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. Friends with Money
    If Friends With Money is about the meaning of success in a town obsessed with wealth, it is also, more universally, about our defining incompleteness, and the sad, uproarious inconclusiveness of life.
  2. Mission: Impossible III
    Cruise is probably the most graceful physical performer to occupy the screen since Burt Lancaster, and in this sort of action role, he's just about peerless...He may not be a great actor, but to find a greater movie star would be a nigh impossible mission.
  3. Waitress
    Washed in a honeyed 1950s glow, Waitress has a mildly puckish way with outlandish baked goods and pert dialogue, but the movie is memorable largely for the contrast between its innocent sweetness and the savagery of its maker's premature death.
  4. Bread and Roses
    There are scenes here that fill one with rage or bring tears to the eyes.
  5. The Story of the Weeping Camel
    Rigged toward a sentimental conclusion and overpopulated with cutesy touches (including a curtain-call finale), but there are many remarkable sights along the way.
  6. The Man Who Copied
    An enjoyable ride.
  7. The Same River Twice
    Far from an arthritic exercise in hippie nostalgia. There is a seasoned richness and vivid specificity to these lives, for all their hurts and losses. Yet the movie is shot through with an undeniable note of elegiac wistfulness.
  8. Gypsy 83
    Karen Black gives her sharpest performance in years as Bambi LeBleau, a roadside-dive karaoke hostess who invites the kids back to her house for a night of booze and lounge classics.
  9. Freeze Frame
    This nastily efficient thriller from British newcomer John Simpson offers a low-budget, high-tech expression of the idea that just because you're paranoid doesn' mean they'e not after you.
  10. Dreaming of Joseph Lees
    A film whose story movingly outfoxes any number of shopworn expectations on its way to a singular, heart-rending outcome.
  11. All About Nina
    Winstead is wildly funny (and spot-on) doing the impressions in Nina’s act (especially of Björk ordering a smoothie) but also proves uninhibited and candid when Nina doesn’t have jokes to hide behind.
  12. Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator
    Stickler goes straight to the source, combining terrific archival footage with interviews of Tony Hawk, Stacy Peralta and others who knew Rogowski back in the day.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cocaine Cowboys
    Cocaine Cowboys' pulpy entertainment value merely lures us into a grim, kaleidoscopic look at how one city was both destroyed and, ironically, eventually saved by some of the worst human beings to walk the Earth.
  14. Best in Show
    Guest begins -- but doesn't end -- with caricatures, then peels away at our preconceptions until we see the heart and soul beneath.
  15. Grateful Dawg
    Grisman's warm, loving home movie in the guise of a documentary.
  16. Hostage
    The movie isn't particularly tasteful or finely crafted -- but it grabs you by the jugular, and only during an overcooked climax does it finally relax its grip.
  17. The Last Castle
    Lurie manages, despite these obstacles, to inspire Redford to give one of the most layered and interesting performances of his career.
  18. Favela Rising
    Elevated by fantastic performance footage of Sa and his young protégés singing, dancing and rhythmically banging on cans, plastic bottles or anything else that can be fashioned into a drum -- and a cultural revolution.
  19. Barnyard
    Even an advanced case of critter fatigue shouldn't stop you from rushing out to see this delightfully cheeky animated tale.
  20. Rape Me
    A small revolution tucked inside clichés and willful artistic ineptitude.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Prowler
    Special effects master Tom Savini did the makeup for this overlooked gem (actually, his fingerprints are on a few of the films on this list), and some of the kills are downright ugly (or beautiful, in horror jargon).
  22. King Arthur
    If King Arthur is as magnificently ridiculous as any Bruckheimer picture, its thuggish charms, which owe as much to Monty Python as to Sam Peckinpah, more than pick up the slack.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Midnight Meat Train
    Director Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus) is a bit weak when it comes to storytelling, but there are few who could so enthusiastically stage a butcher fight amid hanging human carcasses in a subway car.
  24. Wild Side
    Though Lifshitz's attitude toward sex and sexuality ranks among the most progressive in contemporary movies, he doesn't belabor it; seen through his eyes, Wild Side is a love story in which love is unrestrained by matters of gender or sexual orientation or even the number of lovers.
  25. Happy, Texas
    A very cynical exploitation of the current Hollywood vogue for things queer. Still, the film is a must-see.
  26. A Map of the World
    If director Scott Elliott falters, it's only in the spots where he tries to comment on her (Alice's) persecution without being complicit in it.
  27. Brotherhood
    Characters make choices that are incredibly stupid, even wildly offensive, but also recognizably human, and as the night spirals out of control Cannon demonstrates a strong hand in controlling the mayhem. He also sets himself up as a filmmaker to watch.
  28. The Company
    On the plus side, The Company is directed by Robert Altman, who's clearly drawn in by the rare opportunity of putting ballet on film, and who responds brilliantly...The rest of the time, the film fails to catch us up in the workaday intrigues of its characters (most of whom are played by real Joffrey dancers) the way Altman can when he's working in top form.
  29. Maybe Baby
    A film we hereby proclaim the finest fertility comedy ever made, in the faint hope that another will not be attempted.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Closet
    Auteuil is as charming as ever, with a surprising aptitude for physical humor that keeps the tone cheerfully light and the laughs plentiful.
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