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 Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyam
    Though the story hardly lacks for event as it traces Khayyam's ascension from the peasantry to the royal court, the period costumes and sets look to be on loan from Medieval Times, as do most of the actors, and the boxy, harshly lit compositions make everything feel even more cardboard.
  2. Stick It
    The final meet felt eternal to me, but little girls may love it all, and even if they don't, they're almost sure to practice their handstands when they get home.
  3. Lunacy
    Lunacy feels programmatic, the repetitive working through of an idea that had me checking my watch.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Favor
    The Favor ultimately takes itself too seriously and ends up stranded in an unconvincing no man's land of cute bleakness.
  5. Wonderland
    The vaporous Wonderland never moves beyond its grungily romanticized view of the past.
  6. The Time Machine
    In the new film, it's personal tragedy that provokes the journey, not social upheaval or even scientific curiosity -- which, predictably, makes for a story that's at once more familiar and less interesting.
  7. The City of Lost Souls
    While the film throws a solid pop punch, you could still swear you've seen it all before.
  8. Duck
    Bettauer means for Arthur and Joe's adventures to be a fable about empathy and hope, but her tone shifts awkwardly between silly and ponderous.
  9. Father of My Children
    Loses focus and sags into a how-we-got-through-it family procedural.
  10. World Traveler
    The gorgeous Crudup is talented, but this charming asshole (more asshole than charming) is old hat for him, little more than another of the blank-eyed-loser-on-a-spiritual-quest roles in which he's been trafficking lately.
  11. Mau Mau Sex Sex
    There is too much rambling contemporary footage here and not enough juicy historical material.
  12. Control
    What the movie lacks is a point.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blades of Glory
    Blades does capture the obvious eccentricities of the skating world, and is funny up to a point, but by now Ferrell & Co. have the formula for a mild comedy down pat. What they need is a little soul.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Weather Girl
    Humdrum but marketable comedy.
  15. Stateside
    If the contrast between Marine life and blue-blood luxury sometimes pulls the film in awkward directions, Anselmo's perceptive fondness for all his characters -- parents, children, grunts, even drill sergeants -- more than compensates.
  16. National Treasure
    Can't match an ounce of the suspense generated by contestants frantically buying airline tickets on Bruckheimer's own TV money quest, "The Amazing Race." This movie is a fortune wasted.
  17. Blood Simple
    On viewing, the cuts seem negligible, but what is new and clearly improved is the sound, which now booms with each door slam and gunshot.
  18. Æon Flux
    The plot frequently resets/realigns itself in the fashion of "Lost" or "Alias," as good guys become bad guys, friends become enemies, and combatants become lovers. To portray confusion and uncertainty is one thing; to make a film this unsure of itself, wracked by its own faulty footing and reticence, is quite another.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Management
    Each new superfluous Jennifer Aniston rom-com is already met with low expectations, but add some overcooked, middlebrow Indiewood quirk and you've got cinema's purest shade of beige.
  20. Rebound
    Rebound is a sports comedy so by-the-numbers that you don't really have to watch it -- you can just check in on it every once in a while between trips to the concession stand and the bathroom.
  21. Rumor Has It...
    This Rob Reiner comedy jogs along pleasantly enough to the finish (Costner is charming as always in over-the-hill-ruin mode), which entails a less-than-shattering insight about love and marriage.
  22. Cruel Intentions
    In truth, the only reason this film was made was to allow viewers to ogle pretty young things behaving badly.
  23. Nacho Libre
    Like the abominable "Napoleon Dynamite," director Jared Hess' second feature will doubtless capture the hearts and minds of 12-year-old boys everywhere, even if Nacho Libre sacrifices the earlier film's aggressive mean-spiritedness in favor of gentle slapstick lunacy.
  24. It Happened in L.A.
    At times, Morgan's script inspires laughs; but at others, the witticisms seem forced
  25. Showboy
    The film takes on unexpected weight when Christian cops to his intense personal loneliness. That's not the stuff of high comedy, but it's brave and, in these days of rah-rah, everyone's-in-love gay media, rather refreshing.
  26. Red Eye
    Between them, first-time screenwriter Carl Ellsworth and director Wes Craven don't come up with a single clever way to generate suspense, and the movie's onboard atmosphere is so phony.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Snow Day
    Fortunately, everything comes together splendidly in the last act, and the kids and grown-ups are all first-rate.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paul Blart: Mall Cop
    Done as an all-out battle to the death, this could have been an entertaining mix of "Die Hard" and "The A-Team."
  29. Bukowski: Born into This
    As factoids do-si-do with testimonials from the likes of drinking buddy Sean Penn and fan-boy Bono, the movie all but becomes the very A&E Hagiography for which Bukowski would have had little or no patience.
  30. Tears of the Sun
    Despite the busy camera work, bombastic score and rapt attention to violence, director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) can't mask the script's white-savior paternalism.
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