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 8.9 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. Benjamin Smoke
    Poignant portrait.
  2. Deep Blue
    Deep Blue runs just shy of 90 minutes, and this pathetic landlubber of a movie critic must confess to growing restless here and there, an example of how quickly awestruck wonder can turn to apathy.
  3. Le petit lieutenant
    Light on visceral thrills and heavy on the quotidian rhythms of life on the force, Xavier Beauvois' police procedural owes more to "Prime Suspect" and "Hill Street Blues" than it does to any film genre.
  4. The Pledge
    Penn's own gifts as an actor seem, in turn, to bring out the best in Nicholson, as well as the rest of the cast.
  5. The Score
    You begin to wonder whether a story is ever going to show up. When it does, it's worth the wait for a long and well-turned set piece coordinating the heist, and two lovely flips in the plot.
  6. Real Women Have Curves
    Accomplished and invigorating debut feature from Colombian-born director Patricia Cardoso that took both the Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize at Sundance this year.
  7. The Road Home
    By all current standards it's a startlingly ingenuous film.
  8. Nicholas Nickleby
    In his capable, yet only mildly exciting, adaptation of Charles Dickens’ third novel, Douglas McGrath (Emma) keeps reminding us that what we’re seeing is theater. This feels gratuitous.
  9. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
    It makes an eloquent case against the death penalty, especially when imposed on the mentally incompetent. For if one thing is clear by the time she went to the execution chamber, it's that Wuornos is barking mad, her eyes wild and vengeful, yet also, on some level, already dead.
  10. Mad Hot Ballroom
    The worthy text of Mad Hot Ballroom is undercut by the real source of its energy, the heat of competition and the pure joy of winning.
  11. Searching for Ingmar Bergman
    Little here will surprise cineastes but much of it will charm them.
  12. The Spanish Prisoner
    Everyone plays their role (and the roles within their roles) to perfection, and writer-director Mamet keeps us guessing what's what and who's who right up until the final minute.
  13. Swingers
    What counts here aren't the girls, but the boys--and all the sweet and clumsy ways in which they make love to one another without once shedding their clothes.
  14. Horton Hears a Who!
    Warm, playful and inventive, this tale of an elephant with a spirit as generous as his waistline comes juiced with the genially goofy animation of the folks who brought us "Ice Age" (and, less memorably, "Robots") coupled with a respectful doffing of the cap to Geisel’s exuberantly wacky visual style.
  15. The Nomi Song
    Dazzles with rare performance footage.
  16. Mansfield Park
    Rozema seems determined to defrill the Austen trend and charge it with a fiercer sort of femininity.
  17. Next Stop Wonderland
    Anderson and co-writer Lyn Vaus have a wonderfully light touch with dialogue both comic and sad, and Davis is the perfect mirror for the movie's gracefully shifting moods, and its soulful bossa nova score.
  18. Divan
    Gluck, an oral historian, has the magpie eye of a born collector of objects, people and ideas, a cheeky appreciation for the ironies life drops on us, and enough of an open mind to let her odyssey lead her where it may.
  19. I Will Follow
    The entire cast is in fine form (Omari Hardwick, as Maye's maybe-suitor, pushes the sexual heat through the roof), but White's blistering performance sears the screen.
  20. Pleasantville
    The results are charming if rarely thrilling, with outstanding performances from Joan Allen and William H. Macy.
  21. Requiem for a Dream
    Far too complex and provoking.
  22. Separate Lies
    Though it's not much more than an haute-bourgeois morality play about the inadequacy of bourgeois morals, that's plenty in view of the small but terrific ensemble at Fellowes' disposal.
  23. Where the Wild Things Are
    What he’s (Jonze) ended up with strikes me as one of the most empathic and psychologically acute of all movies about childhood -- a "Wizard of Oz" for the dysfunctional-family era.
  24. Earth
    Both visually and emotionally, a panoramic picture; Mehta wields a master's hand as she weaves together vistas of urban and pastoral India with thoughts on the nature of man as it keeps cycling out in the specifics of history.
  25. Shadow of the Vampire
    Malkovich and Dafoe play off each other with a devilish hamminess.
  26. Carnage
    Carnage is a film about the violence of living, of finding and keeping a place in the world, and though it's a work of preternaturally sophisticated philosophy from a director who's barely out of her 20s, this beautiful, bizarre movie could function quite well without its capable screenplay.
  27. A Woman Is a Woman
    There are a couple of absurdly nonchalant song-and-dance sequences, though mostly, Michel Legrand's sumptuous music swells in anticipation of showstoppers that never happen.
  28. Twin Falls Idaho
    Proves that it's possible for a movie to be reckless and adventurous merely by being sedate, unhurried and contemplative.
  29. Carandiru
    Babenco's kindly, concerned eye seeks out the humanity in even the worst of his characters, and by the time he re-creates the massacre, with shocking power and force, one has been equally captivated and appalled at the world he shows. The result is one of the richest prison movies in years.
  30. Collateral
    Like "Heat," Collateral will doubtless go down in film history as the noir marvel it undoubtedly is, but I don't quite buy its characters, and I came out of the theater still wondering what it had to say. Me, I have a soft spot for that old ’60s radical.
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