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. Too Much Sleep
    Maquiling offers us the unexpected pleasures of taking the side streets in a film about how even minor-key adventures can make a life stuck in low gear something to look back on.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Screamers
    So many documentaries about genocides play art-house theaters that it can be easy to get jaded, but combining one with tour footage from the most innovative metal band in the world is genius, banging the viewer's head before he realizes it's being filled with awareness too.
  3. Rory O'Shea Was Here
    O'Donnell's directing is assured and glossy as befits a former maker of television commercials, and Jeffrey Caine's exuberant script sidesteps cliché -- just.
  4. The Debut
    Having built his cast from friends and family, the director is left with some stilted acting, but that's easily outweighed by the film's infectious enthusiasm.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
    Narrated with surprising empathy by John Waters, is a historically thorough and thoroughly hysterical examination of the big, smelly desert lake's formation.
  6. The Forgotten
    Midway through, the plot pulls itself out of its doldrums with a sudden, heart-twisting turn. Ruben still knows how to cut a sequence for maximum jolt, and, ultimately, he and DiPego manage to summon up some of the B-movie paranoia that fueled "The Stepfather," turning in a pleasantly nonsensical roller-coaster ride.
  7. Dogma
    A profession of faith, made with the confident disrespect of a true believer.
  8. Shanghai Ghetto
    One of the most fascinating and least documented tributaries of the Jewish experience in World War II.
  9. Ultimate X: The Movie
    All of this looks great on the giant IMAX screen -- most things do -- but the filmmakers can't shake the sense that this is an inflated TV special.
  10. Grazia's Island
    The movie's pleasures draw on old-fashioned Italian neo-realist simplicity.
  11. Cowboy Bebop the Movie: Knockin' on Heaven's Door
    There are so many good ideas at the visual level that you can't help wishing the narrative elements had been more cleverly worked out.
  12. Straight-Jacket
    Writer-director Richard Day, whose debut feature, the drag comedy Girls Will Be Girls, was shamefully neglected by critics and audiences alike, proves again that he's the new master of the catty one-liner, and he's also becoming a striking visual stylist.
  13. Wordplay
    Wordplay offers a running tutorial in how crosswords are created - lessons that are enhanced by the onscreen graphics of designer Brian Oakes, which, come tournament time, allow moviegoers to see the clues and grids the contestants are working on, theoretically allowing us to solve the puzzles along with them.
  14. Race You to the Bottom
    Watching this interesting, well-acted debut feature from writer-director Russell Brown, one begins to reason that what Nathan and Maggie have in common, besides desire, is a need for a partner who's not completely kind.
  15. Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi
    The film has the unpolished charm of a diamond in the rough, and it boasts a richer inner life than most of the teen movies currently bouncing off the assembly line.
  16. The Color of Paradise
    The performances are revelatory.
  17. Thirteen Days
    A refreshing breakaway from both idolatry and cynicism.
  18. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
    Leuchter is such a riveting, disturbing and finally pathetic character that his story hardly needs embellishing with Morris' fancy visuals and ominous mood music.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gamer
    Neveldine and Taylor’s spazzy (but coherent) action scenes rely mostly on blood spurts instead of feats of badassery, but their dystopia is inventive and their visual schemes diverse.
  20. Deep Blue
    Deep Blue runs just shy of 90 minutes, and this pathetic landlubber of a movie critic must confess to growing restless here and there, an example of how quickly awestruck wonder can turn to apathy.
  21. Kinky Boots
    Kinky Boots is diverting, but it's only worth shouting about thanks to Ejiofor' quietly subversive take on what has become a stock movie character.
  22. Lemming
    Like Michael Haneke's "Caché," this effectively creepy little customer from Dominik Moll (With a Friend Like Harry) fires yet another shot across the bows of French bourgeois complacency, while throwing in a wink and a nudge about the perils of surveillance.
  23. 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.
  24. Barbershop
    Despite the fact that you can see every plot twist a mile off, director Tim Story keeps the script by Mark Brown, Don D. Scott and Marshall Todd rollicking with a jazzy spontaneity.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Final Destination 5
    So tapped into its audience's giddy schadenfreude that beyond a kinkier-than-usual jolt of black humor and some clever red herrings, the formula remains rote.
  26. The Lady and the Duke
    As always, conversation is the constant threading together Rohmer's stately pace and episodic structure, the thing he uses to show us who his characters are and what their friendship entails.
  27. Rescue Dawn
    The canniness of Bale’s performance (which may be the best of his young but brilliant career) is that he plays Dengler as a fundamentally kind and simple yet rather ingenious man.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Powerpuff Girls
    All you really need to know, finally, from a consumer angle, is that it is not boring, and looks fantastic, and maintains the wit and spirit of the original, and that -- it takes care of the grown-ups first. There are obscure puns and cultural references for Mom and Dad, dog pee and monkey poo (metaphorical) for the kids, and fighting for . . . everybody!
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    44 Inch Chest
    As in "Sexy Beast", Mellis and Scinto’s rhythmically aggressive dialogue becomes arialike. But first-time director Malcolm Venville lacks the visual flair of Sexy Beast’s Jonathan Glazer -- a deficit that, combined with 44 Inch Chest’s wobbly final act, comes dangerously close to erasing the film’s uninhibited look at the measure of a man.
  30. The World Is Not Enough
    The formula, with its comforting arrangement of familiar elements, is what we're after, and The World Is Not Enough certainly comes through on that front.
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