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. Eve's Bayou
    Writer-director Kasi Lemmons works fast, and the world she conjures is powerfully realized.
  2. Up and Down
    This fluidly paced film, with its keen observation of the confused longing for love, family and stability in an inherently unstable world, nonetheless keeps faith with the Czech genius for holding the tonal line between tragedy and the absurd.
  3. The Saddest Music in the World
    The weirdest, freest-wheeling, most obsessively inventive motion picture you'll see this year. Parts are confusing, parts are berserk, parts are exasperatingly slow. But in a world of cookie-cutter movies, Maddin's movies are like nobody else's -- funny, Romantic, as deliriously overwrought as a drug lord's wedding.
  4. Magnolia
    Part poem, part jungle blossom, all brilliance.
  5. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
    Leuchter is such a riveting, disturbing and finally pathetic character that his story hardly needs embellishing with Morris' fancy visuals and ominous mood music.
  6. Last Orders
    Superbly adapted by Fred Schepisi from the Booker Prize-winning novel by Graham Swift, Last Orders pays quietly passionate tribute to the unsung working-class generation that fought World War II and survived to take up apparently humdrum lives.
  7. Murderous Maids
    A true rarity, Murderous Maids is an intelligent, moral shocker.
  8. The Aura
    Whereas "Nine Queens" was a movie of clockwork precision and blindsiding reversals, El Aura is more internalized and digressive but no less striking, in large part thanks to Darin's mesmerizing performance.
  9. 2046
    The result is a film chilly and externalized in all the ways that Mood was bottled up and woozily dreamlike.
  10. Transformer
    The film might prove more illuminating and instructive if it examined more reactions to Kroc’s flowering from within the lifting world. Overall, though, Del Monte has crafted a warm portrait of the birth of a woman from a man who found that he had even more strength than he ever realized.
  11. 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.
  12. Panic
    Enigmas make Panic involving, and suspenseful.
  13. The Aviator
    A triumph of production design...As a character study, though, The Aviator is downright squeamish.
  14. Ratcatcher
    Ramsay has made a movie in which a universe of hopelessness and decay is penetrated by shafts of light that remake these bleak surroundings in strange and beautiful ways.
  15. A Talking Picture
    As a political statement it is either a cry of despair or a grim acknowledgment that in the endless cycles of history, civilization will always have its saboteurs.
    • 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.
  17. Rescue Dawn
    The canniness of Bale’s performance (which may be the best of his young but brilliant career) is that he plays Dengler as a fundamentally kind and simple yet rather ingenious man.
  18. Happy Feet
    Antarctica is a beautiful blue paradise, and the final set piece, in which penguins and humans tap their way to a unity of green-minded spirit, is a small masterpiece of conciliatory wackiness.
  19. The Weather Underground
    Through masterful editing, nimble music selection and smart use of documentary materials, the filmmakers shake the dust off cultural clichés to provide a provocative survey of the past. It’s a subversively sleek enterprise.
  20. 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.
  21. The Virgin Suicides
    Sofia Coppola, who's directed the film from her own screenplay, narrowly misses making the story work on the screen.
  22. Our Song
    So gently told, so deceptively simple a story, that its considerable emotional power sneaks up on you.
  23. Pollock
    What Harris extracts from himself is nothing less than a psychological nude scene, sustained across two hours.
  24. 51 Birch Street
    Open-minded, probing but never prurient, 51 Birch Street is much more than a portrait of suburban ennui. It's a loving, painful map of the gulf between thought and word, between word and deed, that props up good marriages, and sends bad ones to hell.
  25. Monty Python's Life of Brian
    Astringently funny masterpiece.
  26. Open Hearts
    A very good new Dogme by Danish director Susanne Bier, begins with several lives in excellent working order, and proceeds by way of domestic tragedy to a full-court emotional train wreck.
  27. 8 Mile
    Eminem plays Rabbit with riveting, flamboyantly expressive intensity.
  28. 12:08 East of Bucharest
    This brilliantly caustic movie -- easily the best in a burgeoning and fertile effort to come to grips with post-Soviet malaise in Central and Eastern Europe -- offers living proof that when it comes to politics, comedy is the sincerest form of dissidence.
  29. Shut Up & Sing
    Kopple and Peck went on and off the road with the band for the three years of waffling, agonizing and defiance in between Maines’ mouth-offs.
  30. Notre musique
    Strikes me as one of Godard's most accessible works - one in which the graying, stubbly maestro, who turns 74 today, presents himself and his ideas to the audience in a less combative way than he sometimes has in the past.
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