L.A. Weekly's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Butterfly Tongues
    The family flags palpable agony... provides the movie's only earned emotional tension.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Sasquatch Gang
    Gavin’s story is typical teen-faces-bullies-and-gets-girl hokum, while Zerk is like a Mike Judge cartoon character come to life, with a revelatory slapstick performance from the often straight-laced Long.
  3. Vanilla Sky
    Crowe, for his part, is decency itself, but unlike Amenábar he's a pop romantic with no stomach or aptitude for noir.
  4. After the Life
    This overcrowded, overheated scenario, with many scenes repeated from the first two films, keeps us so busy tracking all the overlapping storylines, we have no time to imagine what they might mean.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Drawing Restraint 9
    It's difficult to see the characters as anyone but Barney and Björk, and the film's binary system, opposing hard and soft, East and West, male and female, etc., feels clumsy and simplistic. That said, there's creepy delight in seeing American consumption carried to its logical extreme.
  6. Cookie's Fortune
    Not even Altman's loose-limbed shooting style can redeem Cookie’s Fortune, a bafflingly pointless farce that belongs more properly in the vaudeville halls than on the director's sporadically lustrous résumé.
  7. 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.
  8. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
    Silberling and writer Robert Gordon have made the fatal error of trying to jolly up the novels, which are often funny but never, ever cute.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
    It's merely a trivial footnote to the popular franchise - though one that will no doubt satisfy rabid gleeks.
  10. DysFunktional Family
    His veiled misogyny and totally unguarded homophobia are unconvincing, and when he resorts to chestnuts like comparing how black and white people walk, he comes off as a Pryor caricature, rather than as a devotee.
  11. Charly
    It simply takes faith for granted as a motivating factor, and thus pulls off the neat trick of never making us feel we’re being preached at -- Yet, as directed by first-timer Adam Anderegg, from Jack Weyland's 1980 novel, the movie is too amateurishly square to make the most of its own ironic implications.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Night of the Living Dead 3D
    They do deliver on the gore and nudity fronts, and you don't often see such things in 3-D. The familiar title helps with the marketing, but hurts by inviting comparison with a classic; as a 2-D remake, it wouldn't pass muster. (Tom Savini's 1990 redo is far more respectable.)
  13. Sordid Lives
    Some of the performances are remarkably natural amid so much farce.
  14. Dorian Blues
    Dorian Blues is full of similarly rigged moments, but there are genuine chuckles, and a palpably heartfelt final scene between Dorian and his mom ends the tale on a powerful note.
  15. The Sisters
    The Sisters may be worth a look, however, for the work of the magnificent Bello and Tony Goldwyn, who's never been better than as the married man with whom Marcia has an affair. Their final clench is pure, guilty-pleasure melodrama, which means it's not the least bit Chekhovian.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cease Fire
    Milani has never been one for subtlety, but although her feminism remains refreshingly vital, Cease Fire comes down like a blunt instrument, hammering out the couple's kinks and flaws much too easily.
  17. House of Sand and Fog
    Everything about the movie seems excessive to the material. What should have been a small, independent feature without marquee casting -- the story's protagonists, after all, are meant to be the kind of people nobody ever notices.
  18. Conspiracy Theory
    The film isn't really about much and so feels patchy and forced, with elements more calculated than inspired, more urgent than exciting.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Princess Kaiulani
    And this may be the only film in history to have someone learn about egalitarianism at a British boarding school (!). Hawaii's dismal onscreen track record continues; bring back James Michener.
  20. Mad City
    The great, and given Costa-Gavras' previous m.o., inevitable irony of Mad City is that even as it condemns the media for exploiting the situation, it's busy doing the very same.
  21. Happiness
    There's nothing new about this sado-cinema, and nothing much worthy, either.
  22. A Home at the End of the World
    I can't think of another contemporary novel -- unless it be Cunningham's far more ambitious and less successful "The Hours" -- less suited for the journey to film under any direction but that of, say, Russian dreamer Alexander Sokurov.
  23. Madison
    If not for the race sequences and the intriguing presence of Caviezel, who made this film before "The Passion of the Christ" and who one hopes will take on even more roles befitting his peculiar sad-eyed charisma, the film would amount to a well-intentioned snooze.
  24. Speed 2: Cruise Control
    The last half-hour is a decent enough ride, with Dafoe controlling the ship by Powerbook and product placement, while Bullock and Patric demonstrate the triumph of American gumption over high tech, the better to save all hands on deck.
  25. Once Upon a Time in the Midlands
    A movie saved by great acting.
  26. Sin City
    After half an hour spent drooling over its visual splendors, I found the movie every bit as sickening as its creators intended it to be, minus the kicks they so palpably got out of making it.
  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. Buffalo Soldiers
    As social satire, though, the movie is a nonstarter, completely lacking in the zany lunacy of "M*A*S*H" and "Dr. Strangelove," or the whacked savagery of "Catch-22."
  29. Jason X
    The film has spunk. Unfortunately, the gore comes with brutal regularity, so that, despite Farmer and Isaac's attempts to liven things up, the film still just wears you down.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sex and Breakfast
    Suffering from what could be called Garden State syndrome, Sex and Breakfast demands that we empathize with the anguish of straight, white, financially privileged young people and their significantly hot significant others.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »