L.A. Weekly's Scores

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:
3750 movie reviews
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    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.
  1. The movie works so hard to transform its shocking subject into acceptable material for middlebrow melodrama that it never deals with it.
  2. 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
    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
    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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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
    "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.
  7. Has one thing to recommend it, but even that will likely appeal to a small subset of filmgoers: the cult of Brendan Sexton III.
  8. 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
    In 2009, its hilarious ineptitude makes it border on becoming a cult classic for the ages ... and we're not talking religious cult.
  9. Feels like a movie made by men whose world views were shaped, primarily, by "Porky's" and "American Pie."
  10. Ultimately, what’s most noteworthy about this middling effort is how aggressively un-contemporary it is.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    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.
  11. 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.
  12. Economy be damned, lack of originality is the silent killer.
  13. 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
    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
    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.
  14. 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
    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
    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
    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.
  15. For a movie that literally says it's full of "a bunch of degenerate maniacs," humdrum Black Site Delta bombs.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. The movie lays on the melodrama too thick.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A curious, thoroughly reported, handsomely shot, ultimately frustrating portrait of the event.

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