who'd skipped the last two decades of American genre film and opted to get back to basics -- like character, and the ways in which two actors can sit in a smoke-filled car and turn an everyday conversation into art.
  29. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
    Mitchell retools his play magnificently, opening it up into a vibrant cinematic work.
  30. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    Though the frighteningly late-term abortion at its center hints at larger sins in the last gasp of Nicolae Ceausescu’s iron-fisted regime, it’s no metaphor, but a sordidly visceral transaction conducted in the next best thing to a back alley.
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