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. Little Otik
    Magnificently twisted black comedy.
    • L.A. Weekly
  2. In the Realms of the Unreal
    Yu has transferred to her superb film, the hushed awe she must have felt the day she walked into the room - and, in a sense, the mind - of this strange, singular individual.
  3. Go
    Entertaining and slight, topical and cannily familiar.
  4. Genesis
    The story is as wonderful in the showing as it is in the telling, by an African griot (oral historian) who stirs our tragicomic passage from birth to death, into a simple clay pot.
  5. The Dish
    Surprisingly moving -- prompting lumps in the throat over what was, after all, a historic moment of the most luminous hope.
  6. The Hurricane
    This is the deepest of Jewison's three racially themed films, the other two being "In the Heat of the Night" and "A Soldier's Story."
  7. Billy Elliot
    Good, colorful fun, and by virtue of its emphasis on escape through individual initiative rather than class solidarity, more likely to succeed with American audience.s
  8. Violet Perfume: No One Is Listening
    This powerfully rough slice of neo-realism, hitched to soapy melodrama, puts a heartbreakingly human face on the widespread problem of sexual assault in Mexico.
  9. The Keys to the House
    There is nothing obvious about this subtle yet powerfully subversive look into the emotional toll and confusion of dealing with a disabled child.
  10. A Mighty Heart
    Michael Winterbottom has made an enormously moving document of the tense days between Pearl's capture and the news that he was dead.
  11. Breakdown
    Breakdown recalls so many good movies, in such unpredictable order, that by the end it simply stands on its own, a solid, logical, edge-of-the-seat sluiceway of escape and pursuit.
  12. Sir! No Sir!
    Zeiger's superb documentary about the Vietnam War era's GI protest movement is jammed with incident and anecdote and moves with nearly as much breathless momentum as the movement itself.
  13. Place Vendôme
    It's all about having your intelligence -- emotional, spiritual, cerebral -- respected. Garcia does that; Place Vendôme does that.
  14. The Duchess of Langeais
    If anything, as it lathers up into an abortive attempt at scarlet-woman branding and a goofy siege on the nunnery where a dazed and confused Antoinette has holed up, The Duchess of Langeais works best as the comic bondage fantasy implied in its deliciously sly French title: "Don't Touch the Axe."
  15. Sin City
    After half an hour spent drooling over its visual splendors, I found the movie every bit as sickening as its creators intended it to be, minus the kicks they so palpably got out of making it.
  16. My Country, My Country
    Perhaps the most telling image in this remarkable movie is that of a relative intently swatting flies in Riyadh's house, while fighting rages outside.
  17. 7 Days in September
    The film may be rife with emotional declarations, but rather than the studied sentiments of news anchors and politicians, these ruminations have the quotidian ring of real people struggling with a standard vocabulary to describe something unthinkably new.
  18. A Matter of Taste
    Rapp's creepy, ghoulishly funny and, finally, touching new film.
  19. Such a Long Journey
    True to its source material, this is a movie with the dense, rich texture of a good novel.
  20. Shower
    Pretty good going for a ton of moisture.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
    Uncomfortable fun.
  22. Teacher's Pet
    This mouthy express train of a movie has giddy charm to burn, due in major part to the frantic charisma of Nathan Lane.
  23. Breach
    Here is one of the best American actors (Chris Cooper) in one of his best parts.
  24. Tully
    This is writer-director Hilary Birmingham's first film, and it's a lovely thing, as reserved and unfussy as its characters and, like them, full of surprises.
  25. 28 Days Later...
    The movie is mercifully uncontaminated by the smarty-pants self-reflexiveness that has sucked the lifeblood from nearly all post-"Scream" horror pictures. Clever enough not to be too clever, Boyle and Garland play their story straight -- they just want to give you the creeps -- and, by so doing, bring the undead back to cinematic life.
  26. Japanese Story
    The quiet and intimacy of what is essentially a two-character piece are well juxtaposed by Brooks against the vast desert expanses of her home country, captured in sumptuous wide-screen cinematography by the great Ian Baker.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Scanner Darkly
    As they (Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson) bicker and banter, threaten one another with small household objects, and try (unsuccessfully) to determine the number of gears on a bicycle, they display a combination of irritability and incompetence that is the soul of comedy.
  28. The Dinner Game
    The fun is in getting there, and in the mechanics, charted by writer-director Francis Veber.
  29. The Limey
    A disappointed meditation on the '60s.
  30. 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.
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