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 8.7 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. My Voyage to Italy
    Has power not only as film scholarship, but as an inquiry into cinema's interplay with our collective memories and the nature of history itself.
  2. The Battle of Algiers
    A classic of politically engaged filmmaking, based on a book by Saadi Yacef, a former FLN leader who also produced the picture and played a version of himself.
  3. Springtime in a Small Town
    Simply put, it represents the work of a filmmaker so exhilaratingly in command of his craft that he can, among other things, turn a single image of two people standing next to each other -- fully clothed, their bodies not quite touching -- into one of the most sublimely erotic moments we have ever beheld on the screen.
  4. Oasis
    At once a romantic melodrama, a sharp social comedy and a fierce political commentary on Korean society's cruelty to social outcasts. It's also a triumph of artistic indirection: Not a single scene plays out the way you expect. This is a film that gives humanism back its good name.
  5. Scratch
    Simultaneously hilarious and deeply informative thanks to the vibrant personalities at its center.
  6. Chunhyangdyun
    The film is unabashedly sexy, and its heady romanticism feels as right and as unaffected as Im's bold use of color and his equally bold decision to tell the story through traditional pansori narration.
  7. Femme Fatale
    I haven't admired a De Palma film since "Carrie," or even enjoyed one since "Scarface," so it must mean something that Femme Fatale gave me one of the best times at the movies I've had this year.
  8. Croupier
    Immensely rich, clipped and precise, with a sly, sardonic sense of humor.
  9. Chicken Run
    A delirious fable about every creature's need for espace.
  10. Antz
    A charmer, complete with cute critters voiced by the ultrafamous.
  11. Happy Here and Now
    Since premiering on the festival circuit in 2002, this small masterpiece has been one of the best films around not to secure a proper theatrical release, and while one week on a single L.A. screen at the height of the crowded holiday season may not exactly qualify as proper, it's nevertheless a joyous happening.
  12. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
    By not even attempting to follow Sterne to the letter, Winterbottom and Boyce have triumphantly captured his impish creative spirit.
  13. All or Nothing
    It's a strangely stirring experience that finds warmth in the coldest environment and makes each crumb of emotional comfort feel like a 10-course banquet.
  14. Bus 174
    Tough and relentless, dazzlingly researched and crafted. At its core is compassion for those who are angry, violent and uneducated.
  15. Timecode
    We're afforded the illusion of an omniscience so complete as to mark a pioneering breakthrough in movie storytelling, one not to be missed.
  16. Judy Berlin
    Where "American Beauty" was smug and obvious in its dissection of suburban life, Judy Berlin is hilarious, heartbreaking and -- in its graciousness -- unlike any American film we've seen in a long time.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Almayer's Folly
    Almayer's Folly is lush and dreamy (if not quite dreamlike), but it never feels unanchored or given to pointless meandering. However hypnotic it at times becomes, this is a sober(ing) endeavor that never strays far from its post-colonial backdrop.
  18. Grosse Pointe Blank
    With a brisk pace and satiric blend of nostalgia and violence, it's the sharpest, funniest comedy so far this year.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Blue Velvet
    What dazzles still about David Lynch's Blue Velvet is its total authority: Not a single false gesture. No shock delivered solely for its own sake.
  20. The Devil's Backbone
    Here is a ghost story so dynamic you could call it a ghost poem.
  21. Diary of the Dead
    In most horror movies, it's a given that we should root for the heroes to make it out alive, but Diary of the Dead isn't nearly so certain, and so it terrifies us all the more.
  22. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    While it's Dave's madly humming brain that propels the film, Davis, whose every glance is a short story in itself, makes Dana's internal crisis equally resonant.
  23. Ghost World
    Zwigoff pulls off something in Ghost World that seems a minor miracle -- he creates someone with a complex inner life.
  24. Hilary and Jackie
    This sensitively directed film is one of those rarest of accomplishments: a graceful work of art about the very creation of art itself.
  25. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    It is worthy of comparison to the lifelike, character-rich films we cherish from that era (1970s), and is certainly one of the finest films to come out this year.
  26. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    In the nearly 30 years since the movie was released (it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1972), one forgets how falling-about-funny is this mad caper.
  27. Capote
    The triumph of Capote is that it both grants and shares with him that twisted brew of obsessive identification and monstrous detachment that is the fertile burden of the artist.
  28. Half Nelson
    At a time when most American movies, studio made or "independent," seem ever more divorced from anything approximating actual life experience, Half Nelson is so sobering and searingly truthful that watching it feels like being tossed from a calm beach into a raging current.
  29. Dogtown and Z-Boys
    Enormously enjoyable, high-adrenaline documentary.
  30. Breakdown
    Breakdown recalls so many good movies, in such unpredictable order, that by the end it simply stands on its own, a solid, logical, edge-of-the-seat sluiceway of escape and pursuit.
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