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. This Film Is Not Yet Rated
    Unlike the object of its scathing attention, Kirby Dick's documentary about the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board is merry and bright and loads of fun.
  2. Idiocracy
    If you crave a lively and funny trek through the farcical possibilities of unchecked dimwit power, Judge is still your guy. Just go rent "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America" instead.
  3. Beerfest
    Beerfest bubbles with the cheeky irreverence of early John Landis and David Zucker. Yet, like just about every other American screen comedy of the moment, it's far too long in the tooth, with a scattershot final half-hour that seems the work of an editor battling a bad hangover.
  4. Idlewild
    The film only rarely harnesses the power of the anachronistic, funk-driven, beat-heavy rap music that swells its soundtrack. Even the intricately choreographed crowd dance scenes, filled with frenzied movement, are more often stillborn than stimulating.
  5. How to Eat Fried Worms
    Worms is one of those rare kiddie flicks that successfully adopt a child’s-eye view of the world, where nothing is more important than saving face on the playground and where parents are as distant and clueless as storybook giants.
  6. Invincible
    Core has a touch with actors, too, and there are surprisingly fine performances here.
  7. Queens
    Although not quite as uproarious or as wickedly subversive as Pedro Almodóvar's more substantial body of work, Queens is content to scamper gaily in the wake of his achievements -- and to offer one more reason for old Franco to roll anew in his grave.
  8. Buzz
    The film's power is undeniable, as a bittersweet valentine to Buzz and the many others who came to Hollywood and found a factory that produced dreams, yes, but nightmares too.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dogwalker
    The sort of movie that you'd see on Lifetime if that channel actually respected its viewers' taste and intelligence, Jacques Thelemaque's feature directorial debut has been kicking around the festival circuit for five years, and now finally comes to theaters in a leaner cut that jettisons an extraneous subplot to get to the core of its human story.
  10. Princesas
    Aranoa's bleak yet warmly humanistic Princesas deftly and sympathetically ponders the interlocked destinies of two Madrid prostitutes.
  11. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
    The overall effect of the film is a case study in how dispassionate leaders sow mistrust in their most needy citizens.
  12. Snakes on a Plane
    Snakes was the most exuberantly trashy delight of this summer movie season or last.
  13. The Illusionist
    The movie is leaden and self-serious, with an unusually hollow performance from Norton, who's not for a moment convincing as a man of raging passion. Far better is Paul Giamatti.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Material Girls
    The Duffs don't even fully commit to their characters here -- they’'e seemingly undecided about whether they can get away with being shallow and bratty without ruining their family-friendly images.
  15. Factotum
    This is also an acidly funny work, even if the humor is that of a man who drinks to stave off the pain and madness of sobriety. In his finest performance since "Drugstore Cowboy," Dillon plays Chinanski with funereal grandiosity.
  16. Trust the Man
    Emerges a weakling comedy of manners.
  17. King Leopold's Ghost
    King Leopold's Ghost is an often infuriating (and excruciating) film to watch, but one that gets to the root of the despair that now plagues so much of the African continent.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Pulse
    Here, the CG effects are plentiful, but the scare factor rarely rises above the level of a viral email, and the desaturated color scheme of Sonzero and cinematographer Mark Plummer makes every frame look as though it was developed in a solution of vomit and ash.
  19. Step Up
    The movie serves up a pleasant, if unsurprising, confluence of classic ballet with street dance, not to mention a seamless collusion of polite racial integration with savvy niche marketing.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Zoom
    Tim Allen gamely brings some humanity to the role of the retired, powerless hero Captain Zoom, but is thwarted at every turn by bad special effects, slapdash editing, interminable pop-song montages, and a goofy performance by Courteney Cox.
  21. Half Nelson
    At a time when most American movies, studio made or "independent," seem ever more divorced from anything approximating actual life experience, Half Nelson is so sobering and searingly truthful that watching it feels like being tossed from a calm beach into a raging current.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    House of Sand
    Andrucha Waddington's admirably pretentious epic of woman in nature makes the rare attempt to impart a purely visual experience
  23. Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna
    As a director of melodramatic peak moments, Karan Johar has no peer: He stages a chance encounter on a New York street between an adulterous husband and the two women in his life with the slow-motion virtuosity of a soap-opera De Palma.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The L.A. Riot Spectacular
    This vision of the riots as a kind of Kentucky Fried Movie doesn' lend itself to film the way, say, L.A.'s urban violence does to Sandow Birk’s apocalyptic paintings. Nor does it help that the gags are mortally unfunny.
  25. Poster Boy
    Working from a preachy, clumsy script that's full of gaping holes in logic, plot and character development, director Zak Tucker is also handicapped by a cast filled with actors who seem to be in their first year of acting school.
  26. Who Needs Sleep?
    The result is (no pun intended) a powerful wake-up call, not just for Hollywood but for a nation that once fought passionately for the eight-hour workday and now, ever more willingly, works itself to death.
  27. World Trade Center
    World Trade Center is fatally benign -- an unexceptionable and therefore unexceptional heroic narrative that does little to further the tentative creep of our pop culture toward parsing the significance of that catastrophic day.
  28. Lunacy
    Lunacy feels programmatic, the repetitive working through of an idea that had me checking my watch.
  29. The Descent
    Compulsively watchable, with its fair share of effective sledgehammer shocks; it just isn't very good.
  30. Barnyard
    Even an advanced case of critter fatigue shouldn't stop you from rushing out to see this delightfully cheeky animated tale.
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