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 8.6 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. Chicken Run
    A delirious fable about every creature's need for espace.
  2. Up
    Up emerges as a gentle hymn to adventure of both the soaring, storybook variety and the smaller, less obvious kind -- the perilous, unpredictable and richly rewarding journey of ordinary, everyday life.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Marooned in Iraq
    Occurring as it does amid a surge of tragedy and bitterness, its comic effect is powerfully mitigated.
  4. Toy Story 2
    No parent who's been roped into leading the troops to a matinee need fear being bored: gags are, Simpsons-like, conceived to tickle several generations at once.
  5. Nobody Knows
    Unfolds with such leisurely, terrible beauty, it takes a while to realize that what we are witnessing is the children's long slide into beggary, exacerbated by the slow torture of faint hope.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    Falters precisely because there's not enough stumbling, and far too much striding gallantly forward.
  7. L'Enfant (The Child)
    As Dardenne films go, with their slow, minutely observed journeys from despair to faint hope, L'Enfant is a horror movie of sorts, and for a few minutes at least, a kind of thriller.
  8. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    No one does dissolute hubris with as much charm as Grant, and his ebullience is the perfect foil to the misanthropic McCarthy.
  9. Amadeus
    Remains the most popularly successful film ever to render the inner life of an artist.
    • 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.
  11. Gomorrah
    The five interwoven narratives in this visceral but disciplined and beautifully acted movie show to devastating effect how ordinary men and women -- and especially vulnerable boys desperate for masculine role models -- get caught up in the seductive violence and are ruthlessly destroyed by the network's hardened henchmen.
  12. To Be and to Have
    To Be and To Have works in the grandest tradition of documentary filmmaking -- it keeps company with a small, specific place going about its business, and from it parses the whole world.
  13. In the Mood for Love
    It is undeniable in its poignancy, an ecstatic vision of what might have been, though as much for its story as for the fact that the whole thing dissolves like a paper fan in rain, an evanescent masterwork.
  14. Mulholland Dr.
    Not just everything you want in a David Lynch movie, but damn near everything else you want in ANY movie.
  15. Grizzly Man
    While Grizzly Man is never less than a fascinating portrait of a troubled Peter Pan who couldn't function in human society and tried to remake the animal kingdom into his own private Hanna-Barbera cartoon, it fails to establish Treadwell as much more than a serious headcase, let alone a titanic figure.
  16. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    Who could resist a movie in which a garden gnome holds the front line in high-tech home security?
  17. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    Unlike the zippy American medical dramas it apes, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is paid out with the deliberate slowness of a dray horse straining up a mountain path. With every painstaking turn of the screw that seals Lazarescu's sorry fate, Puiu flirts with tedium, but tedium is the point of this hyperrealist tale, paced in what feels like real time.
  18. Maria Full of Grace
    The movie is thrillingly subjective, teeming with the fullness of everyday proletarian life that one finds in the work of the directors who most influenced Marston in the making of this movie: Hector Babenco and the Brazilian realists, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh.
  19. Shakespeare in Love
    Good fun, though not more than up-market situation comedy studded with the usual leaps out of period-speak to swipe at contemporary Hollywood.
  20. Fateless
    Like "The Pianist," Fateless painstakingly builds up the reality of what it is like to be drawn into a perfectly arbitrary hell you can neither comprehend nor rationalize.
  21. Happy as Lazzaro
    Rohrwacher’s work unites a passionate interest in social realism, in the hardships faced by people on the streets and in the fields, with a daring refusal to be held by the rules of narrative realism.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    Morris is a more talented filmmaker than he is an interviewer. Mean-while, McNamara is a subject so complex and so rich in nuance that he requires no cinematic embellishment.
  23. Brokeback Mountain
    Brokeback Mountain is at once the gayest and the least gay Hollywood film I've seen, which is another way of saying that Lee has a knack for culling universality from the most specific identities.
  24. Tarnation
    Caouette lifts his story clear out of the victimized whine that bogs down so many confessional memoirs and offers the viewer instead an intimate look inside his ravaged yet loving head, at once street-smart and haloed by the naiveté of a young saint.
  25. Murderball
    A great sports drama first and a heart-wrenching triumph-over-adversity weepie almost never.
  26. Caché (Hidden)
    The eerily timely subject of Haneke's film is France's unwilling encounter with the disenfranchised minorities it has tried to sweep under the rug. As one who giggled through his widely admired, irredeemably silly "The Piano Teacher," I wasn't prepared to be easily won over by Caché, but it turns out to be his most human and affecting movie to date.
  27. All About My Mother
    Just about everyone worth knowing in All About My Mother is female in spirit, which is to say they're all sexy, impossible, powerfully durable souls, quarrelsome and loyal, inventive at navigating the tragedies.
  28. Rushmore
    A beautifully off-center movie.
  29. 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
  30. Ten
    One of the year's finest movies, it's not quite the masterpiece that some of Kiarostami's cultists want it to be.
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