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. The Tic Code
    What at first seems emotionally charged, ultimately comes off as contrived.
  2. Armored
    The camaraderie in the Eagle Shield Transport locker room is strained stuff, despite a capable ensemble cast that includes Matt Dillon and Larry Fishburne.
  3. The Final Destination
    Ellis and screenwriter Eric Bress even go all meta on us with an "Inglourious Basterds"–esque finale set inside a 3D cinema, though their set pieces never quite muster the giddy brio of "Final Destination 1" and "3" auteur James Wong at his best.
  4. Cats & Dogs
    Plays cleverly to adults, but will fly straight over the heads of minors, who have little but a lone fart joke and wave upon wave of flying fur to keep them laughing.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Streets of Legend
    First-time director Joey Curtis shows inklings of a future as an accomplished cinematographer, his digital videography lending some scenes a mesmerizingly pixellated quality and others the hectic blur of a surveillance video.
  6. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    It is a dull and boring film, pretty as a Turner landscape and as sweetly becalmed as the glassy Sargasso Sea in which the men of the unfortunately named “Surprise” find themselves trapped for what felt, to me at least, like weeks on end.
  7. Way Off Broadway
    This ensemble drama is passionately acted and nicely shot, but the storytelling of first-time writer-director Dan Kay is infused with an archaic naiveté.
  8. Little Manhattan
    At its best, there's a strong (albeit live-action) echo of Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts" in Little Manhattan. The movie's hero, Gabe, is a world-weary 10-year-old who addresses us in eloquent voice-overs. Like Charlie Brown, he's in love with a red-headed beauty.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    ZigZag
    A great ensemble cast can't lift this heartfelt enterprise out of the familiar.
  10. The Trials of Henry Kissinger
    To explore seriously the question of Kissinger's crimes wouldn't merely take hours, it would require the patient, unblinking vision of a Frederick Wiseman or Marcel Ophuls. Gibney and Jarecki just want to string the bastard up.
  11. Race to Nowhere
    Abeles sheds little new light on why few parents, teachers, politicians or administrators seem willing to get off the bus.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bran Nue Dae
    The film is too broad and tacky to engage on a universal level, or at least Stateside: The choreography is sloppy and lifeless; the outmoded blend of vintage rock, country and Broadway styles doesn't click; and the characters are such caricatures that it's no wonder the entire cast is overacting.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Madea Goes to Jail
    Check off all of Perry’s motifs: vilification of the black bourgie princess, tough-love Christian messages, Academy Award–nominated actresses (Viola Davis, this time) managing to maintain their dignity.
  14. Felicia's Journey
    As with all of Egoyan's films, this new one comes cloaked in an atmosphere of dread, but for the first time there's no real purpose, intellectual or emotional, to all the free-floating anxiety.
  15. Don't Tell
    Don’t Tell is intelligent on the schizoid mental strategies of incestuous families, but its style and mood are so heavily drawn from television soap opera, I found myself more absorbed in the seriocomic lesbian subplot that rambles along entertainingly, if irrelevantly, on the periphery.
  16. Ghosts of the Abyss
    During the all-important underwater sequences, the three-dimensional effects are surprisingly muted.
  17. Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
    It's short, this movie, an attribute Sandler himself might take heed of, and if the teenagers in the back row are laughing harder and more often, you might at least find yourself smiling (guiltily) every few minutes.
  18. Taxman
    Writer-director Avi Nesher and co-screenwriter Roger Berger -- upon whose real-life investigations the film is based -- deliver on the hard-boiled promise of this low-key thriller with plenty of gritty twists and turns.
  19. One Missed Call
    It's a prolonged, maddening, predictable -- yet curiously pleasurable -- descent into incomprehensibility.
  20. All Access: Front Row. Backstage. Live!
    Less about music than about the possibilities of the IMAX system itself.
  21. Dancing at the Blue Iguana
    Iguana runs hot and cold, being engaging and dull by turns depending on the plausibility of the character before the camera.
  22. 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.
  23. Stoned
    Despite good performances from Gregory, Considine and especially David Morrissey, the movie's true merits are all on the surface: its uncannily authentic period reconstruction and its successful use of stressed and textured film stocks. The filmmakers care more about this than about their characters, and it's hard for us not to feel the same.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    12 Rounds
    This is the kind of amiable time-killer that belongs on a basic-cable weekend afternoon.
  25. Halloween
    Too often, in this version, Green doesn’t seem to know where to put the camera to elicit that sense of surveilling or being surveilled. Worse, that incompetence often works hand in hand with overwrought comic dialogue. But let’s get to what really works here: Curtis.
  26. MirrorMask
    Crafted by hand and computer, Mirrormask is as breathtakingly beautiful to behold as it is tedious to slog through.
  27. Match Point
    Match Point is a perfectly presentable, entirely unremarkable domestic melodrama parked queasily between opera and realism, two irreconcilable forms if ever there were.
  28. Shall We Dance
    Shall We Dance?, which roams all over the emotional map without landing anywhere, is an unwieldy mess that gives every impression of having been made under a mandate to fill the Miramax crowd-pleaser slot.
  29. The Shaggy Dog
    In this serviceable remake of the fondly remembered 1959 Disney comedy (which starred Fred MacMurray), an impressively dexterous Tim Allen plays Dave Douglas.
  30. Swimfan
    The story may not be new, but Australian director John Polson, making his American feature debut, jazzes it up adroitly, with a nifty, staccato editing technique that suggests Madison's inner turmoil and, in the process, fills in some of the shading missing from Christensen's performance.
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