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. Contact
    What's most frustrating about the movie isn't that it thinks so little of its heroine that it can't let her figure out the moral of her own story, but that it thinks so little of us as to suggest that, after a couple millennia of human struggle, it's indeed possible to answer the unanswerable.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    4 Little Girls
    The film is artfully made, its occasional excesses of style moderated by the plain force of the content and the passion of the testimony.
  3. Men in Black
    A great goof of a film...However daftly amusing, and periodically inspired, Men in Black is distinctly short on character and plot, even for a cartoon.
  4. Face/Off
    Yet the movie, distilling into purest form the blend of viciousness and sentimentality that informs all Woo's work, winds up as emotionally bogus as it is viscerally overwhelming.
  5. Batman & Robin
    There's so much happening in the movie that it feels like nothing is happening at all. Which leaves you free to gaze, slack-jawed, on the true glory of Batman & Robin -- its fabulously color-coded set design.
  6. 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.
  7. Speed 2: Cruise Control
    The last half-hour is a decent enough ride, with Dafoe controlling the ship by Powerbook and product placement, while Bullock and Patric demonstrate the triumph of American gumption over high tech, the better to save all hands on deck.
  8. Ulee's Gold
    Nunez is a master at rendering emotionally complex, ordinary folk into the kind of unassuming heroes that don't much appear in American films anymore.
  9. Con Air
    Con Air is entertaining in an extravagantly decadent sort of way. It just isn't a movie.
  10. Addicted to Love
    It's a tribute to Robert Gordon's nifty screenplay and Dunne's cheerful way with digression that Addicted to Love, even as it broadens into screwball, also deepens into a character study full of surprising left turns.
  11. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
    Although the digital dinos look great, especially the clumsy stegosaurs, Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp have failed to absorb the single most important lesson from the movies they've looted: If your people aren't interesting, at least make your monsters memorable.
  12. Brassed Off
    Trimmed to an hour, and tucked between a documentary on snails and an episode of Coronation Street, writer-director Mark Herman's Brassed Off could prove lively watching indeed. As it is, however, his pedestrian if sweetly well-meaning inspirational about a coal-mining town done in by Thatcherism is too long, too laborious and 15 years too late.
  13. Love! Valour! Compassion!
    Yet the pride and sympathy McNally brings to his characters reminds us how far gay film has progressed from the long, self-lacerating whine of "The Boys in the Band".
  14. Night Falls on Manhattan
    Without serious political and ethical stakes, the story limps to a halt, shrouded in platitude and faux drama.
  15. The Fifth Element
    Too long by half, burdened with shabby F/X and offering up some seriously weird performances, this pricy foray into science fiction is a muddle of miscues and narrative bloat--along with a lot of frivolous fun.
  16. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
    Mike Myers wrote the abominable script, plays both leads and is miscast in each.
  17. Breakdown
    Breakdown recalls so many good movies, in such unpredictable order, that by the end it simply stands on its own, a solid, logical, edge-of-the-seat sluiceway of escape and pursuit.
  18. Romy and Michele's High School Reunion
    It's the spark and surprise of good sketch comedy that makes this film really work--the laugh-out-loud moments are worth the wait.
  19. Volcano
    Here, the volcanic villain behaves like a smart terrorist, taking over almost immediately and holding a collection of excellent actors (Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche, Don Cheadle) hostage for two hours of "real time."
  20. Murder at 1600
    The convoluted plot unfolds mechanically and with little atmosphere as if sex and death in the Oval Office would provide enough gravity on its own. That it doesn't is a sign of mediocre filmmaking as well as a measure of just how cynical the times have become.
  21. Traveller
    It's fine acting of - and chemistry - between Paxton, Margulies and Mark Wahlberg that gives this film (written by Jim McGlynn, directed by Jack Green) its kick.
    • L.A. Weekly
  22. Grosse Pointe Blank
    With a brisk pace and satiric blend of nostalgia and violence, it's the sharpest, funniest comedy so far this year.
  23. Anaconda
    Quite unintentionally, director Luis Llosa and screenwriters Hans Bauer, Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. have crafted a howler; Anaconda, meant to be a nail-biting thriller, is a laugh-out-loud comedy.
  24. Shall We Dance?
    As sticky as "Strictly Ballroom," if far better behaved, Shall We Dance was written and directed by Masayuki Suo, a man who really knows his way around clichés both benign and tiresome.
  25. Chasing Amy
    Smith has created the raunchiest romantic comedy in recent American film, and one of the most good-natured.
  26. The Saint
    The Saint works. The reason why it occasionally soars is Kilmer, an actor who’s happiest when burying himself in eccentric characterizations, a trick he performs repeatedly here even as he fills the screen with pure movie-star dazzle.
  27. The Devil's Own
    Hobbled by a schizoid desire to make a deep human drama on the one hand and a blistering IRA shoot-'em-up on the other, Alan Pakula's new movie is less a story than a plodding sequence of debates punctuated by gunfire.
  28. Selena
    For all its simplicity, however, the film is entertaining, even uplifting, with Lopez giving a stellar, confectionary performance.
  29. Liar Liar
    He's (Carrey) an unruly commodity and, as such, compulsively watchable.
  30. Crash
    For all the director's visual flair, his trademark flashes of gallows humor and his few good moments, there's never a sense that he's made Crash his own.
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