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 8.7 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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    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crimson Gold
    The result is the work of a funereal yet darkly funny neorealist, sounding the rallying cry against the inflexible maxim casually delivered by one of his own film's characters.
  2. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    The best of the Harry Potter films so far, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is also hands down the scariest, and the deepest.
  3. Michael Clayton
    This loving throwback to the paranoid thrillers of the ’70s is a beauty.
  4. Face/Off
    Yet the movie, distilling into purest form the blend of viciousness and sentimentality that informs all Woo's work, winds up as emotionally bogus as it is viscerally overwhelming.
  5. Touching the Void
    Breathtaking stuff that freezes the toes, harrows the soul and turns the viewer's seat into a foot-wide ledge over a yawning chasm.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Agronomist
    Although the film may be about 20 percent overweight, the human story of a man who -- for four decades -- spat in the eye of his tormentors and gleefully accepted his role as a latter-day Sisyphus commands the viewer's attention.
  7. Read My Lips
    Improbably, Read My Lips escapes the cynicism of much contemporary neo-noir, if only by a hair, by ending as a love story of delightful crackpot idealism, in which Paul has made a crook and a hussy out of Carla, and she's made a gentleman out of him.
  8. The Return
    The true mystery is the journey itself, which will turn out to be one of the most spiritually enervating, and elevating, Outward Bound courses ever undertaken.
  9. Late Marriage
    Late Marriage, though hardly dispassionate, assiduously avoids passing judgment on any of its characters, all of whom are desperately trying to bend the world into conformity with their own narratives and superstitions.
  10. One Day in September
    Macdonald's singular achievement is to restore -- through interviews and archival footage -- the dead to such vivid life, you weep for them and for their families, who have only memories to live off.
  11. Concert for George
    This filmed record is a musical bliss-out.
  12. The Twilight Samurai
    Perhaps because this is director Yoji Yamada's 77th movie, every aspect of his filmmaking is placidly assured and meaningful.
  13. Three Kings
    Better than the usual Hollywood rot, but dialectical it ain't.
  14. Gilles' Wife
    All but a silent movie, Frédéric Fonteyne’s strikingly atmospheric film - adapted by Philippe Blasband and Marion Hänsel from a 1937 novel - relies on the extraordinarily mobile face of Emmanuelle Devos to express the pain of a woman who has no language for her inner turmoil.
  15. The Filth and the Fury
    The Sex Pistols themselves were bloody magnificent.
  16. George Washington
    May turn out to be the finest American indie of the year.
  17. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
    Rough-hewn, improvisatory and contentedly lo-fi, the resulting documentary should prove warmly encouraging to embattled progressives of all stripes, and incidentally offers the best political date-movie of the week.
  18. A Mighty Wind
    Freshened immensely by pitch-perfect song parodies, a batch of hilarious faux album covers, nimble improv from the ever-marvelous cast, and a palpable love for the subject matter.
  19. Juno
    What sets this engaging little movie above the pack of glib, brittle or sickly-sweet teen comedies is the clear eye it casts on the suburban American family, while stoutly defending that battered institution’s elastic ability to adapt.
  20. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    It is a dull and boring film, pretty as a Turner landscape and as sweetly becalmed as the glassy Sargasso Sea in which the men of the unfortunately named “Surprise” find themselves trapped for what felt, to me at least, like weeks on end.
  21. A Simple Plan
    In one of the sweetest ironies of the entire film year, Sam Raimi has made an A-movie with the soul of a B-movie classic.
  22. The Station Agent
    Quiet and meditative, Dinklage neatly sidesteps the trope of the angry dwarf, and Clarkson, even in pain and rage, is characteristically warm and sexy -- she's our very own Helen Mirren.
  23. United Skates
    Often, a scene-survey doc that takes on so much — cultural history, present-day portraiture, regional distinctions, celebrity interviews, fly-on-the-wall reportage — can play as scattershot. That’s not so with United Skates. Round and round it flows — why not jump on in?
  24. Happiness
    There's nothing new about this sado-cinema, and nothing much worthy, either.
  25. My Architect
    What makes it enthralling is the younger Kahn's openness to a range of emotional responses (his own and others') to his father's life above and below board, and his readiness to turn his own predicament into both entertainment and a provisional kind of puckish wisdom.
  26. Hot Fuzz
    For most of its running time, it's an enjoyably unpretentious celebration of the guilty pleasure we can take from a stupid-as-all-get-out car chase or from watching things blow up real good. Then, in its final half hour, Wright and Pegg ratchet up the absurdity tenfold and enter the realm of the sublime.
  27. The Human Body
    There's no denying the overwhelming force of the giant IMAX screen, as we're reminded that each of us is the coolest special effect ever.
  28. The Devil's Miner
    It’s the captured conversations about everyday lives and struggles that pin you to your seat.
  29. Chris & Don. A Love Story
    To describe the novelist's final days, Bachardy opens a drawer and begins pulling out the magnificent deathbed drawings he did of Isherwood -- a fusion of art and love that's deeply moving.
  30. You, the Living
    Andersson particularly delights in left-outs: the guy who can’t squeeze into the bus stop during a downpour; the natty little suitor getting his bouquet smashed in a slamming door. The sum total is the reflection of a worldview -- sad sack, bordering on “Everybody Hurts” black-velvet sad-clown bathos -- rather than any narrative.
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