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. Goya's Ghosts
    Far from an embarrassment and a generally fine piece of work.
  2. Valentin
    It's not that Noya is bad as kid actors go, but a pair of dewy, crossed eyes and a beyond-his-years melancholy do not an entire movie make.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Little Secrets
    Despite its extraordinary theme, the film wades again and again into the kind of ordinary territory befitting its muted if glossy made-for-TV look and its tinkling, whimsically modern piano score.
  4. The King Is Alive
    The tedium of the situation is felt by the audience, but too often in the wrong way: We don't empathize so much as suffer through the movie.
  5. Splendor
    It's dirty and delightful, if a tad on the slight side.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Water for Elephants
    Beautifully designed, sufficiently choreographed, insipid but watchable, Elephants stresses that showbiz is about the maintenance of an illusion by any means necessary.
  7. Dead Man's Shoes
    Like so many movies of its kind, Dead Man's Shoes gets hopelessly lost in vicious process, and so loses all sight of anything you might optimistically call insight.
  8. The Producers
    The musical film version of The Producers is, for better or worse, a faithful record of the stage production, adhering to the same if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it philosophy that informed the recent "Rent."
  9. 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.
  10. Romeo Must Die
    Doesn't even come close to being a good movie, but it is a lot of fun.
  11. Blow
    If as much thought had been expended on character and consequences as was lavished on bell-bottom diameters, collar widths and soundtrack selection, Blow might have been a richer, more intelligent experience, and much more Demme's movie than a carbon copy of other people's.
  12. Rat Race
    The good news is that this off-the-wall ensemble comedy may just be the summer's happiest surprise.
  13. Under the Tuscan Sun
    The movie is not without charm or humor, but it leaves little for Lane to do besides chuckle at setbacks as if they were naughty children.
  14. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    Refreshingly laid-back romantic comedy.
  15. Snake Eyes
    Not too long after the knockout opening, all that's left of Snake Eyes are Cage's wild eyes, the dregs of David Koepp's rotten script, and De Palma's restless, anxious camera, on the prowl for something, anything, to hang on to.
  16. À cause d'un garçon
    Screenwriter Vincent Molina and director Fabrice Cazaneuve are wonderfully calm about the tumult of teen life.
  17. Rick
    This impressive - and utterly depressing - feature debut is another in the current rush of testaments to the power of the new corporation to suck the goodness from its employees and all who have the misfortune to enter its orbit.
  18. Haiku Tunnel
    The Kornbluths don't offer much visual style -- the film is as flat and sterile as its corporate environs -- but they build an excruciating tension from Kornbluth's confounding inability to lick a few stamps.
  19. Seeing Other People
    Begins as a refreshingly subversive departure from the Hollywood studios' cookie-cutter romances, but the thin script can't sustain that initial charge, and it soon flattens out, like a punctured comic balloon.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    First Descent
    Hardcore fans will appreciate the handful of genuinely gnarly aerial sequences, but these gravity-defying stunts, which can be thrilling as part of a five-minute James Bond pre-credit sequence, grow very tedious when repeated over almost two hours.
  21. Cherish
    May be scant on character and plot development, but it’s rich with affection for daydream believers
  22. Windtalkers
    In the studied excess of his Hong Kong action movies, Woo's swooning sentimentality plays like grand opera. With its dogged Hollywood naturalism and the inexorable passage of its characters toward sainthood, Windtalkers is nothing but a sticky-sweet soap.
  23. An American Rhapsody
    While Gardos knows what to ask -- and though Kinski and Johansson both easily command attention -- the filmmaker lacks the storytelling sophistication to answer with anything but prettily rendered cliches.
  24. The Brothers Grimm
    This is one of the most visually off-putting films ever made by a director who supposedly makes beautiful pictures.
  25. Girl, Interrupted
    Mangold can't escape the fact that instead of someone in the throes of a genuine existential crisis, his star comes off as -- to paraphrase nurse Whoopi Goldberg -- a spoiled, lazy girl who's afraid to face life.
  26. The American Astronaut
    The result is a sui generis, love-it-or-hate-it exercise in homegrown American surrealism.
  27. Six Days Seven Nights
    Against the odds of this wheezy material and Michael Browning's fitfully funny script, director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, Dave), a master of timing, contrives to spin a likable romantic comedy.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Baxter
    A movie filled with cardboard cutouts where the interesting characters ought to be. As a result, The Baxter is less engaging than the '40s screwball comedies (like The Philadelphia Story) that it's supposedly sending up, and not nearly as effervescent.
  29. Adam's Apples
    Some will see this as a movie about how we're all God’s children. I saw only the misanthropic fulminations of Jensen's runaway ego.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Death at a Funeral
    Rock's interventions can't compensate for excessive fealty to dumb gags involving watery poop and designer hallucinogens.
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