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 8.7 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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    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Avatar
    At the end of a decade defined by much bellyaching about "the death of cinema" (including, on occasion, by this critic), Avatar concludes, appropriately enough, with an image of rebirth.
  2. Spider
    Deliciously wicked, strangely poetic portrait (adapted by Patrick McGrath from his own novel) of a schizophrenic man at once tyrannized and elevated by oedipal terrors.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
    It may seem overblown when one of the gamers calls Donkey Kong a metaphor for life, but The King of Kong is just that -- a reminder of how we all have to prove ourselves to others, and the extent to which the odds are often stacked against outsiders and newcomers.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Taxidermia
    All this helps to shape Pálfi’s crudely bombastic but impressive philosophical view of the body as landscape and art, a source of personal discovery, wonder and annihilation.
  5. Merci Pour Le Chocolat
    The story proceeds, by minuscule tonal shifts and barely perceptible changes in the atmospheric temperature, from touches of ghoulish comedy -- to the creepy stillness of death that pervades the house.
  6. Triad Election
    Outside of "Grindhouse," it may be the most bang for your buck to be had in a Los Angeles movie theater this season.
  7. Lilya 4-Ever
    Lilya is the more genuinely unsettling film because Moodysson seems to actually know something of what it is to take and stumble beneath a crushing blow. You feel that here. And you feel it for days after.
  8. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    Vol. 2 is the most sheerly enjoyable movie I've seen in ages, allowing for all the intimacy that was missing from its predecessor -- this time, the violence feels PERSONAL. Yet this film, too, would be richer if it didn't stand alone, but rather were part of one grand grind-house epic.
  9. Vera Drake
    As a character study Vera Drake is coarsely drawn, and as pro-choice polemic, it’s both a blunt instrument and a red herring. Which may be why, among all the moviegoers who staggered from the theater wielding soaked tissues, I was among the few who remained dry of eye, and raised of brow.
  10. Private Life
    Jenkins (director of The Savages and Slums of Beverly Hills) is always more interested in emotional truth than she is in laughs. Throughout Private Life’s tense 124 minutes, she continually achieves both.
  11. The Magdalene Sisters
    Grim, grueling and triumphantly powerful.
  12. Free Solo
    To watch Honnold think through each ledge of his climbs can stop the heart; to watch him navigate human emotion might melt it.
  13. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    Tim Burton has taken a hallowed classic of the modern musical theater, hemmed in the narrative from well over two hours to well under, cast confessed nonsingers in the principal roles, and somehow managed to make something magical out of it
  14. The Apostle
    An effortlessly complex portrayal that relishes the contradictions and complexities of someone capable of both exalted and debased behavior, a shape-shifter it is possible to be fascinated, repelled and compelled by, all at the same time.
  15. Election
    Election is finally, necessarily, as much about sex as it is about politics -- wanting it, getting it, losing it.
  16. Memento
    If nothing else, Memento is a savvy comment on the queasy uncertainties of the postmodern condition, in which history goes no further back than yesterday's news, and knowledge is supplanted by "information" from a tumult of spin-controlled, unreliable narrators.
  17. Venus
    Venus may be a leering male fantasy, but it is also, improbably but persuasively, a love story as tender as it is transgressive. It's a wry celebration of the tyranny of beauty, and the tragicomic way in which desire outruns the betrayals of dying flesh.
  18. Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    Very few art documentaries are as deeply in tune with the spirit of their subjects, and the implications are enormous, since Goldsworthy is the rare contemporary art star whose work (what a radical notion) is actually about something.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Three Times
    I urge you to see the ineffably beautiful Three Times however you can, lest you go on thinking that Hou's greatness is merely the supposition of obscurantist critics intent on reserving their highest praise for those films that nobody else can actually see.
  20. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    Fiercely intelligent, terrifying and absurdly funny documentary.
  21. Safe Conduct
    Alternately frustrating and rewarding film.
  22. Duma
    A drama of uncommon beauty and emotional resonance.
  23. The Constant Gardener
    A smart, beautiful piece of storytelling, attentive to Le Carré's broad intent, while boldly taking a knife to his more egregious longueurs.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A History of Violence
    Cronenberg holds up a mirror, but he leaves it up to us to recoil at what we see.
  25. Winged Migration
    Astonishing both for the beauty of the birds and for its sheer technical brilliance.
  26. The Squid and the Whale
    Baumbach weds his verbal gifts to a fresh visual acuity that brings layers of rich detail to a portrait of a family coping, poorly, with self-inflicted change.
  27. School of Rock
    Still, the big-show musical payoff is good fun, and Black and his little doppelgangers have it all over "Daddy Day Care."
  28. Life and Nothing More
    It’s a shame we never get to know Andrew as well as Regina — arguably part of the moody teen persona — but it’s even more affecting when Andrew’s initially passive existence escalates due to white fear, and his mother is left to fight for his chance at life.
  29. Star Trek
    The visual effects are predictably excellent -- sometimes, in the case of a three-man free fall through space, unexpectedly lyrical -- but most of the movie's dramatic conflicts feel strictly pro forma.
  30. Howl's Moving Castle
    Another soulful gem from the peerless Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki.
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