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 8.8 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 Prince of Egypt
    Thou shalt not covet any thing that is thy neighbor's. Maybe DreamWorks should stop trying to be Disney.
  2. The Tic Code
    What at first seems emotionally charged, ultimately comes off as contrived.
  3. Joe the King
    Whaley successfully balances his scenes on a knife-edge of tenderness and anger that was Truffaut's trademark.
  4. Frailty
    Audiences are destined to debate the film's final scenes, where Hanley piles on plot twists, leading to a coda that turns a creepily ambiguous story about God and the terrifying power of paternal love into something closer to an X-File.
  5. Herod's Law
    A bracingly sarcastic political comedy -- it opens on a bound copy of Mexico's Constitution, stuffed with cash -- possessed of a baleful satiric eye for hypocrisy and greed, a delicious anti-clerical bent, and pitch-perfect comic timing.
  6. 8 Women
    Without its cast -- the cream of France's female acting elite -- François Ozon's ambivalent musical-comedy homage to the 1950s wouldn't be much.
  7. One Swallow Brought Spring
    The Girl From Paris may not have half the smooth technique of "Swimming Pool," but it has 10 times the heart and soul.
  8. Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War
    While it comes on like a flag-waver, it actually delivers something more nuanced. Its underlying skepticism about the Korean War seems to have jibed with the current national mood: The picture was, deservedly, a huge hit.
  9. The Notorious Bettie Page
    While it's true that most of us make our way through life without a plan, the studied arbitrariness of Page's accommodating ramble from Hicksville to Smutsville doesn't make for thrilling cinema.
  10. Pooh's Heffalump Movie
    Amusing, beautifully drawn one-hour film.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    One Hour Photo
    Like Max Cady in "Cape Fear," the prototypical prole-stalks-bourgeois thriller, Sy is employed simply to scare the family members silly and, in so doing, make them stronger. Call it an exercise in threat management.
  12. Northfork
    So stuck is the movie inside the heads and hearts of its indisputably gifted makers, it never quite makes the leap into ours.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Father and Son
    For Sokurov, the relationship between a father and a son surpasses physical, even human intimacy -- it’s something approaching the sacred.
  14. Paper Clips
    There is something quite heartening about watching these kids earnestly guide others around their memorial.
  15. Princesas
    Aranoa's bleak yet warmly humanistic Princesas deftly and sympathetically ponders the interlocked destinies of two Madrid prostitutes.
  16. Grateful Dawg
    Grisman's warm, loving home movie in the guise of a documentary.
  17. The Pursuit of Happyness
    For a movie conceived and executed in the mainstream Hollywood idiom, it has uncommon depth and honesty.
  18. In Praise of Love
    In its formal daring and exquisite style, the movie is itself an act of resistance against what Godard sees as a modern triumphalist culture that turns historical truth to lies and love to images created to make money.
  19. Eight Below
    Marshall isn't exactly a cinematic poet, but he does a fine job delineating each individual dog's personality, as well as the shifting hierarchy of power within the pack, which is why it's so exasperating that he and first-time screenwriter Dave Digillo are forever cutting away to dull Jerry and his stateside quest for rescue-mission funds.
  20. Suspiria
    I’m happy to report that I have no idea what’s going on in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake, and that’s wonderful. The two Suspirias function more as companion pieces than as mirrored twins.
  21. Enigma
    It's all part of a larger calculus that the filmmakers hope will translate into a thinking person's thriller. If only they themselves knew how to figure it.
  22. The Low Down
    Thraves escapes formula by shaping the film around low-key incidents instead of speeches or overt lessons. There are plenty of side streets here.
  23. Mondays in the Sun
    Bardem, given the only fully fleshed-out character to play, is a marvel to behold...If only he had found a more soulful, less didactic movie to be plunked down into.
  24. The Sixth Sense
    Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan lets the tension rise slowly, leads you everywhere you don't expect, doesn't rip you off and totally freaks you out -- all without stale effects or gore.
  25. Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)
    These live performances and classic music videos drive home the point that part of the Giants' longevity flows from the fact that they can't be explained, only experienced.
  26. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
    Smart, goofy and endearing, Cho and Penn make a terrific team, and the fact that they're starring in their own movie suggests that, in the Hollywood comedy frat house, there's finally room for everyone.
  27. Look Both Ways
    Watt seems to want to say something about the role of fate and happenstance in creating connections between people, but she never quite brings the strands of her ideas together.
  28. Come Early Morning
    No new narrative ground is broken, but there's a lived-in, musical feel to this tale of a fiercely independent, thoroughly screwed-up building contractor (Ashley Judd, in a pleasing return to the directness of her first significant role, in Victor Nunez's "Ruby in Paradise").
  29. Vénus beauté (institut)
    Director Tonie Marshall has taken a very simple story and laced it with potent details that make the film a rich map of her lead character's inner life.
  30. Identity
    Cooney's achingly clever script has more up its sleeve than just Agatha Christie -- he also evokes "Psycho," "The Sixth Sense," "Poltergeist" and "The Omen" -- and the final third dishes up a twist that isn't just surprising, it's revealing
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