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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    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Smiley Face
    Uproarious pothead comedy.
  2. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
    The list of ills is endless, well-researched, and cross-referenced repeatedly for emphasis. That makes the film a bit of a slog at times, but the fury and grief of the folks interviewed propel it forward.
  3. Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown
    Despite its Scottish scenery and period frocks, Madden's film proves a pallid creature indeed compared to the hanky-panky leaking out of Buckingham Palace of late.
  4. Chasing Amy
    Smith has created the raunchiest romantic comedy in recent American film, and one of the most good-natured.
  5. The Water Horse
    Personally, I wouldn’t take a toddler (unless he was the son of Tarantino) to this intermittently, legitimately terrifying tale of a boy and his Loch Ness monster. But everyone else should blow off "Alvin and the Chipmunks" and show up for the best kiddie picture of the season -- and, along with "Ratatouille," of the year.
  6. Sisters in Law
    Inspirational stuff, and often hysterical to boot.
  7. Maria by Callas
    Volf’s refusal to address key choices that Callas made to shape her own career and fight her insecurities suggests that he’d prefer to imagine Callas as a victim of fate — and bronchitis, fame, Onassis, etc. — instead of a strong-willed but human prima donna.
  8. Wonderland
    With acting as good as this, Wonderland gives you all the expected pleasures of eavesdropping on the intimate lives of others.
  9. All the Real Girls
    Green is essentially a poet of moods rather than a teller of tales, and he adorns the movie with stylistic touches influenced by Terrence Malick.
  10. Spy Kids
    It's whiz-bang, techno fun, with a touch of Latino flavor.
  11. Tadpole
    It requires nothing more of a viewer than quiet complaisance, which is rewarded in turn by pleasant scenery, a few mild laughs, and the dependably involving presence of Weaver and, especially, Neuwirth.
  12. Time of the Wolf
    Time of the Wolf is tough medicine, to be sure. Yet, the movie builds to a note of cautious optimism that is as stirring as it is unexpected.
  13. La Moustache
    The pleasure of La Moustache is that it doesn't feel the need to explain itself at every turn. Part absurdist comedy about the institution of marriage, part paranoid Kafkaesque fantasy, it's a minor-key reverie on the way our own lives can sometimes feel alien to us.
  14. The Unknown Soldier
    Superb documentary.
  15. Holes
    Although parents of small children are advised to give the film an advance look, Holes may nudge older kids toward that most ancient of after-school distractions: reading.
  16. Cookie's Fortune
    Not even Altman's loose-limbed shooting style can redeem Cookie’s Fortune, a bafflingly pointless farce that belongs more properly in the vaudeville halls than on the director's sporadically lustrous résumé.
  17. King Leopold's Ghost
    King Leopold's Ghost is an often infuriating (and excruciating) film to watch, but one that gets to the root of the despair that now plagues so much of the African continent.
  18. Thank You for Smoking
    As sleek, clever and cocky as its anti-heroic protagonist, Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), a hard-driving lobbyist for the tobacco industry who can turn the most unpromising PR quagmire to his own advantage with a few well-turned lies posing as rational argument.
  19. The Good Girl
    Aniston plays her depressed character with enough conviction to guarantee that practically every scene will be stolen out from under her by minor characters, among them a pricelessly funny Zooey Deschanel as a Retail Rodeo employee who vents her rage and frustration on the customers.
  20. Intolerable Cruelty
    Intolerable Cruelty seems the kind of movie that results from two essentially erudite, anarchic talents playing down to the masses.
  21. Intimate Strangers
    Leconte, as always, means to explore the gray areas between sexual espionage and love, and there remains something powerful about the fantasy of being listened to, without judgment.
  22. Factotum
    This is also an acidly funny work, even if the humor is that of a man who drinks to stave off the pain and madness of sobriety. In his finest performance since "Drugstore Cowboy," Dillon plays Chinanski with funereal grandiosity.
  23. Tropic Thunder
    Like this summer's other slapstick cause célèbre, "Pineapple Express," it's a comedy with as high or higher a body count as the movies it purports to be parodying, and the problem isn't the violence per se but rather the fact that neither movie ever finds a satisfactory balance between tongue-in-cheek and guts-in-hand.
  24. 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.
  25. Red Eye
    Between them, first-time screenwriter Carl Ellsworth and director Wes Craven don't come up with a single clever way to generate suspense, and the movie's onboard atmosphere is so phony.
  26. Travelers and Magicians
    In this lovely film, writer-director Khientse Norbu (The Cup) shifts smoothly between a kind of Buddhist "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and depicting the bonds that form among Dondup and his companions.
  27. Crossing the Line
    Crossing the Line, like its subject, remains a fascinating and frustrating enigma -- a declassified government report still marred by redacted passages.
  28. The Opportunists
    It's Walken who's most impressive.
  29. The Embalmer
    Mahieux, who is superb, methodically paint Peppino as a man for whom solitude is torture.
  30. Superstar in a Housedress
    Slow-starting but ultimately invigorating debut film by Craig Highberger.
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