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. Bandido
    Director Roger Christian (Battlefield Earth -- yes, that Battlefield Earth) and screenwriters Scott Duncan and Ned Kerwin have been influenced more by James Bond than El Mariachi–style spaghetti Westerns.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
    There's something terminally small about this big-screen melodrama, with its trite characterizations of fighting parents, empty pockets and kind hearts.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Human Traffic
    Turns into a driving soundtrack accompanied by a film.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stardom
    With Woody Allen's "Celebrity," Altman's "Prêt-à-Porter" and MTV's "House of Style" predating it by half a decade, this is kind of like clubbing harp seals in a meat locker.
  5. Renaissance
    The director is Christian Volckman, whose skills as an animator greatly exceed his grasp of an idea worth pursuing.
  6. How High
    There is something fun about a movie that so brazenly portrays excessive pot smoking.
  7. Harrison's Flowers
    A premise so patently absurd, so implausible, they might as well have pitched it to the Oxygen channel.
  8. Stuck on You
    By the time of its medical-operation climax, Stuck On You has focused so much on ennobling the disabled that it comes to resemble a segment of the Jerry Lewis telethon.
  9. The Phantom of the Opera
    Watching the passionless Phantom, with its geriatric story-framing device, gooey dimestore romanticism and tawdry pop ballads about unrequited yearning, feels akin to dying and waking up in your parents’ easy-listening-radio hell.
  10. Texas Rangers
    A blandly competent dramatization of the famed Texas lawmen's post–Civil War history starring the blandly handsome tube stars
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The New Daughter
    Unfortunately, Berdejo doesn't seem to know the difference between "slow" and "suspenseful," erring on the side of the former far too frequently. It's mostly formulaic fare, too.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Perfect Game
    Barely dramatizing off-the-field struggles like visa problems and the boys' first taste of good ol' American racism, the film does a disservice to the community it depicts by rendering an inspiring cultural story entirely uninspired.
  13. Event Horizon
    The worst thing about Event Horizon--written by Philip Eisner, directed by Paul Anderson--isn't all the gore decorating the 21st-century space ship that gives the movie its name, but the filmmakers' reliance on shock edits and headache-inducing sound F/X to obscure the fact that this is one of the most derivative movies to hit screens in memory.
  14. Manic
    Melamed's debut film, Manic, set in a juvenile mental institution, has all the uncertainties of a first run-through.
  15. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
    Only once, in a quick sketch of "Planet of the Apes" -- does the humor seem to spring from pure movie love. In nearly every other respect, the film is so lazy, solipsistic and overpleased with itself it's hard not to believe that this time the Evil Empire has won not just the battle, but the war.
  16. A Love Divided
    In the end, Macartney and screenwriter Stuart Hepburn decide that love conquers all, which may have been the way it happened but doesn't leave the film with much going on.
  17. Undertaking Betty
    It's rarely a good sign when a movie feels obliged to add the words "a fable" beneath its main title -- and Undertaking Betty is no exception.
  18. Daddy Day Care
    Feels like a movie cribbed together from outtakes of other hapless Hollywood comedies -- rejected scenes where the line readings fell flat, the chemistry expired or the adult actors couldn't wipe the "get this brat away from me" scowl from their faces.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Good Dick
    It feels provocative but inconclusive -- brimming with intriguing ideas about love's dark underbelly but not quite confident enough to pull them off.
  20. Open Water
    Open Water is just one tedious scene stretched out to feature length. It's terrifying all right, but only for what it says about the extents to which a couple of hungry actors and a bullish director will go to turn themselves into overnight celebrities.
  21. Testosterone
    The cutesy opening of writer-director David Moreton's Testosterone (co-written with Dennis Hensley) turns out to be a crippling miscalculation.
  22. Auggie Rose
    None of it rings true, and it distracts from the film's real heart, which, on its own, would have made for a strikingly original first film.
  23. Basic Instinct 2
    Basic Instinct 2 pushes diligently along in a murder-and-mayhem-stuffed effort to demonstrate that (a) a sillier and more hackneyed movie than "Basic Instinct" is possible and (b) that shrinks have ids too, by golly.
  24. Big Girls Don't Cry
    Sleek, not-quite-trashy-enough melodrama.
  25. Sex, Politics & Cocktails
    This peculiar little comedy, shot on digital video, gets points for editorial pizzazz, but earns a big zero for content.
  26. Along Came a Spider
    By the time it hits you, you're worn out by all the dead ends and false trails the movie has put you through.
  27. The Limey
    A disappointed meditation on the '60s.
  28. Bon voyage
    The cast's sometimes capable, sometimes gross mugging is overwhelmed by lavish costumes, shiny vintage cars, hordes of meticulously directed extras, and the here-incongruous seriousness with which the French still regard this momentous, if humiliating, chapter of their national history.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The King and I
    The tale has been tidied, buffed, waxed and polished into a harmless but relatively boring adventure.
  30. The Cat's Meow
    An inert, respectable bore.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »