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. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    Jacquot seems unwilling to either shape his story or offer commentary, a standard New Wave strategy that, in this instance, makes for a tale as vague as it is nouvelle.
  2. The Island
    Nary an original idea abounds in The Island.
  3. Walking on the Sky
    But Walking, which is well-acted and fast-moving, takes a tumble from which it never fully recovers once Josh's diary is found, and the rest of the film is spent tending to spilled secrets and their collateral damage.
  4. Chicken Little
    Chicken Little is a clunky, arbitrarily plotted, over-caffeinated spritz that, despite colorfully visualizing a world of suburbanized animals, shifts from social-outcast comedy to underdog clichés to War of the Worlds mayhem as if the filmmakers were an improv troupe slamming through genre requests.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Open Season
    On the plus side, Open Season enjoys a clear narrative, real rooting interest and good interspecies rapport. On the downside, there’s a surfeit of cruel bunny-rabbit gags.
  6. Heist
    Can he do the thing? Well, yes and no. He -- Mamet, David, celebrated celebrity playwright and less-certain maker of movies -- can do some of the things, like assemble a cast sleek as a cat.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Alexander
    What Stone has delivered instead is no folie de grandeur, but rather the last thing one would have expected from him: an honorable failure.
  8. Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
    Game Over provides no answers.
  9. Love & Sex
    Janssen proves herself an actress of delightful range.
  10. Die, Mommie, Die!
    Predictably, the jokes are raunchy, yet they're few in number, as if the writer's sleaze well is running dry. First-time director Mark Rucker has a nice feel for period detailing but fails to build on his star's rare flashes of high energy.
  11. Gulliver's Travels
    Black, looking like an unwashed clothes pile and capering in familiar "Uncle Jack" style, is a good babysitter, his cross-dressing turn in a doll's house a highlight.
  12. Fantasia 2000
    What's missing from Fantasia 2000 is the shamelessly pandering Disney cutesy that made the original such a full-blooded nostalgic memory.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Star Trek: Insurrection
    With its young-vs.-old plot conflicts, its vid-game-reminiscent setups and its prominent positioning of a 12-year-old in the cast, the ninth Star Trek movie explicitly stalks kids, and probably snares neither them nor their parents.
  14. Vera Drake
    As a character study Vera Drake is coarsely drawn, and as pro-choice polemic, it’s both a blunt instrument and a red herring. Which may be why, among all the moviegoers who staggered from the theater wielding soaked tissues, I was among the few who remained dry of eye, and raised of brow.
  15. Center Stage
    Has next to no story beyond some stock clichés about bulimia, stage mothers and internal affairs in the corps de ballet.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Marine
    Tongues are planted firmly in cheek; it’s impossible to endorse a full price ticket, but fans of campy action should check this out.
  17. Quitting
    Whether Quitting will prove absorbing to American audiences is debatable: After all, it's not like we don't have enough rehab stories of our own, and Jia often comes across as a sullen, unreachable brat.
  18. Atlantis: The Lost Empire
    Has the comfortable, old-fashioned, earnest idealism of a '50s Disney action-adventure.
  19. Americano
    Watching Americano is like hearing a long story about someone else's holiday, and while it seems everyone had a nice time, it's too bad they didn't shoot a better film while they were there.
  20. Bad Santa
    Gets stuck in a rut. Hearing Santa say “f---” isn't nearly as funny the 50th time as it is the first 49.
  21. Lower City
    This frenetic potboiler about a love triangle on the Salvador waterfront smacks of liberal slumming and bristles with faux authenticity.
  22. Bollywood/Hollywood
    Perhaps it is simply impossible, even with affection in your heart, to craft an evocative homage to the expansive musical melodramas of Bollywood on a small-scale indie budget.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Under Our Skin
    Andy Abrahams Wilson builds a decent, if stylistically dull, case that Lyme disease is far deadlier and more neurologically debilitating than most doctors want to admit.
  24. The Myth of Fingerprints
    An overly mannered film drowning in the symptoms of dysfunction but unable to tap the root causes of this WASPish clan's pain except in the most oblique and cursory ways. This might be Freundlich's point, considering this family deals with its problems through avoidance.
  25. Psychopathia Sexualis
    It's a mildly enjoyable romp.
  26. Feast
    Feast isn't the least bit artful, but it is gleefully gruesome, which may be all one can ask of a no-budget monster movie.
  27. Mail Order Wife
    Initially amusing, ultimately wearying mock documentary.
  28. 39 Pounds of Love
    Despite Menkin's clear belief that he's crafted a rousing true-life drama, his film plays like a cliché-ridden, painfully self-conscious Hollywood melodrama about a noble person with disabilities.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fireproof
    Then the film gets all religulous, suggesting that Caleb's devotion to healing means nothing without Jesus, and so Fireproof stops becoming relatable to us all and only to the already, or easily, indoctrinated.
  30. Sex Sells: The Making of 'Touché'
    Tiresome, and with no discernable edge or wit, Sex Sells is most powerful when it dawns on us we're watching Barnes, the leggy replacement for Suzanne Somers on "Three's Company," and Zmed, the beefcake cop from "T.J. Hooker," arrive at this point in their careers.
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