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. Somersault
    This remarkable film from Australia, the debut feature of writer-director Cate Shortland, moves to the lyrical rhythms and unhurried pace of a 1970s road movie.
  2. Standing Still
    The script (by Matthew Perniciaro and Timm Sharp) is trite, and the direction so flat that every scene looks like it was shot in a broom closet, but the bright young cast makes things more bearable than they should be.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Stolen
    Several potentially compelling narratives jockey for breathing room in this disappointing documentary about the unsolved 1990 heist of 13 paintings (valued at $500 million) from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
  4. The Celestine Prophecy
    The film taps the same spiritual thirst and anxiety that has made cultural phenomena of "The Da Vinci Code" and the "Left Behind" series. And it’s just as cheesy.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Scary Movie 4
    The sort of movie you like in spite of yourself, Scary Movie 4 is obvious and dumb, but it possesses such a giddy, good-hearted spirit that even its terrible jokes (and there are tons) get by on something resembling charm.
  6. The Wild
    The animation is cheesy; the banter isn't funny; the score is noisy and grating; and the critters look like stuffed animals. The best that can be said for The Wild is that it's a most insincere form of flattery. The worst is that it's a sincere form of theft.
  7. Kinky Boots
    Kinky Boots is diverting, but it's only worth shouting about thanks to Ejiofor' quietly subversive take on what has become a stock movie character.
  8. Hard Candy
    The more things drag on, the more monotonous they become and, by the end, Hard Candy has devolved into a rather transparent game of one-upmanship in which Hayley and Jeff come across in almost equally repellent measure, their behaviors driven less by organic impulses than by their need to satisfy the script's elaborate series of reversals and counter-reversals.
  9. The Notorious Bettie Page
    While it's true that most of us make our way through life without a plan, the studied arbitrariness of Page's accommodating ramble from Hicksville to Smutsville doesn't make for thrilling cinema.
  10. Look Both Ways
    Watt seems to want to say something about the role of fate and happenstance in creating connections between people, but she never quite brings the strands of her ideas together.
  11. Abominable
    Not quite aptly titled, but close, writer-director Ryan Schifrin's cheapo horror opus pits everyone's favorite hirsute hominoid against the denizens of a remote town nestled at the base of a mountain called Suicide Peak. It's not much of a contest.
  12. Herbie Hancock: Possibilities
    Filled with great archival footage from throughout Hancock's five-decade career, and with elder-statesman words of wisdom from the man himself, Possibilities celebrates an impulse that's too rare in modern music: the love behind the labor of creation.
  13. Mountain Patrol
    Mountain Patrol: Kekexili is sometimes slow going, yet it builds in power as nature begins to take its toll on the patrol, and its cumulative effects are haunting.
  14. La Mujer de Mi Hermano
    La Mujer lumbers along, trapped in a long-faced score that appears to have been borrowed from a thriller, and without a smidgen of the saving irony that might have made of it a decent screwball comedy.
  15. Metal: A Headbanger's Journey
    At once playful and thorough, the documentary is also stacked teased-hair high with wicked performance footage.
  16. The Sisters
    The Sisters may be worth a look, however, for the work of the magnificent Bello and Tony Goldwyn, who's never been better than as the married man with whom Marcia has an affair. Their final clench is pure, guilty-pleasure melodrama, which means it's not the least bit Chekhovian.
  17. Preaching to the Choir
    Formulaic but innocuous little movie's one clever moment, a sing-off between choirs standing on their respective church steps, trying to lure in Sunday-morning worshippers.
  18. Sisters in Law
    Inspirational stuff, and often hysterical to boot.
  19. Lucky Number Slevin
    Another drearily sadistic and pointless crime thriller.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Benchwarmers
    It's hard to buy the movie as an underdog success story, since even the actors barely seem to exert themselves.
  21. Phat Girlz
    Mo’Nique's character here is so underwritten that the actress doesn't get a chance to really capitalize on her extra screen-time. Her sassy forte may be talking so straight-up she sounds crazy, but she seems a little advanced to be doing "yo mamma" jokes.
  22. Take the Lead
    To their credit, screenwriter Dianne Houston and director Liz Friedlander (both making their feature debuts) go relatively easy on the urban-life clichés and instead stick tight to dance class.
  23. Friends with Money
    If Friends With Money is about the meaning of success in a town obsessed with wealth, it is also, more universally, about our defining incompleteness, and the sad, uproarious inconclusiveness of life.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    95 Miles to Go
    If, during a quiet moment of reflection, you have ever thought, "Hey, why hasn't there been a film about Ray Romano driving and eating Subway sandwiches?," you’re in luck: Tom Caltabiano's stupendously uneventful documentary of his and Romano's eight-day comedy tour of the South has arrived.
  25. On a Clear Day
    On a Clear Day is in most respects "The Full Monty," only with swimming, not stripping, and no bursts into song or dance - only the usual canny sequencing of tears and laughter, interspersed here with fetching underwater photography and father-son issues up the wazoo.
  26. When Do We Eat?
    A debut film that's more well-intentioned than funny.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    One Last Ride
    It's typical poor-schnook-in-over-his-head stuff, spiked with some nervy, Pi-esque montages of eyes, horses and racing forms that illustrate Michael's fraying nerves (and distract us from the flatness of the other scenes).
  28. Sir! No Sir!
    Zeiger's superb documentary about the Vietnam War era's GI protest movement is jammed with incident and anecdote and moves with nearly as much breathless momentum as the movement itself.
  29. Quality of Life
    It's Garrison and Burnam who hold the film's center, however, with a natural magnetism. Newcomers both, they take the same clean approach to their roles that their characters bring to their tags.
  30. I Am a Sex Addict
    While some may bail early, those who stay to the end are likely to dwell on Zahedi's unwavering (some would say unrelenting) belief in his own artistry, as well as the film's many funny, quotable lines.
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