L.A. Weekly's Scores

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:
3750 movie reviews
  1. First Snow has a fine sense of place and a small but terrific turn by veteran actress Jackie Burroughs.
  2. A remarkably clear-eyed look back at a moment in which real revolution seemed possible - even probable - in America's streets.
  3. Writer-director Darren Lemke's likable thriller shows surprising smarts for a low-budget debut, cribbing from all the right sources.
  4. Rachel Boynton's painfully timely film is actually a full-court tragedy - the sorry tale of a battle won and a war lost; of a country decimated by 500 years of colonialism and poverty; of globalization and America's losing battle to export market democracy to the developing world.
  5. The Tsuk children, with remarkable equanimity, evince the least surprise at their parents’ later actions. Hebrew speakers may be better able to appreciate nuances that the sometimes stilted, distracting subtitles seem to obscure. But those open, honest faces — the story they tell transcends words.
  6. On its own, the story is tepid, and less than original. What draws us in is the way in which Gatlif sets it against a rich Andalusian backdrop.
  7. Hickenlooper can't contain Bingenheimer's incredibly generous spirit -- so generous that, while obviously uncomfortable, he lets the director into his most private moments, including the scattering of his mother's ashes.
  8. Andersson particularly delights in left-outs: the guy who can’t squeeze into the bus stop during a downpour; the natty little suitor getting his bouquet smashed in a slamming door. The sum total is the reflection of a worldview -- sad sack, bordering on “Everybody Hurts” black-velvet sad-clown bathos -- rather than any narrative.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    For Conran, after they finished shooting pesky actors, the real fun began at the computer screen with his delirious imagination in free-fall.
  9. The film might prove more illuminating and instructive if it examined more reactions to Kroc’s flowering from within the lifting world. Overall, though, Del Monte has crafted a warm portrait of the birth of a woman from a man who found that he had even more strength than he ever realized.
  10. Director Derek Doneen opens hearts wide with his documentary The Price of Free, his tale of enslaved children working in factories in India. But he’ll also crush many of those hearts with the revelation that viewers are among the villains activist Kailash Satyarthi is fighting.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    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.
  11. The triumph here is a matter of craftsmanship rather than art, but it's rare enough even on that level for a film to be worth celebrating.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Spanish dinner-theater comedy, this intermittently hilarious contraption by the husband-wife team of Dominic Harari and Teresa de Pelegri heaves Jewish-Palestinian conflict onto a prop-room table already groaning with loaded guns, impromptu sex toys, a wounded duck paddling in a bidet, and a brick of frozen soup that doubles as a sandbag for unlucky pedestrians below.
  12. With the supremely gifted Rudd as his point man, Peretz is often ruthless in depicting Americans abroad as deluded cretins; by film’s end, however, he finds their optimism useful for re-firing the defeated hearts of his characters, even the hope-leery French ones.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The sort of movie that you'd see on Lifetime if that channel actually respected its viewers' taste and intelligence, Jacques Thelemaque's feature directorial debut has been kicking around the festival circuit for five years, and now finally comes to theaters in a leaner cut that jettisons an extraneous subplot to get to the core of its human story.
  13. 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.
  14. Though Baran is more forgiving of the Afghans' Iranian hosts than they may deserve, writer-director Majid Majidi ("The Color of Paradise") handles his unassuming material with surpassing delicacy, and the poetic eye for the rhythms and routines of hard labor that has become the hallmark of Iranian film.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The sort of movie you like in spite of yourself, Scary Movie 4 is obvious and dumb, but it possesses such a giddy, good-hearted spirit that even its terrible jokes (and there are tons) get by on something resembling charm.
  15. The movie surely owes something to Polanski, Cronenberg, et al., in its use of an apparently placid, upper-middle-class setting as the background for perverse horrors, but De Van's fearless, high-wire performance is uniquely its own.
  16. With the possible exception of Neil LaBute, I can't think of a filmmaker who can divide an audience as efficiently as Solondz.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This is a sick flick. Sick, but satisfying. A cartoonish parable in the mode of Cronenberg's "A History of Violence."
  17. Dog Days is in fact a bleak but deeply felt humanism -- a yearning that we might all learn to better love our neighbors and, perhaps more importantly, ourselves.
  18. Kopple and Peck went on and off the road with the band for the three years of waffling, agonizing and defiance in between Maines’ mouth-offs.
  19. While Stiller and De Niro can play hilariously off one another, the film -- despite its happy ending -- feels unresolved.
  20. Despite, or perhaps because of, the jollity that reigns in this household, one wants to ask the Mia Farrow question: Why does this woman keep surrounding herself with others who are completely reliant on her?
  21. Intelligent, moving film.
  22. Diaz leaves us unsure about whether we should pity or revile Imelda, a woman alternately charmingly childlike, shockingly remote and, ultimately, as she stands over the waxed corpse of her husband, pathetic.
  23. Dazzles with rare performance footage.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blaustein's journey seems not to have shaken his convictions; he still embraces pro wrestling, warts and all.

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