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. Broken Flowers
    It's a romantic comedy in which both the romance and the comedy are turned to such muted levels that any lower would require closed captioning.
  2. Lantana
    Notable for its power of surprise and its refusal to immediately clarify the confusion of these lost souls.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A History of Violence
    Cronenberg holds up a mirror, but he leaves it up to us to recoil at what we see.
  4. The Last September
    This is one of those rare times when a credit-heavy gathering of top film talents actually manages to produce a work of art.
  5. Casino Royale
    What's appealing about Bond is precisely its unhip classicism -- its promise of clean, crisp excitement delivered without the interference of whiplash-inducing camera pyrotechnics, attention-deficient editing patterns, gratuitous color tinting and/or ear-splitting rock ballads.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Taxidermia
    All this helps to shape Pálfi’s crudely bombastic but impressive philosophical view of the body as landscape and art, a source of personal discovery, wonder and annihilation.
  7. Street Fight
    This is classical activist filmmaking of the first order, a movie with the power to turn hearts, change minds and, just maybe, right the wayward course of an entire city.
  8. Almost Famous
    Crowe has made a hugely entertaining, nearly pitch-perfect film about rock & roll.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Santitos
    Springall also deftly weaves the film's most dramatic moments with lighthearted comedy, and the result may be Mexico's best film in years.
  10. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [re-release]
    The movie survives beautifully both as an elegant thriller and as a study of the twisted infantilism that shapes the fanatic heart.
  11. In Praise of Love
    In its formal daring and exquisite style, the movie is itself an act of resistance against what Godard sees as a modern triumphalist culture that turns historical truth to lies and love to images created to make money.
  12. Calle 54
    Trueba reveals his subject organically, letting the music speak for itself.
  13. Murderous Maids
    A true rarity, Murderous Maids is an intelligent, moral shocker.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    American Splendor
    It's our great good fortune, and Pekar's, that this movie -- which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, followed by the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes -- is as true to the dyspeptic spirit of its source as anyone could have imagined.
  15. eXistenZ
    eXistenZ gives us Cronenberg at his wittiest, and Leigh at her most vulnerable and fascinating.
  16. Off the Map
    A small masterpiece of tone and form.
  17. Les Destinées
    An exquisite metaphor for the high cost and higher returns of an enduring marriage.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    ...So Goes the Nation
    From its riveting opening to its gripping conclusion, . . . So Goes the Nation is arguably the most intelligent, kinetic analysis of the modern election process since "The War Room."
  19. Fear and Trembling
    Testud, who learned to speak Japanese phonetically for the role, is nothing short of sublime, her expressive face morphing from tear-stained frustration to slaphappy delirium with the speed of lightning flashing across the Tokyo sky.
  20. Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop
    Belongs to the small rank of hip-hop films that actually have something to say -- and that say it with both style and intellectual bite.
  21. Touching the Void
    Breathtaking stuff that freezes the toes, harrows the soul and turns the viewer's seat into a foot-wide ledge over a yawning chasm.
  22. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    Lucas is a major figure, and Revenge of the Sith may be some kind of historic achievement -- the first movie in which it is fully impossible to tell where flesh ends and digital paint begins.
  23. Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade
    Where Okiura leads the art of animation into truly uncharted territory is in his character work, the precise behavioral strokes that bring people to life in two dimensions.
  24. Place Vendôme
    It's all about having your intelligence -- emotional, spiritual, cerebral -- respected. Garcia does that; Place Vendôme does that.
  25. The Twilight Samurai
    Perhaps because this is director Yoji Yamada's 77th movie, every aspect of his filmmaking is placidly assured and meaningful.
  26. Our Lady of the Assassins
    A scathing, darkly funny political essay wrapped inside a tragic love story (or vice versa).
  27. Pi
    A triumph of low-end production design, shot in sizzling, solarized black and white, and driven by a propulsive, insinuating score, Pi is a horror movie that makes you think and an indie film that makes you squirm.
  28. The Endurance
    Not only relates the astounding story of the expedition and its unimaginable hardships, it presents a thoughtful study of a time when there were adventurers who might actually respond to an advertisement reading "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold . . ."
  29. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
    Maddin's genius is so inescapably idiosyncratic that his work seems destined to remain a cult taste. Although Dracula won't change that, I hasten to add that this is the most inventive vampire picture of the last 80 years.
  30. Genesis
    The story is as wonderful in the showing as it is in the telling, by an African griot (oral historian) who stirs our tragicomic passage from birth to death, into a simple clay pot.
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