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. Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert
    She makes a perfectly fine role model, if you rate cheerful, sensible and chaste under the skinny tights and glow-in-the-dark tank tops.
  2. Over Her Dead Body
    Many a comic potentiality is underworked, and the film's prevailing tone is obnoxiously erratic -- surely the supporting eccentrics (Jason Biggs and Lindsay Sloane) aren't supposed to be so off-putting? -- but it rests safe when entrusted to the charisma of its principals.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Strange Wilderness
    No snob to low-brow ridiculousness when it’s actually unexpected, I’ll admit to being amused exactly once, when Zahn gets deep-throated by a gigantic prop turkey who, despite the mouthful, keeps on flapping.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rambo
    Gorier, meaner and uglier than anything Sylvester Stallone has made before, and as such damnably effective in rousing your blood lust, this wind-up groin kicker of a movie seems initially as wary of being pulled back into a dirty job as its reluctant hero.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Meet the Spartans
    Meet the Spartans is a mild improvement over their "Epic Movie," which is like saying that a debilitating fever is more fun than appendicitis, but what’s shocking is how lazy it is, which is a shame for former UK child star/pop singer Sean Maguire, whose Gerard Butler impersonation is spot-on.
  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. Summer Palace
    Jolting narrative ellipses sometimes threatens to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. What never lessens is the movie's rapturous eroticism, and the exquisite longing in each one of Yu Hong's sideways glances.
  8. Cloverfield
    While the entertainment value of Cloverfield is highly negotiable, it's clear that Abrams has consciously aligned himself with those filmmakers who have used the template of a grade-B monster/invasion movie -- Don Siegel, George Romero, Steven Spielberg -- as a stealth vessel for social commentary.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
    As numbing and depressing to watch as suits hammering out a film-packaging deal one venal clause at a time.
  10. One Missed Call
    If your cell phone vibrates while you’re watching One Missed Call, go ahead and answer, because even a wrong number will be more exciting than what’s happening onscreen.
  11. Honeydripper
    Honeydripper is classic Sayles cinema: an insightful sketch of assorted common folk whose criss-crossing dreams and agendas unfold against larger, more powerful (and sometimes crushing) sociopolitical and cultural forces.
  12. The Orphanage
    There’s not really a bogeyman in The Orphanage and not much blood; just insane intensity and a building sense of bad vibes.
  13. 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.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem
    Chopped down to 40 minutes, this could be a wickedly cool short; as is, it’s a passable slasher that’s still nowhere near the interspecies smackdown we geeks have long imagined.
  15. The Bucket List
    Director Rob Reiner’s atrocious cancer “comedy” marks a new low in Hollywood’s self-flagellating “things to be thankful for” tradition.
  16. The Water Horse
    Personally, I wouldn’t take a toddler (unless he was the son of Tarantino) to this intermittently, legitimately terrifying tale of a boy and his Loch Ness monster. But everyone else should blow off "Alvin and the Chipmunks" and show up for the best kiddie picture of the season -- and, along with "Ratatouille," of the year.
  17. Charlie Wilson's War
    Watching Charlie Wilson’s War is like sitting through a very long episode of "The West Wing."
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    National Treasure: Book of Secrets
    This ain’t "The Da Vinci Code," folks, and the reason you can tell is that it’s actually quite entertaining.
  19. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    Tim Burton has taken a hallowed classic of the modern musical theater, hemmed in the narrative from well over two hours to well under, cast confessed nonsingers in the principal roles, and somehow managed to make something magical out of it
  20. Half Moon
    In a boom time for movies about the scars of the battlefield, Half Moon reminds that the unending strife and religious fundamentalism of the Middle East kills not just people but culture too.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Alvin and the Chipmunks
    Lee, acting through gritted teeth, barely musters the energy to yell “Alvin!,” but the chipmunks themselves -- voiced by Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler and Jesse McCartney -- are surprisingly appealing, though their newly R&B-tinged rendition of “Witch Doctor” is god-awful.
  22. The Amateurs
    The Amateurs is nothing if not easy to watch. Yet, as a writer, Traeger is consternatingly adolescent and glib.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dirty Laundry
    Cheesy crockpot of a film.
  24. Juno
    What sets this engaging little movie above the pack of glib, brittle or sickly-sweet teen comedies is the clear eye it casts on the suburban American family, while stoutly defending that battered institution’s elastic ability to adapt.
  25. Billy the Kid
    But what you ultimately take from the film is the awareness that this smart, self-aware, uncensored kid has been playing to a camera in his own head since well before Venditti came along.
  26. Aaja Nachle
    Both in subject matter and form, this 25-minute music drama within the film tips its hat to the roots of Bollywood cinema’s most distinctive conventions -- with the inestimable assistance of its most seductive modern axiom.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Awake
    Harold’s glum overplotting squashes the sick humor and the innate fear of hospitals that gives the premise what kick it has; not even Craig McKay’s clever editing can defibrillate the preposterous ending.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Sasquatch Gang
    Gavin’s story is typical teen-faces-bullies-and-gets-girl hokum, while Zerk is like a Mike Judge cartoon character come to life, with a revelatory slapstick performance from the often straight-laced Long.
  29. He Was a Quiet Man
    He Was a Quiet Man casts its own perversely funny spell thanks in large part to Slater, whose wonderfully shifty, beaten-down performance is easily his best in the 17 years.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sex and Breakfast
    Suffering from what could be called Garden State syndrome, Sex and Breakfast demands that we empathize with the anguish of straight, white, financially privileged young people and their significantly hot significant others.
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