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 Ladykillers
    It's the disease of Hollywood remakes that they nearly always lose sight of what made the original good in the first place. Where Alexander Mackendrick's film offered a delicately diabolical blend of the ordinary and the brutal -- the new Ladykillers bludgeons you with cartoonish gags about stupid football players, irritable-bowel syndrome and somebody accidentally shooting himself in the head.
  2. Burning Man: The Burning Sensation
    The overall vibe is druggy and self-indulgent, like a spring-break orgy for pretentious arts majors.
  3. Just Visiting
    A happy vulgarity still reigns.
  4. Studio 54
    Helped along by news clips, the filmmakers do better with the crash-and-burn business story than with the actuality of the Studio experience.
  5. Anywhere But Here
    Compared to the glib, pandering rosiness of most current chick-flicks, Anywhere but Here is a class act.
  6. A Walk to Remember
    West delivers the emotional goods when tragedy strikes in the final reel. If 17-year-old pop star Moore isn't a skilled actress, she's at least unassuming.
  7. Reindeer Games
    A cleverly plotted, cleanly crafted matinee item -- pure entertainment on a romping continuum with Frankenheimer's "Ronin."
  8. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    Came alive only in the presence of a supposed dead man -- specifically, the nefarious Lord Voldemort.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    ATL
    What starts out as a lively reconsidering of the thug-life mentality ends up having as much depth as, well, one of Robinson's videos.
  10. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
    Although the digital dinos look great, especially the clumsy stegosaurs, Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp have failed to absorb the single most important lesson from the movies they've looted: If your people aren't interesting, at least make your monsters memorable.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cave
    Despite the striking underwater photography and production values, much of this feels like Alien: Stalagmite Edition. But if it isn't original, The Cave does demonstrate that you can always elevate threadbare material by keeping your ambitions modest.
  12. Manna from Heaven
    Frankly, the story behind Manna From Heaven is a truckload more interesting than the movie itself.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    G-Force
    Amping up the "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" formula with a whole A-team of adorable, talking furballs who converse in one-liners and pop culture references (Apocalypse Now and Scarface, really?), the mega-producer’s stamp is on every fight sequence, explosion and ugly stereotype.
  14. Stander
    It can be thrilling to watch Stander and his gang of gentlemen bandits rack up the loot without ruffling their (or anyone else's) shirt collars. The movie isn't content to rest there, though; it wants to be a caper with a conscience.
  15. ABCD
    An observant comedy of cross-cultural befuddlement in a half-assimilated immigrant family, with occasional spasms of propagandistic pleading on behalf of the younger generation.
  16. Suddenly
    The 26-year-old Argentine director Diego Lerman shows a sure hand in his debut, from his contrasty black-and-white compositions to his sly, jumpy edits, reminiscent of Godard.
  17. Lost and Delirious
    Blessed with a lovely score and strong acting, but crippled by an awkward, mawkish script.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nim's Island
    Despite its formula and flaws (chief among them Foster’s sitcom-campy performance), Nim’s Island is a perfectly pleasant, agreeably innocuous ’tweener adventure film.
  19. Contact
    What's most frustrating about the movie isn't that it thinks so little of its heroine that it can't let her figure out the moral of her own story, but that it thinks so little of us as to suggest that, after a couple millennia of human struggle, it's indeed possible to answer the unanswerable.
  20. High Tension
    While the acting is fine and the direction accomplished, the real stars of the film are editor Baxter and cinematographer Maxime Alexandre. Forfeiting a gold star is whoever haphazardly dubbed the film, simply giving up about halfway through.
  21. The Butterfly
    If there's anyone to credit for The Butterfly's eventual triumph over the inherent fatuousness of the material, it's the great Serrault and his tiny leading lady, who matches her elder nearly line for line and look for look.
  22. Stepmom
    Less a movie about stepfamilies than a PSA about how cancer makes everyone behave themselves at Christmas.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Why Did I Get Married?
    The writer-director-producer-star would rather save your soul and your marriage than engage your aesthetics. That’s probably why every other line was greeted at my screening with a chorus of stern “Mm-hmms” and “Exactlys!”
  24. Unbreakable
    The movie feels oddly undercooked and aimless.
  25. Red Satin
    Predictable as Satin Rouge's plot points may be, it ultimately resists characterization as an amiable and conventional tale of sexual rebirth.
  26. Air Force One
    The first 20 minutes of Wolfgang Petersen’s new action adventure, Air Force One, are so thrillingly choreographed (and so very, very loud), it’s all the more disappointing that the balance of the movie tends to move less like a Stealth bomber and more like a jalopy — jerking fitfully from plot hole to plot hole, only occasionally finding momentum.
  27. Enemy at the Gates
    Despite the success of these action sequences, Annaud and his ultraserious cast are so determined (admirably) to keep war from seeming romantic that we are never quite pulled into the movie.
  28. Vlad
    It all adds up to pleasantly nonsensical mayhem.
  29. Mad Love
    de Ayala is required to supply too much of the energy in a film that is, overall, far too staid for its subject matter.
  30. Tell Me Something
    Director Chang builds some chilling suspense into the cop's grim investigative routine -- as well as generous helpings of blood: It runs, splashes and sprays as the amputations continue.
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