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. The Real Dirt on Farmer John
    It’s fascinating that this portrait of the rise, fall and rise of Midwestern organic farmer John Peterson can be read in so many different ways, only some of which appear intentionally in Taggart Siegel’s sympathetic documentary about his friend and fellow artist.
  2. My Grandmother's House
    An accomplished miniaturist's documentary -- 80 finely wrought minutes in alternating increments of wonder and loss.
  3. Gunner Palace
    Sensational viewing.
  4. Water
    Hitches some of the most irresistible conventions of Hindi movie melodrama to an earnest agenda of social protest.
  5. Mid90s
    Mid90s, for all its darkness, is uplifted by its hilarious moments and joyous skating shots.
  6. The Lookout
    The Lookout is funny, tender and littered with elegantly written characters played by actors cast for goodness of fit rather than star wattage.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Earth
    State-of-the-art camera equipment captures images of startling clarity and proximity. There isn't one frame of CGI.
  8. Sweet and Lowdown
    Funny and light, all the more potent for seeming so effortless.
  9. Kissing Jessica Stein
    These women are smart, funny and wonderfully real, traits that one might safely attribute to Westfeldt and Juergensen, who also wrote the screenplay.
  10. Pretty Persuasion
    This is a very funny film about a creepy, excruciatingly lonely world.
  11. Innocent Voices
    Chilean-born actress Leonor Varela (TV's Cleopatra, a few seasons back) plays Chavo's mother, who, in her rage to see her children survive, powerfully embodies the film's moral center.
  12. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
    Snappy, fun and outrageously irreverent, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the work of someone with nothing to lose, which is only to the audience's gain.
  13. The Guys
    The Australian actor taps into something miraculous here -- LaPaglia's ability to convey grief and hope works with Weaver's sensitive reactions to make this a two-actor master class.
  14. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
    Much of the film is as strange and oddly beautiful as one of Arbus' own photographs, bold in its attempt to find new ways of cracking the biopic chestnut and sensitive in its portrayal of a 1950s woman who, like so many of her contemporaries, finds herself imprisoned in a "Good Housekeeping" nightmare.
  15. Sunset Story
    It's the cinematic equivalent of glancing up at the sky and taking a good deep breath.
  16. Jackass Number Two
    As merry pranksters they have no match, and as they age (Knoxville is 35 now), they only grow in appeal. As they proudly hurl their tattooed (by ink and battle scars) bodies into harm's way, a devilish glint in their eyes, it's as if they've discovered the fountain of youth, and its name is Jackass.
  17. Bubba Ho-tep
    Campbell is flat-out great, muting his beloved Sam Raimi shtick in favor of a genuine character turn, an act of transformation that makes you wonder why he's never been called on to interpret Elvis before.
  18. Carandiru
    Babenco's kindly, concerned eye seeks out the humanity in even the worst of his characters, and by the time he re-creates the massacre, with shocking power and force, one has been equally captivated and appalled at the world he shows. The result is one of the richest prison movies in years.
  19. Spring Forward
    A resonance that is moving beyond all measure.
  20. Plunkett & Macleane
    Lewd, crude and occasionally too brutal to take, it's also gorgeous, heartfelt.
  21. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Noyce wants us to feel the joy of the homecoming, but he's honest enough to show, in a coda that tells what happened to the girls after their break for home, how Rabbit Proof Fence finally must be more a tale of courage than of victory.
  22. Prisoner of Paradise
    An extraordinary documentary about the German entertainer Kurt Gerron, has been timed to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Week, but the film would also fit snugly on a double bill with "My Architect."
  23. Osama
    At the center...lies the stunning Golbahari, a nonprofessional who recalls some of Bresson's most haunting model-actors in her intense, anguished grace.
  24. Everything Put Together
    Mitchell -- gives a harrowing, beautifully conceived performance, the depth and arc of which can't be fully appreciated until the film's final scene.
  25. The Host
    The Host is a miracle of breathless play with form and tone that also seethes with attitude and ideas, from pure movie love to pointed sociopolitical commentary to a bleak existentialism about the inherent cruelty of our world.
  26. Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    Very few art documentaries are as deeply in tune with the spirit of their subjects, and the implications are enormous, since Goldsworthy is the rare contemporary art star whose work (what a radical notion) is actually about something.
  27. Friday Night Lights
    Country singer and sometime actor Tim McGraw excels as the bitter, besotted ex-Panther who can't cut his kid enough slack to follow his own game plan.
  28. Saving Private Ryan
    If Steven Spielberg's emotional intelligence matched his visual genius, his honorably flawed new film might qualify for one of the greatest-ever American WWII movies.
  29. The Yes Men
    An uproarious and appalling piece of consciousness-raising.
  30. The Wind Will Carry Us
    "Nothing happening" is everything happening between the lines, in the gap created between what is unstated onscreen and what we bring to the story ourselves.
    • L.A. Weekly
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