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 8.6 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 Godfather
    The Godfather traces the arc of this doomed idealism with a beauty that is still fresh.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Conformist
    The Conformist is a great film, drunkenly beautiful and deeply disturbing.
  3. Army of Shadows
    The result is a brilliant and relentless thriller, painted in Melville's trademark shades of charcoal and midnight blue, marked by daring escapes, unimaginable moments of self-sacrifice and unconscionable acts of betrayal.
  4. Pan's Labyrinth
    Pan's Labyrinth Like his terrific 2001 "The Devil’s Backbone," Mexican horrormeister Guillermo del Toro's new movie offers us both real-life and fantastical monsters, and if you know his work, you won't waste time figuring out which to root for.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ran
    Save for one startlingly staged battle sequence. . .might as well have been titled "Also Ran."
  6. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    Though the frighteningly late-term abortion at its center hints at larger sins in the last gasp of Nicolae Ceausescu’s iron-fisted regime, it’s no metaphor, but a sordidly visceral transaction conducted in the next best thing to a back alley.
  7. Spirited Away
    Does full honor to Miyazaki’s teeming and often unsettling landscape, and to the conflicted complexity of his characters: Not a single frame was cut, and the voice casting and performances are uniformly excellent.
  8. The Battle of Algiers
    A classic of politically engaged filmmaking, based on a book by Saadi Yacef, a former FLN leader who also produced the picture and played a version of himself.
  9. Yi Yi
    Generous, soulful film.
  10. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
    Has the sprawling canvas of an epic and the emotional heat of classical melodrama.
  11. Sideways
    A trenchant American satirist in his previous films, Payne moves in a different direction with Sideways -- one less mordant but just as pointedly observant.
  12. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    The deep satisfaction of The Return of the King is in surrendering ourselves to the finale, in letting Jackson's superb storytelling (with due credit to co-screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) surround us like a blazing campfire tale -- which it does, gloriously.
  13. Call Me by Your Name
    Guadagnino adeptly captures not just the physicality of a burning love but also the emotional and intellectual components, and the film is all the more salient for that careful, realistic interpretation.
  14. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    In the nearly 30 years since the movie was released (it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1972), one forgets how falling-about-funny is this mad caper.
  15. Band of Outsiders
    Easily the most brilliant of the genuflections bestowed on the American gangster movie by the French New Wave.
  16. Days of Being Wild (re-release)
    Like Proust's madeleine unleashing a flood of reminiscences in the narrator of his novel, Wong works the elements of his aesthetic — music, beautiful people and emotion — into a mood that so overtakes you it's nearly impossible to emerge from his films without feeling slightly drunk.
  17. There Will Be Blood
    With There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson has taken a stab at making The Great American Movie -- and I daresay he’s made one of them.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Almayer's Folly
    Almayer's Folly is lush and dreamy (if not quite dreamlike), but it never feels unanchored or given to pointless meandering. However hypnotic it at times becomes, this is a sober(ing) endeavor that never strays far from its post-colonial backdrop.
  19. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    The film's real power to move flows from its low, childlike angles, which, rather than infantalize its audience, bring it down to where the hurt and fear, and hence the comfort, loom larger. [2002 re-release]
  20. Apocalypse Now Redux
    To look at Apocalypse Now is to realize that most of us are fast forgetting what a movie looks like -- a real movie, the last movie, an American masterpiece.
  21. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    The film is a virtuosic triumph, but parlor tricks don't make movies, and it's Jackson's unwavering sincerity that elevates The Fellowship of the Ring into the increasingly rare Valhalla of the rousing, well-told tale.
  22. Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
    Melville seems to peer out from behind the camera with a reassuring wink and nod. Le Cercle Rouge is the most self-consciously cool of his famously underheated films noirs.
  23. Moolaadé
    Quite possibly the most buoyant, exuberant film ever made on such an unpleasant topic.
  24. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    The first REALLY great mythic film of the summer has arrived.
  25. A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
    The second half proves somewhat darker but also more brazenly inventive in its scene craft. If Part One centered on the role of the arts in the lives of these characters and their community, Part Two finds their lives becoming art. Suddenly, song-and-dance numbers break out in parking lots and coffee shops.
  26. Lost in Translation
    Fraught with a deep sadness and sense of yearning. Yet, it is also an enormously -- at times, even uproariously -- comedic film, not because it feels any obligation to be "funny" in some contrived, screenwriterly sort of way, but because Coppola has set out to make a movie set to the rhythms of real (rather than reel) life.
  27. The Triplets of Belleville
    This divinely eccentric movie feels as if it came straight to the screen from one man’s wild and wantonly free imagination.
  28. A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
    The film, a sort of cinematic state-of-the-arts speech, is endlessly warm, playful and lovable, a sprawling and prankish hangout comedy with no clear precedent.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Beau Travail
    Leaving the theater, you feel not only as if you've been in a foreign country, but as if you'd gone there inside someone else's skin.
  30. Ghost World
    Zwigoff pulls off something in Ghost World that seems a minor miracle -- he creates someone with a complex inner life.
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