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. Tycoon: A New Russian
    Lounguine’s biopic is chilly and convoluted, too eventful to be boring, but never taking the time to immerse us emotionally in Makovski's world.
  2. Nicotina
    Self-satisfied, incoherently busy farce.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Turning Green
    Turning Green is, if nothing else, the world’s loneliest teen sex comedy.
  4. The High Cost of Living
    The cast is uniformly good, but Isabelle Blais especially stands out as Natalie.
  5. 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.
  6. Big Bad Love
    Held together by the blues -- Brown's prose and Howard's performance, Big Bad Love is a mess, but it's a sincere mess, beautifully shot by Paul Ryan and faithfully adapted by screenwriter James Howard.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Way of the Gun
    Isn't a bad film, but as we watch it we're constantly rewriting it in our minds to make it a better one.
  8. The Hidden Half
    Ultimately, The Hidden Half is shopworn feminist soap opera, enacted in a political echo chamber.
  9. The Business of Fancydancing
    While The Business of Fancydancing is a thoughtful and complex work of sound and vision, it doesn't seem quite right to call it a film, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is plainly, if crisply, shot on video, with a bright, shiny surface that fairly screams low-rent. Second, the whole business is strangely non-cinematic.
  10. Good Boy!
    This latest offering from the Jim Henson stable puts a cheerfully broad new spin on the boy-and-his-dog franchise.
  11. Benji: Off the Leash!
    Yes, Joe Camp has gone meta. It's hard to not feel a measure of warmth for the determined optimism of his enterprise, especially since he hasn't lost the touch for cute dog antics.
  12. The Grudge
    Isn't art, but as date-night fright flicks go, it's effective.
  13. The Mummy
    A near miss overall, but enjoyable in its littler particulars.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bohemian Rhapsody
    As with a concert or favorite record, sometimes it's best not to overthink things but simply let the visceral power take over. That is what made Queen and Freddie Mercury so special and that is why Bohemian Rhapsody will rock you, if you let it.
  15. Hancock
    Doesn't seem to quite know what it is or where it's headed. So it goes anywhere it can while treading thematic water.
    • 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.
  17. Callas Forever
    Ardant gives in this film the performance of her life, lip-synching to the voice of the real Callas.
  18. Four Brothers
    It's a finely tuned Motor City engine: The action, including a nighttime car chase through a blinding snowstorm, is fast, brutal and efficient; the Motown soundtrack never cuts out; and as a gangster called Sweet, the British-Nigerian actor Chiwetel Ejiofor gives an electrifying performance.
  19. Flannel Pajamas
    The results are far from perfect: For one thing, Lipsky is so far from being a fluid visual storyteller that the garishly lit, appallingly composed Flannel Pajamas makes another two-hander talkfest Lipsky famously distributed -- "My Dinner With Andre" -- seem like "Lawrence of Arabia" by comparison.
  20. The Man Who Copied
    An enjoyable ride.
  21. Bedazzled
    It's nowhere near as funny, largely because of an exhaustingly hyperactive performance by Elizabeth Hurley.
  22. Harvard Man
    As with most of Toback's films, there are Big Ideas being bandied about that never quite coalesce, a failing that, this time at least, mirrors his hero's own hyped-out search for meaning.
  23. China: The Panda Adventure
    The true star of the film -- areas whose mind-boggling size and immense beauty are still too overwhelming to be fully captured by the supersize IMAX screen.
  24. Harrison's Flowers
    A premise so patently absurd, so implausible, they might as well have pitched it to the Oxygen channel.
  25. Mobile Homes
    In Vladimir de Fontenay’s Mobile Homes, Imogen Poots gives a performance of such multifaceted distinction that it might be hard to believe you’re watching the same actress from frame to frame.
  26. The Whore's Son
    In the end, Sturminger's virginal insistence on draining the mother-son relationship of all eros also drains it of interest.
  27. Tristan and Isolde
    The film's one indisputably great performance comes from Sewell, whose Marke is no mere cuckold, but a good, honorable man caught up in circumstances beyond his ken, and ultimately this Tristan & Isolde's most tragic figure.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Men in Black II
    Smith and Jones sometimes have to paddle hard to keep their heads above the toilet water in which screenwriters Robert Gordon (Galaxy Quest) and Barry Fanaro (Kingpin) occasionally dunk them. But if the presence of Smith and Jones is indeed the tinker-proof ingredient of the Men in Black formula, little else seems to have survived the production unaltered.
  29. Green Dragon
    The characters are put through worn-out cinematic paces, making both them and their tales tedious. Green Dragon plays as hollow catharsis, with lots of tears but very little in the way of insights.
  30. The Monkey's Mask
    What makes the film compelling is the filmmakers' ability to blend a studied (occasionally academic) dissection of cultural and sexual decadence with a potboiler plot.
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