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. Half Nelson
    At a time when most American movies, studio made or "independent," seem ever more divorced from anything approximating actual life experience, Half Nelson is so sobering and searingly truthful that watching it feels like being tossed from a calm beach into a raging current.
  2. The Insider
    Has the glorious look and immaculate technique we expect from Mann, along with a wealth of superb secondary performances.
  3. Street Fight
    This is classical activist filmmaking of the first order, a movie with the power to turn hearts, change minds and, just maybe, right the wayward course of an entire city.
  4. About Schmidt
    The bleakness and poignancy are inescapable in About Schmidt, a character study that has the emotional richness of the great Italian and Eastern European films of the 1960s, in which humor and pathos rode up and down on the seesaw together.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hero
    Hero is an epic, evocative of another epoch and of landscapes beyond time. It's overwhelming. And yet I miss the animating anger of Zhang's early masterworks, in which penniless young lovers were oppressed by impotent old men.
  6. Neil Young: Heart of Gold
    Jonathan Demme's superb film of Neil Young's 2005 performance at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium is as fervent a musical homage as was Demme's bubbly tribute to the Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense (1984).
  7. Mudbound
    With Mudbound, Rees proves the truest rule of all: That talent and vision make all lesser rules negotiable. This absorbing, incredibly accomplished film should win awards and be taught in history classes all over America.
  8. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
    Mitchell retools his play magnificently, opening it up into a vibrant cinematic work.
  9. The Intruder
    For Denis’ film - which may be her most intricately constructed and intensely beautiful to date - is one that transcends words and stories, a movie to be felt rather than rationalized.
  10. No Greater Love
    I'm thankful No Greater Love is around to make people realize how much war heroes need our love, help and support once they come back home. Just telling them "thank you for your service" ain't gonna cut it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    24 Hour Party People
    The movie's a rave and a half.
  12. The Host
    The Host is a miracle of breathless play with form and tone that also seethes with attitude and ideas, from pure movie love to pointed sociopolitical commentary to a bleak existentialism about the inherent cruelty of our world.
  13. Grisbi (re-release)
    Grisbi is hard (new subtitles bring out the chill of the gangsters' argot) and gray: a meditation on what we are left with when life has let us down, played out in the haunted eyes of Jean Gabin.
  14. The Iron Giant
    One of the best films of the year thus far.
  15. Paragraph 175
    Speaks so eloquently for itself, there's not much more for me to do than urge you to get over to the Nuart for the one week it's playing in Los Angeles.
  16. Long Night's Journey Into Day
    Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffman's heart-stopping, Oscar-nominated documentary about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is narrow in focus, but broad in its reach for insight into the power of public drama.
  17. The Circle
    A triumph of invisible craftsmanship that embraces so much specific detail that none of the women ever comes across as an emblem or an abstraction.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sound and Fury
    Perfectly situated in the maelstrom of the personal and the political, Sound and Fury creates a space for serious, obstinate contention.
  19. Since Otar Left
    The kind of small film -- morally ambiguous, graceful in its admission of imperfect knowledge, at once specific and universal -- that expands our understanding of the emotional economy of family life, with its ebb and flow of love and hostility, secrecy and egregious candor. You must see this film.
  20. Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession
    A marvelous tribute to a heady age.
  21. A Christmas Tale
    Their endless groupings and regroupings, their brief encounters and power struggles are framed by an armory of cinematic devices that will be familiar to any Desplechin devotee.
  22. Out of Sight
    This isn't a profound film, or even an important one, but then it isn't trying to be. It's so diverting and so full of small satisfying pleasures, you don't realize how good it is until it's over.
  23. The Last Waltz
    To see the film in this meticulously restored and remixed version is like watching it for the first time, so clear is the sound, so vivid the sights.
  24. Children of Men
    One of the year's most imaginative and uniquely exciting pieces of cinema.
  25. American Movie
    This unassuming, insistently entertaining documentary has the virtue of a great subject.
    • 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.
  27. Calle 54
    Trueba reveals his subject organically, letting the music speak for itself.
  28. Lantana
    Notable for its power of surprise and its refusal to immediately clarify the confusion of these lost souls.
  29. 49 Up
    Their pain is our pleasure, for though occasionally Apted's bluntness makes you want to take a bite out of his neck, there's something immensely satisfying about watching the playing out of ordinary lives we've become attached to over time.
  30. American Beauty
    Surprises you with a kind of hardheaded romanticism.
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