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. About Adam
    While the film strives to prove its cool, it's also built on the insufferably antique idea that some flattery and a good fuck are all any woman needs.
  2. Final Destination 3
    Director James Wong and co-writer Glen Morgan seem, in this film's creaky first third, to be working on automatic pilot, but they gradually cut loose, staging one imaginative and gleefully gruesome death after another.
  3. Like Mike
    A solidly crafted family comedy.
  4. Where the Money Is
    The romance and sheer fun that Where the Money Is packs into its swift 89 minutes follow from the sweet surprise that neither is threatened by the other.
  5. Adam & Steve
    Adam & Steve is uneven, but it's a relief to see a gay romance that isn't about ab-perfect 20-year-olds, and which features lovers played by two long out-of-the-closet actors. Wonder of wonders.
  6. Beijing Bicycle
    Had Xiaoshuai trusted audience sympathies to stay with a slightly more forceful character, he'd likely have crafted the heart tugger that the film aims to be.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Meet Dave
    Meet Dave feels a little too cuddly and familiar to be more than a programmatic summer kids' movie -- better than average, but not worth phoning home about.
  8. Race to Witch Mountain
    A calculated bid to turn the Rock into a more family-friendly commodity. That calculation may be transparent, but it pays off: Cracking one-liners and alternating between world-weariness and growing affection for his charges, Johnson is wonderful -- much better than his material.
  9. Two Men Went to War
    More often than not, Two Men Went to War resembles a feature-length episode of "Hogan's Heroes," with the brave but clumsy Brits continually managing to outfox the even more bungling Nazis.
  10. Swimming
    On the surface, this coming-of-age tale feels slight and unremarkable, yet the director's final close-up of Frankie packs a punch -- a testament to the power of a gifted young actress happily lost inside her first big role.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Neo Ned
    The problem lies in the film's inability to decide whether such loaded images are funny in a Farrelly Brothers/Dave Chapelle kind of way or if they mean something deeper. The terrific lead performances only heighten this confusion.
  12. Beautiful Boxer
    It’s a good story, and Uekrongtham, making his feature debut, captures the camaraderie of camp life and the subsequent matches with the panache of a veteran studio hand, but the insights into Toom's psyche never extend past the fun he has applying powder and eyeliner.
  13. Evan Almighty
    What makes the film transcend its limitations is Carell, whose square, "Father Knows Best" demeanor belies a supreme comic self-confidence and whose implacability in the face of the movie's CGI-intensive animal antics can be marvelous to behold.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Lady in Question Is Charles Busch
    The downside to what is, in essence, an authorized biography is that the movie plays like an inflated "Today" show profile; the upside is that Busch has given Catania and Ignacio complete access to the old footage from his Limbo Lounge days.
  15. The Man from Elysian Fields
    Despite its dry wit and compassion, the film suffers from a philosophical emptiness and maddeningly sedate pacing, and, in the end, the only aspect of the movie that truly commands attention is Jagger's desperately inexpressive acting, which hasn’t improved one iota since "Ned Kelly."
    • 22 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Maniac
    A Freudian nightmare with a lead who looks like the guy who runs your local pizzeria, Maniac also features one of the great head explosions in cinema history.
  17. The Jacket
    The director's work is suitably unnerving, but leaves one feeling beaten senseless by reel two. When the hero's well-earned moment of clarity finally arrives, most will likely be too numbed out to care, despite the best efforts of Brody, an actor too vividly alive to be wasting his time playing dead.
  18. Hard Candy
    The more things drag on, the more monotonous they become and, by the end, Hard Candy has devolved into a rather transparent game of one-upmanship in which Hayley and Jeff come across in almost equally repellent measure, their behaviors driven less by organic impulses than by their need to satisfy the script's elaborate series of reversals and counter-reversals.
  19. Journey to the Sun
    Ustaoglu has made Mehmet unbelievably naive -- and the hardships piled upon him unintentionally evoke "The Perils of Pauline." That dilutes what should be a powerful protest film, and robs it of the emotional impact it aims for.
  20. Bad Reputation
    Bad Reputation comes off more as a fanboy’s declaration of reverence to the queen rather than an interrogation of one of the most iconic women in music.
  21. Laaga Chunari Mein Daag: Journey of a Woman
    The movie works so hard to transform its shocking subject into acceptable material for middlebrow melodrama that it never deals with it.
  22. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    Liberal use is made of freeze-frame and flashbacks as a kind of emotional chronology, yet it's precisely in this regard that the characters feel tentative and half-formed. I'm still trying to figure out why this perfectly serviceable movie won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance last year.
  23. What a Girl Wants
    Strictly for budding young ladies, though it does offer those who've already bloomed the grown-up pleasures of Firth, a great actor who graciously invites you to join him in the slow-burn romantic corner into which he's rapidly painting himself.
  24. God's Army
    A fine cast of unknowns in a story of faith -- lost, found and continually challenged -- that neither romanticizes nor condescends to its milieu.
  25. Wedding Crashers
    Most of the time Wedding Crashers is more genteel than it is outrageous (or funny), playing like an only slightly less benign spin on the tiresome fish-out-of-water farce that fueled the two Meet the Parents movies.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Last Night
    Strangely uplifting, a kind of ode to how on Earth we think we're passing the time.
  27. The Princess Diaries
    The director is Garry Marshall, but The Princess Diaries is no where near as nauseating a fairy tale as Marshall's "Pretty Woman."
  28. A Thousand Peace Clouds Encircle the Sky
    If first-time writer-director Julián Hernández lets his knotted narrative get away from him too often, he nevertheless shows a miraculous sense of style for a 31-year-old.
  29. High Fidelity
    High Fidelity wants to be hip, but it's comically square.
  30. Mostly Martha
    Nettelbeck's storytelling grace, however, only highlights her clumsy script, which drags the viewer through an all-too-predictable menu of catharsis and romance that can overpower the film’s subtler, more complex flavors.
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