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. Liyana
    The animation that brings Liyana to life, created by Shofela Coker, is gorgeous, but the reason it resonates has everything to do with the way it’s woven into footage of the children telling Liyana’s story or going about their everyday business.
  2. The Super
    Naturally, not everything is what it seems; there are a couple of necessary untruths even in this plot synopsis. But the part where it seems like some excellent actors have been roped into propping up a hopelessly by-the-numbers horror movie? That’s totally on the level.
  3. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn
    While writer-director Jim Hosking’s commitment to weirdness (also seen in his previous outing, The Greasy Strangler) warrants appreciation, especially when so many others play it safe, his latest, comedy An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn, is a chore to get through.
  4. Vaya
    The movie lays on the melodrama too thick.
  5. Johnny English Strikes Again
    Director David Kerr engineers Atkinson’s intricate routines with clockwork precision. That said, his first feature film has little to offer anyone not already attuned to modestly absurdist British comedy.
  6. Suspiria
    I’m happy to report that I have no idea what’s going on in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake, and that’s wonderful. The two Suspirias function more as companion pieces than as mirrored twins.
  7. Border
    While the film does take some twists and turns — some fairly contrived — it mostly drills down and explores her emotional conundrum without drawing symbolic conclusions about the world we live in.
  8. On Her Shoulders
    Especially wrenching are scenes of the Yazidi, torn from the land of their birth, separated from one another in camps, confronting the question of how to remain unified when scattered across the globe.
  9. Life and Nothing More
    It’s a shame we never get to know Andrew as well as Regina — arguably part of the moody teen persona — but it’s even more affecting when Andrew’s initially passive existence escalates due to white fear, and his mother is left to fight for his chance at life.
  10. London Fields
    Mathew Cullen’s calamitous film adaptation of Martin Amis’ London Fields plays like the hazy recollection of someone who hated the book, an incomprehensible jumble of misogynistic claptrap. It dashes joylessly through dense material, too quickly for individual moments to register, much less resonate.
  11. Charm City
    There’s still charm in Charm City, despite it all.
  12. The Great Buster: A Celebration
    It’s a relaxed study of greatness, of exquisite physical comedy, of how’d-he-do-that stuntwork, of a vigorous cinema artist who saw new and enduring possibilities for his medium.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. Transformer
    The film might prove more illuminating and instructive if it examined more reactions to Kroc’s flowering from within the lifting world. Overall, though, Del Monte has crafted a warm portrait of the birth of a woman from a man who found that he had even more strength than he ever realized.
  16. What They Had
    The family squabbles jangle the nerves while not hitting on insights or memorable emotion.
  17. Mid90s
    Mid90s, for all its darkness, is uplifted by its hilarious moments and joyous skating shots.
  18. Galveston
    Laurent's work as an actor serves her well as a director, and she allows her performers the freedom to find each moment’s emotional core. Foster and Fanning are excellent, their chemistry intensified by their characters' shared bitterness and loss of what could have been.
  19. Wildlife
    Dano’s film is shrewd and exacting, composed with rigor yet alert to the rhythms of its performers.
  20. Halloween
    Too often, in this version, Green doesn’t seem to know where to put the camera to elicit that sense of surveilling or being surveilled. Worse, that incompetence often works hand in hand with overwrought comic dialogue. But let’s get to what really works here: Curtis.
  21. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    No one does dissolute hubris with as much charm as Grant, and his ebullience is the perfect foil to the misanthropic McCarthy.
  22. The Sentence
    Here’s a true surprise in 2018: a documentary about an American injustice that will likely leave you, by its end, blubbering tears of relieved joy.
  23. First Man
    In the end, what shines through First Man is the toughness and resilience of the men whose no-nonsense efforts allowed the rest of us to dream.
  24. Studio 54
    Helped along by news clips, the filmmakers do better with the crash-and-burn business story than with the actuality of the Studio experience.
  25. The Kindergarten Teacher
    The Kindergarten Teacher dares us to work out for ourselves, from moment to moment, whether Lisa is a hero, a monster or something in-between
  26. After Everything
    White and Monroe are terrific — their relationship, as well as its dissolution, is completely believable — but they’re limited by a script full of old tropes.
  27. The Oath
    While watching the film, I not only laughed a lot and gasped oh, shit! in the right places. I somehow never once found myself tempted to sneak a peek at my phone to check in on our real American hellscape.
  28. Beautiful Boy
    The imperfect yet affecting new film Beautiful Boy, based on memoirs by the real-life Nic and David, examines addiction and its effects on one family. But it’s also a meditation on memory and the difficulty of reconciling the happiness of the past with a present that’s become too sad to bear.
  29. Rodents of Unusual Size
    The documentary, directed by Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer and Quinn Costello, and narrated by Wendell Pierce, uses cartoon diagrams and a cheerful score by the Lost Bayou Ramblers to make its tale of inherited destruction and trauma as charming as possible. The way that initial ease peels back is the film’s greatest asset.
  30. Shine
    While Saldivar and Burgos are better dancers than actors, Collado and Flores are incredibly charismatic performers who bring every scene they’re in to life, but it’s Zayas who anchors Shine. His gravitas shot through with mischief sets the film’s tone, showing that serious-minded storytelling can still be fun.
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