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 Mother
    The Mother winds up unpersuasive, in large part due to writer Hanif Kureishi, who visits on all his mopey characters such calculated savagery, it's hard to care much for them or to get onboard for the hope implied in the hastily stitched-on ending.
  2. Transsiberian
    Anderson and his very fine cast keep things chugging along at a breathless pace, complete with a midfilm reversal of fortune nearly as unexpected as "Psycho's" shower scene. All aboard!
  3. Charlotte Sometimes
    Lovely ensemble piece.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Life of Reilly
    There are the stories of his racist mom, lobotomized aunt, and a TV exec who told him he’d never find work as a homosexual -- and the more charming tale of his Uta Hagen acting class, which yielded nothing but future A-listers (Steve McQueen, Jason Robards, Jack Lemmon and Anne Meara, to name a few).
  5. Gangs of New York
    Scorsese and his writers have saddled their dream with a corny plot apparently lifted from some old 1930s Warner Bros. film starring Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien.
  6. The Rookie
    At its best, there's nothing gushy about Dennis Quaid's portrayal of Morris, and more than anything it's his beautifully modulated reserve that holds this film in emotional check.
  7. Felicia's Journey
    As with all of Egoyan's films, this new one comes cloaked in an atmosphere of dread, but for the first time there's no real purpose, intellectual or emotional, to all the free-floating anxiety.
  8. The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack
    A kind of folktale, rooted in poignant personal experience.
  9. Nowhere in Africa
    The movie's real strength lies in its intelligent, sympathetic account of the dynamic, difficult marriage of Regina's parents.
  10. A Beautiful Mind
    While I don't doubt that Howard's done the best he can, it's sad to see a beautiful mind whittled down by such a plain one.
  11. The Woodsman
    Overblown melodrama, as muddle-headed as it is palpably sincere.
  12. Akeelah and the Bee
    While it can't have been easy to find action points for a drama about vocabulary drills, Atchison comes up with a steady stream of plot-propelling business, including Akeelah's flair for jump rope, a skill that serves her beautifully in a clinch moment.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
    Narrated with surprising empathy by John Waters, is a historically thorough and thoroughly hysterical examination of the big, smelly desert lake's formation.
  14. Brick
    Johnson pulls us into his world and keeps things oddly plausible, despite the intense stylization
  15. Bringing Out the Dead
    (Cage's) performance feels embalmed in the accumulated shtick of an actor trapped in excess.
  16. Journey to the Sun
    Ustaoglu has made Mehmet unbelievably naive -- and the hardships piled upon him unintentionally evoke "The Perils of Pauline." That dilutes what should be a powerful protest film, and robs it of the emotional impact it aims for.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Closet
    Auteuil is as charming as ever, with a surprising aptitude for physical humor that keeps the tone cheerfully light and the laughs plentiful.
  18. Mostly Martha
    Nettelbeck's storytelling grace, however, only highlights her clumsy script, which drags the viewer through an all-too-predictable menu of catharsis and romance that can overpower the film’s subtler, more complex flavors.
  19. Walk the Line
    An engaging biopic that would totally lack surprise were it not for Reese Witherspoon, and a healthy touch of ambivalence about the populist myth that bound The Man in Black to his adoring public.
  20. Control
    What the movie lacks is a point.
  21. Match Point
    Match Point is a perfectly presentable, entirely unremarkable domestic melodrama parked queasily between opera and realism, two irreconcilable forms if ever there were.
  22. The Talent Given Us
    A painful, hilarious and immensely moving rumination on mid-life angst.
  23. Step Into Liquid
    The movie's tag line, which promises (among other things) “No stereotypes,” is one of those rare cases of truth in advertising. That Brown also happens to have captured some genuinely awesome surf footage -- often the only raison d’être for such films -- feels like a bonus.
  24. Mulan
    Mulan, like all the characters in this movie, is a cookie-cutter American prototype, lazily ripped off from the Disney boilerplate that fashioned Pocahontas et al.
  25. Paradise Now
    Abu-Assad, who made the lovely 2002 film "Rana's Wedding," is a far more gifted observer of the everyday than he is an action director, which is why, in Paradise Now, he productively sidetracks into a persuasive and often very funny portrait of the irrationalities of life under occupation.
  26. Swimming
    On the surface, this coming-of-age tale feels slight and unremarkable, yet the director's final close-up of Frankie packs a punch -- a testament to the power of a gifted young actress happily lost inside her first big role.
  27. Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII
    Even the “good” Holocaust stories are chased by heartbreak, as we learn from this straight-ahead documentary.
  28. Manito
    Eric Eason's assured debut succeeds in the way Larry Clark's “Kids” succeeded -- through a feel for the rhythms of street life, and some extraordinary casting.
  29. Waking Ned Devine
    Writer-director Kirk Jones has the movie roll over, fetch and chase its own tail in order to make you love it.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Neo Ned
    The problem lies in the film's inability to decide whether such loaded images are funny in a Farrelly Brothers/Dave Chapelle kind of way or if they mean something deeper. The terrific lead performances only heighten this confusion.
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