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. Southland Tales
    Southland Tales pilfers large chunks of its plot and visual style from Alex Cox’s "Repo Man," Kathryn Bigelow’s "Strange Days" and Shane Carruth’s Sundance-winning "Primer," and unlike the makers of those films, Kelly hasn’t digested his influences and made them his own -- he’s more like the slacker college kid who’s just enough of an intellectual poseur to bluff his way to an A. That said, Southland Tales isn’t entirely without its pleasures, chiefly The Rock.
    • L.A. Weekly
  2. Being Julia
    But for all Bening’s high emoting and her trademark giggle, here overused to the point of annoyance, for most of its length Being Julia offers little insight into a woman whose life is ruled by theatrics.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Love Hurts
    The direction rarely rises above acceptable, but anytime the camera’s pointed at Grant, it doesn’t matter. Like the currently ubiquitous pop song of the same name says, sometimes it’s a good hurt.
  4. Elvira's Haunted Hills
    Peterson and her longtime writing partner, John Paragon, as well as director Sam Irvin, clearly worship the Poe-inspired Roger Corman/Vincent Price films of the 1960s, so of course there’s a pit and a pendulum in that dungeon, but who’d have expected it to be so beautifully designed?
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale
    The Shapiros, whose film is intercut with hilarious clips from vintage TV interviews with Mike Douglas and Charlie Rose, ultimately reveal a frail but mentally robust old man.
  6. Dark City
    [Proyas] hasn't yet learned how to enliven his characters as fully as his sets. Part of this is structural (somnolence is built into the script), but the greater fault lies with Proyas' direction of his performers, most of whom deliver their lines in a strangulated whisper.
  7. The Wood
    What feels genuine in the film -- mother-son bonds, the wedding party -- is surrounded by overdetermined and formulaic scenes lifted from other films.
  8. Catch a Fire
    The less rosy message of Catch a Fire is that aggression breeds aggression.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Al Franken: God Spoke
    Throughout God Spoke, Franken comes off as passionate and funny, with an impressive ability to muster facts and an absence of smugness.
  10. Chrystal
    McKinnon's direction is nothing if not atmospheric -- his best scenes unfold with a pungent languor that suggests the power of the backwoods to turn hours into days and days into years. If only the sum total were a movie more "In the Bedroom" than it is everything-but-the-kitchen-sink.
  11. The Yards
    There's so much that's right in it that its blunders are all the more frustrating.
  12. Six Days Seven Nights
    Against the odds of this wheezy material and Michael Browning's fitfully funny script, director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, Dave), a master of timing, contrives to spin a likable romantic comedy.
  13. American Pie
    The movie lover in you will recoil; your inner sophomore will rejoice.
  14. Patch Adams
    Williams is a great clown, and Oedekirk and Shadyac give him room to really cut loose, and cure the movie. That’s as it should be.
  15. Watermarks
    Not especially lively filmmaking, but Zilberman has unearthed some terrific footage of the club in its heyday.
  16. 2 Fast 2 Furious
    This shaggy-dog sequel is ultimately satisfying for the most low-tech of reasons: The competitive bond between the two central characters.
  17. Con Air
    Con Air is entertaining in an extravagantly decadent sort of way. It just isn't a movie.
  18. Creature
    It's this trip home that lifts this unpolished, homegrown documentary above the ordinary.
  19. Bringing Out the Dead
    (Cage's) performance feels embalmed in the accumulated shtick of an actor trapped in excess.
  20. Shower
    Pretty good going for a ton of moisture.
  21. The Adventures of Felix
    It would all be too obviously feel-good if Ducastel and Martineau weren't also tuned in to the liberating drift of the open highway and a sharp native humor that adds needed flesh and blood to their walking metaphors.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rambo
    Gorier, meaner and uglier than anything Sylvester Stallone has made before, and as such damnably effective in rousing your blood lust, this wind-up groin kicker of a movie seems initially as wary of being pulled back into a dirty job as its reluctant hero.
  23. The Burial Society
    Though hardly a major work, The Burial Society has going for it something that many of the snickering noir comedies currently littering the field lack. Underneath its cheeky amorality, there beats a heart.
  24. Marie Antoinette
    Precious little history of any kind shows its face in Marie Antoinette. The omission is strategic.
  25. The Backyard
    Though engaging from beginning to end, be warned that this is also harrowing, utterly depressing stuff.
  26. Curse of the Golden Flower
    In the end, Curse also looks alarmingly like a dry run for the opening and closing ceremonies Zhang has been hired to direct for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.
  27. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
    Things could be worse. At the end of the day, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is nothing if not consistent -- taking care of business solidly, professionally and without a lick of the genuine wonderment or inspiration that you can find in surplus in Jon Favreau's Spielberg-influenced "Iron Man."
  28. Cure
    Less outright terrifying than under-the-skin shivery, this psychological thriller from sui generis Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa breaks nearly all the rules -- including those of narrative logic.
  29. The Black Dahlia
    Swank's character and her performance are good enough to merit a movie of their own, instead of serving as fourth wheel to this lifeless ménage à trois.
  30. Downtown: A Street Tale
    Clichéd though it may be, this movie was clearly made with love.
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