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. Prey for Rock & Roll
    The movie deflates, but you still can't take your eyes off Gershon, who does her own singing, is fearless in the one girl-on-girl make-out scene, and is mesmerizing throughout -- an underused Barbara Stanwyck in a Gwyneth Paltrow age.
  2. Janice Beard
    Slight but charming comedy.
  3. 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.
  4. The Idiots
    Becomes guilty of the very prejudice that his film has so obviously tried to subvert. It's too bad -- the rest of it is hilarious.
  5. Vertical Limit
    A thriller that, at its best, has the gooney absurdity of an old Saturday-afternoon movie serial.
  6. The Santa Clause 2
    While the film is not entirely successful, it still manages to string together enough charming moments to work.
  7. Elvira's Haunted Hills
    Peterson and her longtime writing partner, John Paragon, as well as director Sam Irvin, clearly worship the Poe-inspired Roger Corman/Vincent Price films of the 1960s, so of course there’s a pit and a pendulum in that dungeon, but who’d have expected it to be so beautifully designed?
  8. Maze
    Holds its potentially problematic ingredients together remarkably well, summoning outstanding performances from Morrow and Linney, while never dipping into sentiment or patronizing the ailment's sufferers.
  9. The Core
    The first half-hour of The Core is hip enough to its own moribund formula that for a brief, shining moment, there's hope the film will actually be a goofy gas instead of the effects-bound lump it becomes.
  10. Orange County
    This genial comedy is as unambitious and, at times, as funny as its high concept.
  11. Super Troopers
    Begins so well that it's painful to watch it degenerate into tried-and-true frat-boy humor.
  12. Hit and Runway
    Surprisingly smart film.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Not Forgotten
    If the film's first two-thirds are dreary and preposterous, give Soref credit for a truly -- what's the proper cinematic terminology? -- batshit-crazy finale involving demented religious sects, ridiculously bloody face-offs and a gaggle of cross-dressing Mexican prostitutes.
  14. High Crimes
    While its blowout finale is telegraphed long before the first act ends, and too much else is just as obvious and bland, Judd, Freeman and Franklin never stop adding filigree. The big picture isn't much to look at, but the detailing isn't bad.
  15. The Fantasticks
    This is the first Broadway-sourced movie musical in umpteen years, and you should see it, because the score is gorgeous.
  16. Shallow Hal
    Shallow Hal is "Shrek" for grown-ups, a fairy tale right down to its reverse-Cinderella plot.
  17. Dummy
    Milla Jovovich, as Steven's Yiddish-spouting punk-rocker friend, is so bad, she's downright entertaining.
  18. Incantato
    There may, somewhere in the premise of Incantato, lie the inspiration for a fine farce, but under Avati's shaky stewardship, the picture is leaden and charmless.
  19. Orgazmo
    There’s something entirely ridiculous about rating a movie like this NC-17: Why should sniggering, infantile, adolescent humor be denied its natural core audience of snigger-ing, infantile adolescents?
  20. The Longest Yard
    Peter Segal's film, a predictable, choppy affair at best, boasts an understated, likable performance by Sandler, but here we never feel, as we did with the original, invested in the outcome of the final game, or convinced of the redeemability of the movie's sordid protagonist.
  21. The Rider Named Death
    Curiously flat and immobile.
  22. American Gun
    This is "Crash" with gun violence substituted for racism, although the tone of director–co-writer Aric Avelino's debut feature may be closer to one of those pious public-safety films that used to be shown to schoolchildren in order to frighten them out of potential bad behavior.
  23. Step Up
    The movie serves up a pleasant, if unsurprising, confluence of classic ballet with street dance, not to mention a seamless collusion of polite racial integration with savvy niche marketing.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dirty Laundry
    Cheesy crockpot of a film.
  25. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    Khouri manages, with terrific flair, to keep the extremes of screwball farce and blood-curdling family intensity on one continuum -- not only through the strength of the performances (including one from James Garner, who, as Sida's dad, gets the best one-liners) but in the ways they match across time.
  26. Murder at 1600
    The convoluted plot unfolds mechanically and with little atmosphere as if sex and death in the Oval Office would provide enough gravity on its own. That it doesn't is a sign of mediocre filmmaking as well as a measure of just how cynical the times have become.
  27. The Great Raid
    The Great Raid cries out for the kind of B-movie industriousness that Dahl brought to his early, low-budget films noirs (Kill Me Again, Red Rock West and The Last Seduction), but instead it has dreams of sugarplum Oscars dancing in its head, and never stops mistaking spectacle for the truly spectacular.
  28. Condo Painting
    A superb, instructive portrait of an artist at work.
  29. Adam & Steve
    Adam & Steve is uneven, but it's a relief to see a gay romance that isn't about ab-perfect 20-year-olds, and which features lovers played by two long out-of-the-closet actors. Wonder of wonders.
  30. The Thing About My Folks
    Raymond De Felitta's directing is straightforward, tactful, lyrical where necessary and never mawkish, and though Reiser's script offers no grand insights, it's full of sharply observed and funny detail.
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