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. House of Sand and Fog
    Everything about the movie seems excessive to the material. What should have been a small, independent feature without marquee casting -- the story's protagonists, after all, are meant to be the kind of people nobody ever notices.
  2. Training Day
    One of those movie equivalents of a freeway pileup -- it's a mess, at once insistently watchable and a total dead end.
  3. Mayor of the Sunset Strip
    Hickenlooper can't contain Bingenheimer's incredibly generous spirit -- so generous that, while obviously uncomfortable, he lets the director into his most private moments, including the scattering of his mother's ashes.
  4. Fixing Frank
    Boasts one of the most entertaining and bitterly astute screenplays I've had the pleasure of listening to in a while, with its lengthening spirals of deceit, mendacity and one-upmanship, and its elegant linguistic dances around difficult truths.
  5. Sketches of Frank Gehry
    Sketches was produced for PBS's American Masters series, but it's in theaters now and deserves to be seen on the largest possible screen.
  6. Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop
    Belongs to the small rank of hip-hop films that actually have something to say -- and that say it with both style and intellectual bite.
  7. Tape
    A tedious exercise in ethical hand wringing.
  8. Black Book
    A viscerally effective thriller ends up a repugnant exercise in moral relativism, delivered with the grandstanding swagger of the self-styled provocateur.
  9. A Walk on the Moon
    Paula Gray wrote the script (it was her UCLA senior thesis), and if there are gooey spots, there's also nicely turned, lived-in dialogue and a gentle affection for all her characters.
  10. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
    There’s no denying the sharpness of his (Jason Kohn) insights into a society that hasn’t so much collapsed as reconstituted itself around venality, profiteering and rage.
  11. The Descent
    Compulsively watchable, with its fair share of effective sledgehammer shocks; it just isn't very good.
  12. Rana's Wedding
    The movie's wistful tone leavened with breaks into farce recalls Elia Suleiman's superbly controlled "Chronicle of a Disappearance."
  13. Rain
    Jeffs' meticulous framing nicely counterpoints all the messy turmoil, and her screenplay flows with the cadences of life -- its awkward eruptions and long, hurtful silences -- but she never pulls you deep enough into her characters.
  14. Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember
    Nearly three and a half hours in length, but owing to its freedom of movement, the film feels weightless.
  15. Sunshine
    What makes Sunshine unique, what rewards a first viewing and lives in the mind long thereafter, is that Szabo has attempted to place Judaism and Christianity on a continuum that is both historically truthful and highly personal.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Donnie Darko
    It is funny, sad and beautiful. And it's right on time.
  17. The Great Buster: A Celebration
    It’s a relaxed study of greatness, of exquisite physical comedy, of how’d-he-do-that stuntwork, of a vigorous cinema artist who saw new and enduring possibilities for his medium.
  18. The Boys of Baraka
    The kids absolutely win your heart, but there's something off-putting in the film's lazy juxtaposition of unexamined Negro dysfunction tropes (absent fathers, violent streets) against an idyllic Africa tended by white benevolence.
  19. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Rachel Boynton's painfully timely film is actually a full-court tragedy - the sorry tale of a battle won and a war lost; of a country decimated by 500 years of colonialism and poverty; of globalization and America's losing battle to export market democracy to the developing world.
  20. Mrs Henderson Presents
    Stephen Frears has had more downs than ups of late, but I would never have thought the man responsible for "My Beautiful Laundrette" and "The Grifters" capable of stooping to pap as pappy as this unbearably chipper take on the real-life story of Laura Henderson.
  21. Double Dare
    Zoe is lively and an astonishing athlete, but it's Jeannie who gives this film resonance.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Motel
    By not romanticizing its despairing yet humanistic outlook, The Motel presents a moment-by-moment emotional recap of almost anyone's formative years while simultaneously issuing a stinging reminder on the impossibility of fully outgrowing adolescence's uncertain searching.
  23. Yossi & Jagger
    Enlivened by journalist Avner Bernheimer's delicately witty script and some lively ensemble performances under the direction of Eytan Fox, the film offers a haunting portrait of a generation forced to risk their lives in the service of military goals they're far from totally committed to.
  24. Year of the Dog
    So oppressive is Peggy's world -- Year of the Dog is the best evocation I've seen of how much worse it is to be depressed in a sunny climate -- that when she finally loses control, it feels more like catharsis than madness.
  25. The Tao of Steve
    It's amazing that anyone still thinks this kind of shit can fly.
  26. Quills
    Remarkable energy and wit, and is probably the most purely enjoyable entry in Kaufman's suboeuvre of literary excursions.
  27. Cure
    Less outright terrifying than under-the-skin shivery, this psychological thriller from sui generis Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa breaks nearly all the rules -- including those of narrative logic.
  28. Amélie
    Sucks -- because it's a frenetic bore that insists on its audience's adoration while making no demands upon their intelligence.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bad Company
    Refreshingly complex teen drama.
  30. Hamlet
    Cast for fun, and the whimsy is enjoyable both for its parody of heavy-handed "relevant" updates of the play.
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