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. 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.
  2. Shaolin Soccer
    The movie has a rambunctious and likable energy that compensates for its unsteady, only intermittently amusing narrative.
  3. Slums of Beverly Hills
    While Slums of Beverly Hills may sound like a downer, Jenkins tempers the family's downbeat circumstances with sympathetic humor, a quirky camera style and lo-fi retro flavor.
  4. Goodbye Lenin!
    Director Becker and his sharp screenwriter, Bernd Lichtenberg, come less to bury communism than to hurl darts at the Western commodity culture that floods East Berlin.
  5. Family Fundamentals
    It's potentially strong material, but the film is so determined not to demonize the conservatives that it winds up being an inadvertent profile in the banality of bigotry.
  6. The Edukators
    Put simply, this second feature by the young Austrian director Hans Weingartner is a put-on -- a glib anti-capitalist rant in which the rhetoric rarely rises above the you-too-can-save-a-child-for-less-than-the-price-of-coffee level.
  7. There's No One Like You
    Paying off a somewhat laborious buildup in the first act with an escalating series of revelations and reunions in the final reel, Krrish is hearty pulp cinema that really sticks to your ribs.
  8. The Illusionist
    The movie is leaden and self-serious, with an unusually hollow performance from Norton, who's not for a moment convincing as a man of raging passion. Far better is Paul Giamatti.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Office Space
    Mike Judge’s live-action directorial debut not only whittles the high-strung festering soul of ‘90s Orthodox Corporationism down to the quick and quintessential but wraps its veins around his fingers and flosses our teeth.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pulse
    Whether you take it as horror show or social commentary (or both), this is sublimely terrifying stuff.
  11. For Your Consideration
    Doesn't risk ruffling any feathers, and that's exactly what's wrong with it: It's less a satirical bite at the hand that feeds Guest than it is a toothless nibble, and it isn't particularly funny.
  12. Hustle & Flow
    But while some may leave the theater tapping their toes and whistling the lyrics to such inimitable original ballads as "Hard for a Pimp" and "Whoop That Trick," they should hang their heads low and mourn the sorry state of the contemporary African-American movie.
  13. A Civil Action
    A well-chewed gumbo of every lawyer flick you’ve ever seen.
  14. Winter Sleepers
    Though it was made before "Run Lola Run," feels like the work of a more seasoned heart and mind.
  15. Bread and Tulips
    Maglietta, whose soulful countenance and offhand grace are soothing to behold, and Ganz, who says more with a shrug and sigh than most poets do with a sonnet.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heaven
    The final product is so eccentric and resolutely uncommercial -- and so faithful to the spirit of Kieslowski's oeuvre -- that it's hard to doubt the purity of Tykwer's intentions.
  17. The Bourne Identity
    Though it's clearly meant to be character-driven, the movie is thrown out of whack by a total lack of chemistry between the leads, and some great acting (Clive Owen, Chris Cooper, Brian Cox) on the side.
  18. Miracle
    At the movie's core, disguised with pitch-perfect Minnesota accent and bushy comb-over hairdo, the perpetually underrated Kurt Russell (as the late coach Herb Brooks) delivers a brilliant performance of immaculate control.
  19. Bon voyage
    The cast's sometimes capable, sometimes gross mugging is overwhelmed by lavish costumes, shiny vintage cars, hordes of meticulously directed extras, and the here-incongruous seriousness with which the French still regard this momentous, if humiliating, chapter of their national history.
  20. Off the Map
    A small masterpiece of tone and form.
  21. Romántico
    If this terrific documentary doesn't adjust your idea of what it means to have a hard life and a good attitude, you haven’t been paying attention.
  22. The Last Mogul
    Love him or loathe him, Avrich proposes, Wasserman mattered -- which is a lot more than can be said for most of the multinationals and their MBA-bearing surrogates who came to run the studios in his wake.
  23. Shanghai Ghetto
    One of the most fascinating and least documented tributaries of the Jewish experience in World War II.
  24. Why We Fight
    There may not be two equal sides to every argument, but in giving such little credence to those who might oppose him, Jarecki makes us wonder what exactly it is he’s so afraid of.
  25. Women Without Men
    Neshat employs dialogue that is often didactic, but that weakness is forgiven in the face of stellar acting from the ensemble and gorgeously composed and shot images.
  26. Theeviravaathi: The Terrorist
    A heartbreaking reminder of all the wars whose frontlines are currently held by the very young, wars that have robbed them not only of family and friends, but of their childhoods as well.
  27. Son of the Bride
    Although it's better written and directed than the average Nora Ephron bagatelle, it's easy to imagine Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan slipping into a remake of Son of the Bride.
  28. Friends with Money
    If Friends With Money is about the meaning of success in a town obsessed with wealth, it is also, more universally, about our defining incompleteness, and the sad, uproarious inconclusiveness of life.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Casting About
    A nicely contemplative documentary about actors and their ambivalent relationship with that intimidating space.
  30. X2: X-Men United
    Singer's approach to X2 is very much of the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" school, resulting in a movie that, even at its best -- a thrilling jailbreak scene that's the closest thing in either X movie to a rousing set piece -- seems tame and unmemorable.
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