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. Remember the Daze
    Remember the Daze has the irony-free, instant-nostalgia earnestness of your high school yearbook, but watching it is not likely to conjure your own youthful emotions -- it’s more like flipping through the generic memories of a complete stranger.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Young People Fucking
    Tries a bit too hard to give off the impression of experience, and consequently, the film's explicit dialogue and pseudonaughty tone result in mostly shallow, giggly humor that rarely delves into the kinkiness and hang-ups that make sex a topic both obsessed over and rarely discussed.
  3. Gender Bias
    What really sink the film are the script's reductive, outdated psychological implications (molestation leads to queerness/transsexualism) and its clumsy melodramatics.
  4. In Search of Peace
    The film at times feels less than objective, in part due to Douglas' often breathless narration.
  5. Raising Helen
    Raising Helen is the kind of movie you watch on a plane while muttering “utter crap” under your breath -- and then burst into tears.
  6. Swing
    If there's any reason to watch this otherwise inept romance, it's to witness the late Nell Carter nail a Louis Jordan tune, and to see master comic Jonathan Winters downplay his more manic tendencies and effortlessly spin gold from straw.
  7. The Wedding Date
    Anemic.
  8. Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    Even more problematic is the script's clumsy, sprawling architecture, Sheridan's clubfooted sense of pacing and his grubby, indistinct visuals. The only upside? The Chieftains aren't on the soundtrack.
  9. Let It Snow
    In lieu of developing a plot, the brothers opt to cram their cache of forced quirks and hit-or-miss sketches into a framework of predictabilities.
  10. The Life of David Gale
    The movie's one unalloyed pleasure is a funny Goth Girl, played by Melissa McCarthy, who grasps, as Parker apparently doesn't, that the script is energetic rubbish, not The Greatest Story Ever Told.
  11. Assassination Nation
    While sometimes messy, this material is emotionally resonant and cinematically alive.
  12. 24 Hours on Craigslist
    Intermittently amusing, rarely illuminating and ultimately tedious documentary.
  13. Dark Blue
    My own view is that, like me, the LAPD was defeated by the movie's incestuously proliferating plots. I've seen Dark Blue twice, and I still don't have a handle on all its comings and goings.
  14. Garfield
    Under Peter Hewitt's phoned-in direction, Garfield chugs along like the slow train to Chattanooga, with only Jennifer Love Hewitt, as the local vet, twittering pertly in a desperate effort to raise Jon's feeble pulse.
  15. Swiri
    Though the two-hour film can go slack with excess explication, Shiri compensates with an overheated drive that forces the myopia of current events toward a broader field of vision.
  16. Simon Magus
    Unfortunately, it's our knowledge of what's actually to come that puts much of the chill and complexity in Hopkins' rather formulaic script.
  17. Tamara
    Tamara simply doesn't cover all the bases in its drive to be both a grubby teen splatter flick and a more high-minded thriller.
  18. The Truth About Charlie
    The story itself falls to earth with a thud, not least because of a casting catastrophe. The boyish, goofily smiling Wahlberg is egregiously out of place as the kind of charming-ambiguous dreamboat you'd have to be Cary Grant to pull off.
  19. It Runs in the Family
    The question is not how bad this excuse for a domestic comedy is (medium cringe), but how the gifted Fred Schepisi got suckered into directing a vanity project.
  20. Blue Hill Avenue
    The film is naive in its glorification of violence and vengeance.
  21. How Stella Got Her Groove Back
    This upscale Harlequin fantasy film works much the same terrain as Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, a '50s weepy about an affair between an older woman and a younger man, though without an iota of its wit or intelligence.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Delta Farce
    You could make a case that any movie in which Mexicans and rednecks become best of friends is a net positive for society. But to do that, you'd have to ignore the severe boredom that sets in about halfway through this comedy.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
    In the age of creationism, a sympathetic mix of science and religion sounds like a promising premise. But in this genre-blending cocktail of drama, documentary and computer-graphic animation, quantum physics is so subordinated to the service of an anything-goes mysticism that little remains of the science except the terminology.
  24. The War Within
    Mired in noir cliché, the movie manages to be simultaneously overwrought and undercooked, with the Bambi-eyed Akhtar giving such a relentlessly inscrutable performance, one wants to poke him with a stick.
  25. Malibu's Most Wanted
    Amiable but not especially funny film.
  26. The Ring Two
    Might have something interesting to say about cultural ambivalence by and toward the maternal impulse if only it had a spark of originality or verve.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Year of the Yao
    This glorified infomercial glosses over the underlying tension of a young man's introduction into a society whose materialistic, capitalist tendencies are diametrically opposed to his country's values.
  28. Valentin
    It's not that Noya is bad as kid actors go, but a pair of dewy, crossed eyes and a beyond-his-years melancholy do not an entire movie make.
  29. Dude, Where's My Car?
    A film where everyone -- white, black, gay or otherwise -- is equally, lovably dumb.
  30. Sphere
    While the length and ridiculous finale are a drag, the only thing that stinks about Sphere is its pervasive boys-club snarkiness, especially since Stone is actually good. Levinson has always been a better director of men, but it would be nice if Attanasio could learn how to write a role for a woman that wasn't an embarrassment as well as an insult.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »