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. Rock School
    You root for the kids, who are utterly captivating, but Green is another story. His shtick -- a combo of insufferable stage-parent and unbearable rock geek -- is exhausting.
  2. Enigma
    It's all part of a larger calculus that the filmmakers hope will translate into a thinking person's thriller. If only they themselves knew how to figure it.
  3. Breakfast on Pluto
    Jordan is trying for a surrealist romp, and it's as coy and callow as you'd expect from a movie with a lead character nicknamed Kitten.
  4. After the Wedding
    Evidently, this bloated piece of Oscar-nominated nonsense was a big hit in Denmark, which makes me think there's a glittering future in that otherwise discriminating country for several seasons of "Days of Our Lives."
  5. Window Theory
    This film looks so good, thanks to some impressive production work (nice rainstorm) as well as Andrew Huebscher's vibrant cinematography, that one wonders, as one dull scene after another rolls by, why director Andrew Putschoegl - and co-writers Large and Kyle Kramer - didn't lavish half as much attention on the script.
  6. The Best Man
    The best parts of the film...are often distractingly slick enough to cover the film's overriding lack of soul.
  7. America So Beautiful
    The film staggers under its own didacticism. Too often we're told of men who were professionals back home and are here reduced to driving cabs, waiting tables or vending ice cream.
  8. The Widow of Saint-Pierre
    As stunning to look at as "Girl on the Bridge" or indeed any of his others, but it lacks the distilled intensity — and, surprisingly for Leconte, the wit.
  9. A Midsummer Night's Dream
    The set design is gung-ho Hallmark (Tinkerbell lights, that sort of thing) with a strong whiff of Fellini (the fairy glade looks like a pre-Raphaelite red-light district).
  10. The Boondock Saints
    (Duffy's) assembled a fine cast -- it's hard to take your eyes off the two young leads -- but he's given them little to do but squeeze triggers and mouth platitudes.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Alphabet Killer
    "Wrong Turn" director Rob Schmidt ably goes through the motions, though the hook for a sequel at the end is truly annoying. Still, The Alphabet Killer may well make enough money to justify a Part II.
  12. The Skeleton Key
    The Skeleton Key takes its time making a slow, creeping ascent, but once it starts plummeting downward, Softley keeps things moving at a furious pace, and both Hudson and Rowlands enjoy surrendering themselves to the grandiloquent lunacy of it all.
  13. Thirteen
    More than once, while watching the film, I thought: The camera should really just turn away from those grating teen brats and follow the mom (Holly Hunter).
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ella Enchanted
    While the lovers here are sweetly believable, the film's murky giants-alongside-man effects shots are strictly Darby O’Gill and the Little People.
  15. The Newton Boys
    In his true-life film about four brothers who robbed banks out West during the late teens and early '20s, Richard Linklater seems to achieve the impossible: He makes Ethan Hawke bearable.
  16. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    The film won't likely change any minds, but there's a taut political essay beneath the blatant campaigning.
  17. Volcano
    Here, the volcanic villain behaves like a smart terrorist, taking over almost immediately and holding a collection of excellent actors (Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche, Don Cheadle) hostage for two hours of "real time."
  18. Est - Ouest
    By the time the movie ends, having traversed numerous plot twists and character revelations, the viewer is emotionally drained in a bittersweet sort of way.
  19. The Family Stone
    A potentially interesting tale flailing haplessly in the quicksand of holiday-movie formula.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Best Laid Plans
    Manages to be a fun twist-within-a-twist movie.
  21. The Sentinel
    Sentinel works overtime to suggest what a thrill-a-minute world its characters inhabit; but only during the last 20 minutes does the movie's pulse (or ours) raise above a flatline. The actors look uniformly unhappy to be there - except for Basinger, who seems lost in a lithium haze.
  22. Beowulf & Grendel
    Filmed in Iceland, Beowulf & Grendel is beautiful, grungy and a little too tasteful for its own good. You can practically feel the filmmakers yearning to have Beowulf and Grendel go all Rambo on each other.
  23. Son of the Bride
    Although it's better written and directed than the average Nora Ephron bagatelle, it's easy to imagine Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan slipping into a remake of Son of the Bride.
  24. For Love of the Game
    The film's larger, surprisingly mature emotional rhythms are strong enough to pull it through.
  25. Serenity
    It's the zippy chatter among the Serenity's wised-up space pirates that gives the film most of its punch, but with only serviceable action sequences and largely cookie-cutter effects, you can still sense the void just outside.
  26. Megiddo: The Omega Code 2
    Ironically, for all the paranoia, York's Defiler and his henchman, an always game Udo Kier, are an oasis of wit in an otherwise parched, self-serious script.
  27. The House of Yes
    What follows doesn't much surprise, since every emotional detail, accompanied by a noisy storm and then a black-out, arrives well in advance of its execution.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Conversations with God
    Beyond a lack of enthralling characters or convincing plotting, though, what's most glaringly missing in this self-promotional marketing tool is, of all things, God, who gets only a bit role as Walsch's muse in a few scenes.
  29. Autumn
    Elegantly stylized but emotionally strained.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    School for Scoundrels
    This crass remake of the 1960 Robert Hamer film is kept alive for a while by director Todd Phillips (Old School), but ultimately succumbs to its weak script and hopeless typecasting.
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