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. Apres Vous (After You)
    The best that can be said for this excitable, harmless romantic comedy is that it is smoothly directed by Pierre Salvadori.
  2. Dear Wendy
    Starts out as an inspired test case for the continued necessity of the Second Amendment, and only near the end does it lose some of its tightly concentrated focus.
  3. In Her Shoes
    Diaz and Collette are believable as sisters, but their performances rarely surprise -- in a more interesting movie world, they'd have switched roles.
  4. Jarhead
    Curiously, Jarhead transforms Swofford himself (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) from the book’s duty-bound youth, desperate to live up to his father's military legacy, into an enigmatic voyeur whose feelings and motivations are rarely made clear.
  5. Side Effects
    It’s a tantalizing idea - a little rom-com sugar to help the Big Pharma exposé pill go down -but Slattery-Moschkau is simply not a writer of the caliber necessary to pull off that delicate balancing act.
  6. Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown
    Despite its Scottish scenery and period frocks, Madden's film proves a pallid creature indeed compared to the hanky-panky leaking out of Buckingham Palace of late.
  7. A Wake in Providence
    The best news here is Adrienne Barbeau, the 1970s TV star and B-movie queen (Swamp Thing), who invests the role of Anthony's aunt with a worldly-wise sensuality that suggests a long-lost cousin of Tony Soprano.
  8. Passionada
    Nearly drowns in languor, only to be saved by Milos and Isaacs, who are sexy, movie-star talented and, together, really good kissers.
  9. X2: X-Men United
    Singer's approach to X2 is very much of the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" school, resulting in a movie that, even at its best -- a thrilling jailbreak scene that's the closest thing in either X movie to a rousing set piece -- seems tame and unmemorable.
  10. Runaway Jury
    As in all his films, there's a sense that honest human emotion bores Fleder, but he gets points for packing the trial with fine character actors.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Godzilla 2000
    Dumb, fun, out of this world.
  12. On the Outs
    Well-meaning but mediocre.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bee Movie
    For all the muscle and money behind Bee Movie, it still feels unfocused and unfinished.
  14. Crying Ladies
    The nonstop jumping around undercuts Meily's momentum, especially in the film's overly languorous final third. Still, there's a refreshing optimism fueling his take on working-class life, as if Meily views friendship and neighborly generosity as currencies equal to cold, hard cash.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Game Plan
    Johnson’s a good actor, but it would take the ghost of Laurence Olivier to convince us that a grown man could legitimately fall for this brat.
  16. Assault on Precinct 13
    Excitably puppyish homage.
  17. Storytelling
    Storytelling is no more likely than "Happiness" or "Welcome to the Dollhouse" to resolve the question of whether director Todd Solondz is a serious artist or a nasty little man with a perversely glum view of the universe.
  18. The Missing
    What neither Howard nor his screenwriter, Ken Kaufman, seem to realize is that The Missing is that much bleaker and more unsettling when its horrors spring forth from the land itself and from the souls of wayward men.
  19. The Girl in the Spider's Web
    Everything has been watered down: the intensity of the hero, the sense of sexual danger, the violence.
  20. The Treatment
    A feather-light comedy about losing emotional baggage and finding love in upper Manhattan.
  21. Dr. Dolittle
    To his credit, Eddie Murphy knows it well enough to deliver a team-playing performance as the critter-phobic physician who reluctantly becomes the Albert Schweitzer of the animal kingdom.
  22. Happy Hour
    LaPaglia is a fine actor, but not even he can redeem such bathos.
  23. Must Love Dogs
    At once over- and under-written, and peppered with tiresome coincidences and misunderstandings, Goldberg’s mechanical, joke-one, joke-two, joke-three approach to ensemble screenwriting soon betrays his TV-sitcom roots.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
    Like Percy himself, the film doesn’t have any traits that qualify as having an actual personality. Even so, as long as the kiddies aren’t too upset by the major liberties reportedly taken with the source material, it might be enough to distract them until Harry returns.
  25. Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer
    This low-budget horror comedy arrives via a lively trailer and a witty print ad, yet the film itself never quite takes off.
  26. America's Heart and Soul
    Despite some exciting visuals...Schwartzberg intercuts his segments with clichéd swooping helicopter shots of city skylines and desert mesas...undermining the quirky individuality he seeks to celebrate.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Trust You to Kill Me
    A rather standard out-on-the-road rock doc except for one unique and under-explored twist: The "24" star, after signing the band to his label, impulsively decided to accompany them on this barnstorming adventure as their tour manager.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Masai: The Rain Warriors
    As our warriors encounter the Kenyan equivalents of Cyclopes and Sirens, the languid pace and the lulling voice-over (French subtitled in English) make for a nice bedtime story rather than a window on primal struggles.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Three... Extremes
    Title notwithstanding, Three . . . Extremes really offers only two.
  30. The White Countess
    I have the greatest respect for Kazuo Ishiguro, whose wonderful novel "The Remains of the Day" became one of the best films in the Merchant-Ivory oeuvre. But the combination of his stately writing and James Ivory's stately directing, even when pepped by Christopher Doyle's fizzy cinematography, makes for fatally low-key viewing.
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