L.A. Weekly's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Below
    Twohy moves effortlessly between conventions of the sub and horror genres, with long tracking shots and masterful sound design, shock cuts and mismatched mirrors and reflections.
  2. Camp
    The movie is so rigged to elicit the audience's empathy that it becomes difficult to watch; it's stifling.
  3. Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela
    An amiable and colorful, if dewy-eyed, documentary.
  4. Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist
    The strengths of Dominion, however, have been little diminished by its long shelf life and, in fact, may have grown stronger with age.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Greatest Game Ever Played
    The Greatest Game mostly sits there limply -- it lacks the charming swagger Paxton dependably brings to his own acting roles.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    I Can Do Bad All by Myself
    Has so many dead moments that singing spots by Gladys Knight, Pastor Marvin Winans and Mary J. Blige simply highlight, rather than alleviate, the inertia.
  7. The Truth About Charlie
    The story itself falls to earth with a thud, not least because of a casting catastrophe. The boyish, goofily smiling Wahlberg is egregiously out of place as the kind of charming-ambiguous dreamboat you'd have to be Cary Grant to pull off.
  8. P.S.
    This sappy stuff gets better direction by Kidd (who made the far superior Roger Dodger) than it deserves, and Linney gives a wonderfully wistful portrayal of urban loneliness.
  9. Veronica Guerin
    For once, it's no stretch for Jerry Bruckheimer to turn a human life into an action movie. Give or take a pack of screaming clichés in Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donoghue's screenplay, Joel Schumacher's propulsive thriller is also a smart character study, with Cate Blanchett as the jewel in its crown.
  10. Don't Come Knocking
    So radiantly awful that, given the egghead credentials of the director and his screenwriter and star Sam Shepard, I initially took the charitable route and assumed I was in the presence of parody.
  11. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
    Jolie has a gangly inelegance that suggests a giraffe trying to hang wallpaper -- but the entire movie is predicated on a spark between its prettier-than-thou stars that seems to have bypassed the screen and ignited in the tabloids instead.
    • 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Darshan: The Embrace
    Unless you're already a true believer, Amma comes across in Darshan as a perfect angel, a frustrating enigma and a rather dull cinematic subject.
  14. Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny
    "The Blues Brothers" it is not, but in its best moments, the movie feels like a comic exaggeration of the real hardships that a couple of average, decidedly unhip guys went through on their unlikely way to the top.
  15. Knuckleball
    Knuckleball mostly fills up its running time by being a twisted, even more ridiculous Home Alone.
  16. Love Actually
    If you’re going to have your emotional responses shunted around like a gear stick, it might as well be by someone who writes dialogue as funny as Curtis does.
  17. The Acid House
    Sympathy is disturbingly cast aside so we can wallow in the pathetic. It’s a bad trip, man.
  18. Casa de los babys
    The women are terrific -- they know a thing or two about modulating pathos -- and watching them is a pleasure, even if the lines they're speaking sound like those of a world-worried, first-time playwright.
  19. Starsky & Hutch
    This depressingly uninspired action-comedy (based on the 1975–79 TV series) is Hollywood’s latest McMovie -- name-brand recognition as raison d’être or, if you will, creative bankruptcy on a very large scale.
  20. Bulgarian Lovers
    For his first feature in 15 years, Spanish filmmaker Eloy de la Iglesia has made a witty, unsentimental class comedy.
  21. 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.
  22. The Dogwalker
    A well-made but emotionally scattered film whose hero gives his heart only to the dog.
  23. I Heart Huckabees
    A fresh, buoyant, mischievous and rather jolly meditation - if that's the word for a movie as divinely nuts as this one is - on the meaning of life in an unhappy world.
  24. The House Bunny
    The movie is basically on one level and Faris on another -- in that exclusive aerie occupied by Judy Holliday, Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball and a few other blissfully original comedy goddesses.
  25. Ice Princess
    Joan Cusack and Kim Cattrall bring some nice ambiguity to their thankless roles as the mothers, while pintsize Kirsten Olson and punked-out Julianna Cannarozzo, both professional skaters, leaven this Disney sugarplum with much-needed wit.
  26. Without the King
    A curious mixture of banality and revelation.
  27. Take the Lead
    To their credit, screenwriter Dianne Houston and director Liz Friedlander (both making their feature debuts) go relatively easy on the urban-life clichés and instead stick tight to dance class.
  28. Bride & Prejudice
    It is a truth universally acknowledged that had Jane Austen lived to see the profits that have been squeezed from her most marketable premise, she'd doubtless have wept, then lobbied for her share of the royalties.
  29. Agnes Browne
    Anjelica Huston, a gifted and sometimes extraordinary actress, has given herself the title role in her second outing as director---a bitof miscasting for which the director, and not the actress, must be blamed
  30. 'R Xmas
    R Xmas offers a poetic and profane ambiguity that's vintage Ferrara. The drug dealers are community leaders, the cops are corrupt, and the materialistic wife has unimagined emotional reserves.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »