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. Life or Something Like It
    Jolie hogs the spotlight as usual, leaving romantic interest Ed Burns struggling to register and only Shaloub -- fetid, dirty, soulful -- with his dignity intact.
  2. Secondhand Lions
    Despite the considerable imagination that has gone into realizing period scenes on a modest budget, all the episodes (past and present) feel hurried and clipped, like they've been passed through too many impatient editing-room hands, and the picture never fully absorbs you.
  3. Why We Fight
    There may not be two equal sides to every argument, but in giving such little credence to those who might oppose him, Jarecki makes us wonder what exactly it is he’s so afraid of.
  4. Big Fish
    The whole seems disjointed, incoherent and lacking in the startling originality of the other two Edwards (Scissorhands and Wood) who, half a career back, poured from Burton's distended outsider imagination.
  5. Thunderbirds
    Thunderbirds is devoted to the principle that character and story are but rude interruptions to the real order of business, an endless display of profound vehicle fetish.
  6. Mondays in the Sun
    Bardem, given the only fully fleshed-out character to play, is a marvel to behold...If only he had found a more soulful, less didactic movie to be plunked down into.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cthulhu
    Stuart Gordon adapted the story more conventionally in 2001's "Dagon," and it remains the better bet for Lovecraft lovers.
  8. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
    For a while, Vaughn's slobbo guy charm and Stiller's creepy Flash Gordon aesthetic are amusing, but it isn't long before Vaughn looks like a Bill Murray disciple trapped among circus freaks, and Stiller runs out of weirdo tricks.
  9. The Conrad Boys
    Heartfelt but insipid drama, the naiveté quickly becomes exasperating.
  10. Flipped
    Reiner, in very broad strokes, works in issues of poverty, thwarted dreams and family obligation, and almost pulls it off, thanks to Anthony Edwards, Aidan Quinn, Rebecca De Mornay, Penelope Ann Miller and John Mahoney, who impart humor and humanity to thinly sketched characters.
  11. The Magician
    The viewer is meant to chuckle at the escalating violence-ringed absurdities (the kidnapping of a bafflingly passive drug dealer who winds up becoming a road-trip buddy, for example) and at Ray's brutish philosophies, but the chuckles are few. Though the film starts out modestly amusing, it very, very quickly lists into tedium.
  12. Vertical Limit
    A thriller that, at its best, has the gooney absurdity of an old Saturday-afternoon movie serial.
  13. The Man
    Jackson and Levy strike only damp sparks off each other, and they seem to have been introduced to each other --without benefit of rehearsal -- mere moments before the director cried "Action!"
  14. The Jungle Book 2
    Bounces through the bush in search of good will and comes up with recycled charm as it reintroduces most of the original's major characters.
  15. Haiku Tunnel
    The Kornbluths don't offer much visual style -- the film is as flat and sterile as its corporate environs -- but they build an excruciating tension from Kornbluth's confounding inability to lick a few stamps.
  16. My Best Friend's Wedding
    As [Roberts'] gay best friend, Rupert Everett is the only one with any backbone, any sense of humor or any decent lines.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bride Wars
    A step backward for Hathaway, Bride Wars is one more step into the quicksand for Hudson, who's spent the nine years since ""Almost Famous wandering the rom-com wasteland in search of an exit strategy; this movie, which she exec produced, ain't it.
  18. The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
    Slovenly writing by Shondra Rimes doesn't help, and the movie bows out with an omigod-we-forgot-the-feminism twist — too little, too late to redeem this lumpish excuse for a contemporary fairy tale.
  19. Exorcist: The Beginning
    The “surprise” ending, when it comes, is more of a hoot than a holler.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Benchwarmers
    It's hard to buy the movie as an underdog success story, since even the actors barely seem to exert themselves.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Nightmare Man
    Nightmare Man is all impenetrably dark nighttime shots, politely telegraphed shocks and limp, transparent misogyny masquerading as genre-savvy hijinks.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Romulus, My Father
    Admirably unsentimental about the ravages of poverty and mental illness on the foundations of family. But soon the endless succession of heartaches that visit Gaita's brood -- including multiple suicide attempts and romantic betrayals -- becomes monotonous and unbearable, the cinematic equivalent of someone slowly pressing his thumb into your forehead.
  23. Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family
    There’s nothing postmodern about this "family," unless postmodern means never having to grow up.
  24. Super Troopers
    Begins so well that it's painful to watch it degenerate into tried-and-true frat-boy humor.
  25. Raise Your Voice
    Duff, who became a teen-set role model portraying Lizzie McGuire for Disney, has sold over four million records and toured to packed houses, yet screenwriter Sam Schreiber and director Sean McNamara, both making feature debuts, set her up to sing just one song through to completion.
  26. Pay It Forward
    (Leder's) camera won't sit still long enough to complete a scene and tell a coherent story, skittering all over the map until you're dizzy from all the degrees of separation and spurious connection.
  27. Teddy Bears' Picnic
    A satirist such as Shearer should need a license to go hunting on terrain so rich with easy targets; he tries to bag them all, and it leaves the film to founder in aimlessness.
  28. Fever Pitch
    Unfunny, charmless and hopelessly ordinary.
  29. Chasing Papi
    Remarkably, it took four writers to concoct this tin-eared, slighter-than-slight farce.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Second Best
    It tries too hard for sincerity, when it's actually more sincere when cynical. Filmed in 17 days with hand-held cameras that give it a home-movie feel, the movie takes blue-collar pride in its own hopelessness.
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