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 Notorious Bettie Page
    While it's true that most of us make our way through life without a plan, the studied arbitrariness of Page's accommodating ramble from Hicksville to Smutsville doesn't make for thrilling cinema.
  2. Racing Stripes
    Sweet, innocuous and about as fresh as yesterday's lettuce.
  3. Cinderella Man
    The movie is calamitously miscast.
  4. A Galaxy Far, Far Away
    Jalil penetrates a carnivalesque subculture of self-reinvention and obsession, emotional need and materialist greed, with a camera that is, by turns, cruel, kind and incisive.
  5. Nico and Dani
    Filled with the kind of frank, nonsensational sensuality that eludes American filmmakers, this movie proves again that the most interesting cinema about teenage life -- gay and otherwise -- is being made far from our provincial shores.
    • L.A. Weekly
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bridge
    The result is an attractive, well-intentioned film that is surprisingly dull and uninvolving.
  7. Clash of the Titans
    "Transporter" director Louis Leterrier is sure-footed when battling Gorgons and giant scorpions, but he muddles the comic-grotesque opportunity of the Stygian Witches.
  8. Ambush
    Director Olli Saarela, who co-wrote the script with Antti Tuuri, offers up a trembling romanticism that gradually hardens -- like Eero's consciousness -- with exposure to the horrors of war.
  9. Asylum
    I hope to God that Patrick McGrath's novel Asylum, about a bunch of repressed Brits manipulating the stuffing out of one another in a 1950s psychiatric hospital, is better than the shallowly competent exercise in nastiness that British director David Mackenzie and screenwriter Patrick Marber have made of it.
  10. The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland
    The film is nothing if not benign, but its merits are moot for those above 7 or so.
  11. Casanova
    The movie cries out for the bawdy, rompy air that filled Richard Lester's "Three Musketeers" movies, and what it gets instead is the same dispassionate "professionalism" that has made Hallström a steady fixture in a Hollywood that could do with an infusion of Casanova's own virile lifeblood.
  12. The Slaughter Rule
    This bleak debut feature from writer-directors Alex and Andrew Smith would be all but impossible to sit through if it weren’t for Ryan Gosling and Clea Duvall.
  13. Ta Ra Rum Pum
    The film is so single-mindedly determined to be light and comfortable, to not raise a sweat, that it forgoes even the mildest surprises. The only things that get heavy here are the viewer's eyelids.
  14. Faster
    The archetypal names are pure Walter Hill, the single-minded grudge mission borrowed from Donald Westlake's Hunter books - fine antecedents, though director George Tillman Jr.'s style is anything but terse, indulging rote slo-mo swagger set to secondhand musical cues.
  15. Robots
    On a storytelling level, Robots is in dire need of an upgrade.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Inlaws & Outlaws
    Its 104 minutes of lukewarm-’n’-fuzzy comfort food will no doubt satisfy some, but those looking for deeper insight into our nation’s peculiar mating rituals will feel left out.
  17. No One Sleeps
    Intriguing yet muddled thriller.
  18. Clockstoppers
    Intermittently fun, but mostly just efficiently passable.
  19. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
    Ultimately, Jolie's efforts to establish a character are dashed against the film's increasingly inane dialogue.
  20. Warriors of Heaven and Earth
    The buildup is so compelling in this "Chinese Western" by He Ping (Swordsman in Double Flag Town) that its thunderous anticlimax of an ending can almost be forgiven. Almost.
  21. Bride of the Wind
    She is known as one of the great muses, yet director Bruce Beresford, Wynter and screenwriter Marilyn Levy are never clear if this is by design or chance.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    First Love
    The film, which is directed by Matteo Garrone (The Embalmer), could do with a bit more plot: It doesn't resolve so much as collapse in utter desolation.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    In its well-mannered way, this genteel film delicately keeps its platonic May-December love story from turning creepy. But without the sexual undertones and macabre humor of Hal Ashby's classic, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is merely a soft, slightly patronizing movie about the poignancy of aging.
  24. Johnny English Strikes Again
    Director David Kerr engineers Atkinson’s intricate routines with clockwork precision. That said, his first feature film has little to offer anyone not already attuned to modestly absurdist British comedy.
  25. Intermission
    Beyond that surface grit, Intermission is still a fairly saccharine collage of self-redemptive gestures and happy endings that, true to its title, only fitfully compels.
  26. Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector
    It'll give fans exactly what they expect while passing unseen by anyone else.
  27. Cloverfield
    While the entertainment value of Cloverfield is highly negotiable, it's clear that Abrams has consciously aligned himself with those filmmakers who have used the template of a grade-B monster/invasion movie -- Don Siegel, George Romero, Steven Spielberg -- as a stealth vessel for social commentary.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Deterrence
    Ultimately this is a radio drama made into a movie with a single set.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Stolen
    Several potentially compelling narratives jockey for breathing room in this disappointing documentary about the unsolved 1990 heist of 13 paintings (valued at $500 million) from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
  30. S.W.A.T.
    Serviceable, wholly uninspired.
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