L.A. Weekly's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Keeping Up with the Steins
    As director, Scott Marshall displays an unsurprising flair for selling a joke, but also a fine sense of dramatic pacing and, even better, a gift for brevity, neither of which, it could be argued, are innate skills of his famous filmmaking family.
  2. Saving Shiloh
    Saving Shiloh takes place in 2005, but in its setting and sensibility, it feels like 1930s Walton's Mountain.
  3. Wah-Wah
    Though far from expert filmmaking - visual clichés fly thick and fast - the movie has a swooning feel for the stark beauty of the African kingdom in which it was shot.
  4. Sketches of Frank Gehry
    Sketches was produced for PBS's American Masters series, but it's in theaters now and deserves to be seen on the largest possible screen.
  5. Russian Dolls
    Precisely observed, charming and - for better and worse - light as air.
  6. Mission: Impossible III
    Cruise is probably the most graceful physical performer to occupy the screen since Burt Lancaster, and in this sort of action role, he's just about peerless...He may not be a great actor, but to find a greater movie star would be a nigh impossible mission.
  7. Art School Confidential
    Art School Confidential reaches its dementedly brilliant peak in the company of Jim Broadbent.
  8. An American Haunting
    Despite their appeal to patriotic horror fans, the makers of An American Haunting end up doing more harm than good to domestic fright production.
  9. Hoot
    Hoot is flatly directed by talk-show-host-turned-sitcom-director Wil Shriner, but the young actors are spirited and appealing, and the movie's low-key anti-establishment posture is vastly preferable to the knee-jerk fulminations of a Michael Moore.
  10. Down in the Valley
    Writer-director David Jacobson has an excitingly clear-eyed, unsentimental feel for the intensity of adolescent passion.
  11. The Proposition
    The Proposition is a very hard and harsh movie, but it also has a hypnotic, lyrical velocity. As Arthur, Huston exudes dead charisma.
  12. One Last Thing...
    Formulaic but refreshingly low-key weepie.
  13. Side Effects
    It’s a tantalizing idea - a little rom-com sugar to help the Big Pharma exposé pill go down -but Slattery-Moschkau is simply not a writer of the caliber necessary to pull off that delicate balancing act.
  14. Stick It
    The final meet felt eternal to me, but little girls may love it all, and even if they don't, they're almost sure to practice their handstands when they get home.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    United 93
    It is the highest compliment I can pay Greengrass to say that he is a master of the mundane, the routine and the everyday.
  16. Akeelah and the Bee
    While it can't have been easy to find action points for a drama about vocabulary drills, Atchison comes up with a steady stream of plot-propelling business, including Akeelah's flair for jump rope, a skill that serves her beautifully in a clinch moment.
  17. RV
    In RV, the downwardly spiraling career trajectories of Robin Williams and director Barry Sonnenfeld intertwine like the ropes of a tangled parachute, and all the helpless viewer can do is look on aghast as the whole abortive fiasco plummets toward Earth.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Guys and Balls
    With its clean narrative lines, easily grasped message and literal kick-line of affable, non-threatening gay characters, the film is carefully calibrated for mass appeal. It leaves no shortcut or pratfall untaken, and it will be all the more popular for it.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Lost City
    Compelling in fits and starts, actor-director Andy Garcia's The Lost City possesses grand aspirations but troublesome execution.
  20. Water
    Hitches some of the most irresistible conventions of Hindi movie melodrama to an earnest agenda of social protest.
  21. The Whore's Son
    In the end, Sturminger's virginal insistence on draining the mother-son relationship of all eros also drains it of interest.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Revoloution
    Be aware that RevoLOUtion is a remarkably well-made 75-minute inspiromercial.
  23. Lady Vengeance
    If this is what qualifies, as some critics have suggested, as an artistic advance for Mr. Park, let us pray for a hasty retreat.
  24. 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.
  25. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    Unlike the zippy American medical dramas it apes, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is paid out with the deliberate slowness of a dray horse straining up a mountain path. With every painstaking turn of the screw that seals Lazarescu's sorry fate, Puiu flirts with tedium, but tedium is the point of this hyperrealist tale, paced in what feels like real time.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Three Times
    I urge you to see the ineffably beautiful Three Times however you can, lest you go on thinking that Hou's greatness is merely the supposition of obscurantist critics intent on reserving their highest praise for those films that nobody else can actually see.
  27. American Dreamz
    As in his previous "In Good Company," Weitz wants too much to like all of his characters, and he wants us to like them too. The result is a movie devoid of any threat, or many laughs, with barn door–broad performances.
  28. The Sentinel
    Sentinel works overtime to suggest what a thrill-a-minute world its characters inhabit; but only during the last 20 minutes does the movie's pulse (or ours) raise above a flatline. The actors look uniformly unhappy to be there - except for Basinger, who seems lost in a lithium haze.
  29. Silent Hill
    Buried beneath Silent Hill’s hyper-stylized stupidity (the film looks like a collaboration between David Fincher, Trent Reznor and music video director Mark Romanek) is the hollow effort to bottle something of the zeitgeist unease surrounding religious fundamentalism.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Almost Guys
    If Fleming actually believes in this stuff, he should beware: When you put a movie this lazy and uninspired out into the world, you've got something coming to you - and it ain't good.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »