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. Long Night's Journey Into Day
    Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffman's heart-stopping, Oscar-nominated documentary about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is narrow in focus, but broad in its reach for insight into the power of public drama.
  2. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
    At once an astonishing piece of filmmaking and, quite possibly, an Olympian folly.
  3. The Tracker
    None of Tracker's near-fatal missteps in execution or conception, however, prevents this superbly acted film, in the end, from becoming an engrossing study of race and history in Australia, or making the powerful indictment it intends to make.
  4. On the Run
    Though technically sleek and assured, On the Run offers much more than the exercise in style that weakens so much contemporary neo-noir. The movie is an unflinchingly intelligent probe into far-left monomania and the brutish power of ideology divorced from ordinary empathy.
  5. G.I. Jesus
    Writer-director Carl Colpaert never loses his balance, despite the David Lynchian leap of faith he asks us to make midway, in a twist so bold as to be a backflip. If anything, this extra layer in the story effectively illuminates the moral choices Jesus must navigate.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    DOA: Dead or Alive
    Praise be to director Corey Yuen (The Transporter) for delivering one of the year's purest entertainments -- the best butt-kicking PG-13 bikini jiggle fest since the first Charlie's Angels flick.
  7. Your Friends & Neighbors
    What is remarkable is the absolute cool with which LaBute charts his story: The director has the soul of an assassin.
  8. 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.
  9. Two Family House
    Tenderhearted Staten Island Christmas comedy.
  10. Affliction
    Affliction is a work of realist art rich in quotidian detail, a Grimm fairy tale about a community under siege, and a lament for a good man gone bad for nothing.
  11. House of Fools
    Powerful war satire.
  12. Chris & Don. A Love Story
    To describe the novelist's final days, Bachardy opens a drawer and begins pulling out the magnificent deathbed drawings he did of Isherwood -- a fusion of art and love that's deeply moving.
  13. Encounter Point
    In this fascinating documentary, directors Ronit Avni and Julia Bacha ask what kind of person counters malicious violence with activist conciliation, but offer neither pat answers nor false redemption.
  14. The Scandal
    Director Lee Je-Yong gives the book a makeover full of wit and startling beauty as a tragicomedy of Korean manners at the dawn of the Chosun dynasty in the late 18th century, a period known for its gravitas.
  15. A Silent Love
    All three actors are more than up to the challenge, particularly the radiant Salazar, who feasts upon that rare gift of a role that allows an actress the wrong side of 40 to be funny, sexy and vital without apologizing.
  16. Steamboy
    The movie's true genius lies in the exquisite animation, a blend of hand-drawn and state-of-the-art digital technology that suggests an old world being bullied into a new one.
  17. Mumford
    How refreshing it is to see a studio picture where plot development is revealed not so much by grandiose action as by the small, interior shifts that are witnessed through a character's eyes.
  18. The Grief of Others
    Wang favors static, wide, one-take shots, to underscore the relentlessness of his characters’ suffering. But — like Jost — he also has a knack for primitive in-camera effects. The final shot is a triumph of both economy and feeling.
  19. The Sum of All Fears
    Smartly directed, grown-up film of ideas -- with a debonair script by Paul Attanasio (Donny Brasco) and Daniel Pyne.
  20. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    Khouri manages, with terrific flair, to keep the extremes of screwball farce and blood-curdling family intensity on one continuum -- not only through the strength of the performances (including one from James Garner, who, as Sida's dad, gets the best one-liners) but in the ways they match across time.
  21. Bad News Bears
    There may be no other actor (Thornton)working today (or as frequently) who is this good each and every time out.
  22. Stuart Little
    It's (Stuart's) utter believability that lets us follow him into the ecstasy of absurdity that is the rest of the film.
  23. Non-Stop
    Sabu takes an already wildly original concept and launches it toward brilliance.
  24. Spellbound
    For the committed word nerd, spelling has its intrinsic pleasures, but in Spellbound it's another example of the peculiarly American mania for turning everything -- even play --into work.
  25. Crossing the Line
    Crossing the Line, like its subject, remains a fascinating and frustrating enigma -- a declassified government report still marred by redacted passages.
  26. Boy Erased
    When Jared finally erupts, Hedges nimbly navigates the character’s hurt, fear and burgeoning pride — his relief at having at last found his voice.
  27. The Taste of Others
    It's the dialogue -- wisecracking and wistful in equal measure -- that plays out the tyrannical illogic of romantic attraction, and so endears us to this ensemble of bruised souls that when, as in life, not everyone gets what they have come to deserve, it feels, as in life, like an injustice.
  28. The Astronaut Farmer
    This is gloriously self-aware hokum, a fantasy movie that is, above all, about our need for fantasy and escapism -- and even our need for movies like The Astronaut Farmer -- to help us combat the depression and disappointments of the everyday.
  29. City by the Sea
    For the first time in years, De Niro digs deep emotionally, perhaps because he's been stirred by the powerful work of his co-stars, including a subtle Frances McDormand and a ferocious Patti LuPone, as well as the heartbreaking (and achingly beautiful) Franco.
  30. Undercover Brother
    The film works no matter which side of the racial divide you're on, because nothing unites an audience quite like making fun of everyone.
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