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. Group
    Some psychobabble ("We're all trying to be who we are") is inevitable, but somehow or other the thing works, largely because the acting, though primarily reactive, invests the movie with enough immediacy and specificity to turn the most excruciating banality into an original thought.
  2. The American Astronaut
    The result is a sui generis, love-it-or-hate-it exercise in homegrown American surrealism.
  3. The Stepford Wives
    Contrary to recent rumors that it was a dud, the new Stepford Wives, with its chocolate-box visual style, archly heavy-handed foreshadowing and its scene-for-scene parody of the original's fright strategies (Walken's waxy menace is once again played for laughs), is a gas.
  4. Burnt Money
    Those who hang in for the long haul are rewarded with a sexy, moving love story.
  5. Rana's Wedding
    The movie's wistful tone leavened with breaks into farce recalls Elia Suleiman's superbly controlled "Chronicle of a Disappearance."
  6. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    The film's energy is primarily due to the rich storytelling skills of the musicians, who trot out anecdotes and memories filled with humor and wry philosophizing.
  7. In This World
    The movie's staccato pacing, lent emphasis by Dario Marianelli's haunting score, evokes the cycles of tedium and terror that make the journey so unnerving.
  8. 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.
  9. Born Romantic
    Kane believes in happy endings, but he makes his characters earn theirs, as each couple is forced, ever so subtly, to face its own inner nonsense. The filmmaker has divine actors at his disposal.
  10. The Talent Given Us
    A painful, hilarious and immensely moving rumination on mid-life angst.
  11. Live Free or Die Hard
    Provided you don't think too long or hard about it (and why ever would you?), Live Free or Die Hard is infectious good fun, and a tremendous encouragement to the middle aged.
  12. Nowhere Man
    If Blake Edwards wrote a script and then Abel Ferrara directed it, it might look something like Nowhere Man.
  13. The Monkey's Mask
    What makes the film compelling is the filmmakers' ability to blend a studied (occasionally academic) dissection of cultural and sexual decadence with a potboiler plot.
  14. Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary
    Junge's testimony about the last days in Hitler's bunker will fascinate the layperson, but it adds little to what is already known by historians.
  15. Stone Reader
    To anyone whose soul lives or dies by reading or writing or both, the movie is a total thrill, and not just as a debate on the nature of the one-shot writer or the decline of publishing.
  16. House of Flying Daggers
    The most seamless piece of sensuous expressionism Zhang has created since "Ju Dou" (1990).
  17. Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Modelworks
    Enthralling documentary.
  18. The Letter: An American Town and the 'Somali Invasion'
    The result is a carefully wrought, historically grounded and thoroughly absorbing look at a quintessential American experience.
  19. The Believer
    After its electric opening -- one of the few occasions where Bean advances his case cinematically, showing rather than just telling -- the film rapidly assumes the shape of a 100-minute debate, as Danny argues against the Jews and, in the same breath, for them.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Man Without a Past
    If Aki Kaurismaki were the Eagles, which he is not, The Man Without a Past might be considered a kind of "best of" album.
  21. Together
    Moodysson's movie, one part mash note and three parts scathing piss-taker, is hugely compassionate toward the well-meaning fools in his tale, but he doesn't suffer their nonsense gladly; his film is, in large part, about grown-ups needing to grow up.
  22. Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
    Ray Harryhausen's original stop-motion Sinbad classics are a hard act to follow, but Tim Johnson and Patrick Gilmore's update, couched in a gorgeous palette of indigo and dark rose, is a big, beautiful thrill all its own.
  23. The Talented Mr. Ripley
    Although he never matches the book in either brilliance or sheer perversity, Minghella has remained essentially true to his source.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yiddish Theater: A Love Story
    [A] wistful and moving portrait of quixotically dedicated artisans playing to half-empty houses, struggling for solvency and relevance — which renders it not just a movie about a theater in particular, but about the theater in general.
  25. Jet Lag
    Danièle Thompson's romantic comedy is excellent fluff français, leavened with charm, wit and smart observation about the way we love now.
  26. Down to the Bone
    Quietly devastating.
  27. Hatchet
    This horror comedy is loaded with decapitations, bodies torn in two and spewing blood, and yet, unlike the grim, torture-filled gore-fests of late, Hatchet’s mayhem is so giddily over-the-top that you end up applauding the low-budget aplomb of it all.
  28. Nearing Grace
    The actors are superb -- especially Smith, who exudes some of the live-wire charisma of the young Sean Penn in Rosenthal's "Bad Boys," and the smoldering Brewster.
  29. 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.
  30. Transporter 2
    This ridiculously entertaining sequel is that rare part deux that leaves you hankering for part trois. The action is, in a word, spectacular, but also playful, inventive and witty.
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