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 Shape of Things
    Disarmingly funny new film with a doozy of a twist ending... may be his best, cruelest, most vital act of confrontation yet.
  2. Lilya 4-Ever
    Lilya is the more genuinely unsettling film because Moodysson seems to actually know something of what it is to take and stumble beneath a crushing blow. You feel that here. And you feel it for days after.
  3. Maria Full of Grace
    The movie is thrillingly subjective, teeming with the fullness of everyday proletarian life that one finds in the work of the directors who most influenced Marston in the making of this movie: Hector Babenco and the Brazilian realists, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh.
  4. Smoke Signals
    The deeper strength of Smoke Signals rests on the sensitivity and truthfulness of Farmer’s performance as the ebullient, self-hating alcoholic father, and that of Irene Bedard as the young woman he knew in later life.
  5. Days of Being Wild (re-release)
    Like Proust's madeleine unleashing a flood of reminiscences in the narrator of his novel, Wong works the elements of his aesthetic — music, beautiful people and emotion — into a mood that so overtakes you it's nearly impossible to emerge from his films without feeling slightly drunk.
  6. Ten
    One of the year's finest movies, it's not quite the masterpiece that some of Kiarostami's cultists want it to be.
  7. To Be and to Have
    To Be and To Have works in the grandest tradition of documentary filmmaking -- it keeps company with a small, specific place going about its business, and from it parses the whole world.
  8. The Royal Tenenbaums
    In a film that verges on greatness, it is a sign of terrific faith, as well as of Anderson's promise as a director, that when one of the characters in The Royal Tenenbaums wears hospital pajamas after a detour into grief, the words over his heart read "recovery area."
  9. Igby Goes Down
    Culkin, a revelation here, mines every last nuance of the confusion and anger that results. Bursting with grenadelike one-liners and full-bodied performances, particularly from Sarandon (batty) and Goldblum (creepy) -- Igby Goes Down inaugurates a career that should be well worth following closely.
  10. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
    The film unfolds at a deliberate pace, with a soundtrack occupied less by dialogue than by the sounds of water flowing and crickets chirping. And if you listen carefully enough, you might just hear the sound of one hand clapping.
  11. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
    Has the sprawling canvas of an epic and the emotional heat of classical melodrama.
  12. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
    It works its magic with such exuberance and passion that the film's length becomes a part of its fun.
  13. Life and Debt
    Black's cool-headed but blistering indictment of globalization and the racist international economic policies that have shoved that country into crushing poverty.
  14. Scream
    A meta-horror film that hilariously parodies the genre's clichés with smarts to spare. It's also the scariest fucking movie Craven has made since the first "A Nightmare on Elm Street."
  15. Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
    Melville seems to peer out from behind the camera with a reassuring wink and nod. Le Cercle Rouge is the most self-consciously cool of his famously underheated films noirs.
  16. Murderball
    A great sports drama first and a heart-wrenching triumph-over-adversity weepie almost never.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Titanic Town
    A rare treat -- a mix of politics that avoids reductive simplicity and a story that's entirely engaging.
  18. Last Orders
    Superbly adapted by Fred Schepisi from the Booker Prize-winning novel by Graham Swift, Last Orders pays quietly passionate tribute to the unsung working-class generation that fought World War II and survived to take up apparently humdrum lives.
  19. Up and Down
    This fluidly paced film, with its keen observation of the confused longing for love, family and stability in an inherently unstable world, nonetheless keeps faith with the Czech genius for holding the tonal line between tragedy and the absurd.
  20. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    It makes a convincing argument that Dowd's personal history is a kind of history of the 20th century itself, encompassing the era's art, science, commerce and politics.
  21. Adaptation.
    Adaptation is hardly profound, but it's one of the most soulful and loopily romantic movies I've seen all year.
  22. This Is England
    The result is a film marked by eruptions of brutal violence, but also passages of extraordinary tenderness.
  23. Up
    Up emerges as a gentle hymn to adventure of both the soaring, storybook variety and the smaller, less obvious kind -- the perilous, unpredictable and richly rewarding journey of ordinary, everyday life.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Riding Giants
    The Maverick's sequence is perhaps Giants' most viscerally exciting and poignant.
  25. Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys
    The kind of art film that's rarely seen anymore -- the kind that trusts the audience to be as intelligent as the director.
  26. In Between Days
    This superb debut feature by Korean-American director So Yong Kim seems to be constructed entirely of the ineffable and intangible, those fleeting moments that most movies treat as throwaways.
  27. One Day in September
    Macdonald's singular achievement is to restore -- through interviews and archival footage -- the dead to such vivid life, you weep for them and for their families, who have only memories to live off.
  28. Pollock
    What Harris extracts from himself is nothing less than a psychological nude scene, sustained across two hours.
  29. Turtles Can Fly
    Ghobadi's genius seems supercharged rather than weighed down by his higher calling, and his imagery is so boilingly alive that we come away from it feeling exhilarated rather than depressed.
  30. The Warrior
    Scaled like an epic but possessing the narrative simplicity of a fable, The Warrior unfolds over a brisk 85 minutes of screen time, keeping dialogue to a minimum as it celebrates the power of stories told through handcrafted, CGI-free images.
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