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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    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers
    Greenwald's sense of indignation carries the day: He preaches to the choir -- and apparently passes the collection plate -- with evangelical furor.
  2. Paranormal Activity
    Grounded by strong performances by newcomers Featherston and Sloat, who pretty much have the movie to themselves, Paranormal Activity, which demands to be seen in a crowded theater, is refreshingly blood-free.
  3. Honeydripper
    Honeydripper is classic Sayles cinema: an insightful sketch of assorted common folk whose criss-crossing dreams and agendas unfold against larger, more powerful (and sometimes crushing) sociopolitical and cultural forces.
  4. I Remember Me
    Startlingly affecting -- What emerges is a picture of an illness that causes enormous suffering but whose origins and treatment continue to elude even those doctors who pay attention to it.
  5. Erleuchtung garantiert
    Enlightenment Guaranteed is a parable of alienation and rediscovery told with such affection, insight and visual elegance, it could never be taken as preachy or stern.
  6. Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet
    Tavernier's documentary about the famed Paris Opera Ballet is itself a graceful thing, a fleet-footed yet substantial examination of what it means to devote one's life to the art of dance.
  7. The Beauty Academy of Kabul
    There's great charm, and also discomfort, in watching these highly motivated, excited women learn the tricks of a trade practiced very differently from their own, and casually swap horror stories of life under the Taliban.
  8. Memories of Tomorrow
    This heartfelt tale of disintegration and acceptance, seasoned with family devotion, will both raise and soothe the anxieties of those of us who regularly ask ourselves why we came into the kitchen two minutes ago.
  9. Notting Hill
    The result is two films: a big, dreary star vehicle that sags whenever its leads spend quality time together, and a mettlesome British caper whose nutsosecondary characters walk away with the movie.
  10. Purple Butterfly
    Hectic, lyrical, swooningly romantic and almost unwatchably brutal, Purple Butterfly deploys a modern Asian gangster-movie aesthetic to tell a love story of Shakespearean dimensions.
  11. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    Laced with brilliantly knotted ideas on race, masculinity and cults of violence.
  12. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    Lucas is a major figure, and Revenge of the Sith may be some kind of historic achievement -- the first movie in which it is fully impossible to tell where flesh ends and digital paint begins.
  13. El Crimen Perfecto (The Perfect Crime)
    Writer-director Alex de la Iglesia's bouncy, swaggering satire of ethics-deficient, survival-of-the-fittest free enterprise, peopled by broad grotesques and hysterical caricatures, adds Chabrolian callousness to a cartoonish worldview reminiscent of Frank Tashlin or Joe Dante at their most frenzied.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Santitos
    Springall also deftly weaves the film's most dramatic moments with lighthearted comedy, and the result may be Mexico's best film in years.
  15. Reykjavík
    First-time director Baltasar Kormakur -- balances tones with a smooth, mature confidence.
  16. The Italian Job
    Not only are the action sequences well-paced and witty, but Gray neatly draws out the comic high spirits in Wahlberg's ensemble of crooks.
  17. Come Undone
    A melancholy valentine to broken hearts and lost innocence.
  18. The Inheritance
    Director Fly works with a delicate touch, probing the slow, insidious corruption of this fundamentally decent but weak man.
  19. Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
    The movie starts to drag near the end and feels longer than its 90 minutes - but that's cool. It's a love letter to the faithful in the first place.
  20. Chak De India!
    It weaves its familiar story with some fresh textures and even manages to invest the conflict on the field with a resonance that transcends the tick-tock turnover of the numerals on the scoreboard.
  21. The President's Last Bang
    This meticulously well-made picture is disarmingly funny at times - not least during the ballet of bloody absurdity that is the assassination itself - but also subdued and straight-faced, with one eye planted on 1979 and the other on the violent student demonstrations looming in the distance.
  22. Primer
    A dense and dazzling science-fiction mind-bender unassumingly dressed up in a tech geek’s short-sleeved oxford shirt, pocket protector and safety goggles.
  23. The Good Thief
    Indeed, The Good Thief is a fairy tale, not just in the plotted fun of the heist and counterheist, or in the clever twist thrown in at the end, but in the grandiloquent myth, so passionately espoused by Melville, of the crook as a man of honor and elegance.
  24. Monsters and Men
    Monsters and Men seems as if it was made for the world that existed a few years ago. I honestly can’t tell if my dissatisfaction is with the movie or the era into which it is released.
  25. Gladiator
    Filled with brilliant filmmaking and features outstanding performances, but it's neither profound enough nor pop enough to be great -- it's mournful, serious, beautiful and, finally, pointless.
  26. Summer of Sam
    Brilliant, goofy, vindictive, incoherent and compassionate, Summer of Sam begins as a work of startling ambition, spins out of control, and finally limps to a bland halt.
  27. Thirteen Days
    A refreshing breakaway from both idolatry and cynicism.
  28. Ha-Chaverim Shel Yana
    There's some funny erotic business with gas masks, but neither that nor the unfolding love story is quite as engrossing as the raucous bunch of former Soviet citizens.
  29. Ghosts of the Abyss
    During the all-important underwater sequences, the three-dimensional effects are surprisingly muted.
  30. Almost Peaceful
    Modest, wise ensemble piece.
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