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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    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    In its well-mannered way, this genteel film delicately keeps its platonic May-December love story from turning creepy. But without the sexual undertones and macabre humor of Hal Ashby's classic, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is merely a soft, slightly patronizing movie about the poignancy of aging.
  2. The Ice Harvest
    Its jazzy rhythm and economy of form place it closer to a 1950s film noir, shot through with humor so dark you need a flashlight to see it.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    In the Mix
    The movie pitches itself as a modern-day "Romeo and Juliet," but its execution is so lazy and inept that if the lovers were to die horribly it would come more as relief than tragedy. Sadly, in this respect, as in every other, In the Mix disappoints.
  4. Just Friends
    The infectious high spirits of the performers help to carry the day.
  5. Rent
    If the great movie musicals are the ones that transport us to some heady superreality, the only place Rent takes us to is the Nederlander Theatre.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Yours, Mine and Ours
    Likable (if not especially funny).
  7. 39 Pounds of Love
    Despite Menkin's clear belief that he's crafted a rousing true-life drama, his film plays like a cliché-ridden, painfully self-conscious Hollywood melodrama about a noble person with disabilities.
  8. The Libertine
    The picture is an enormous disappointment... The result is one of the most self-consciously grimy movies on record - it looks as if the negative were developed in a mud bath.
  9. Syriana
    Seldom have form, content and cultural sensibility been so excitably aligned as in this fascinating, exasperating film about the unholy marriage of power politics and global business.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Streets of Legend
    First-time director Joey Curtis shows inklings of a future as an accomplished cinematographer, his digital videography lending some scenes a mesmerizingly pixellated quality and others the hectic blur of a surveillance video.
  11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    Came alive only in the presence of a supposed dead man -- specifically, the nefarious Lord Voldemort.
  12. Walk the Line
    An engaging biopic that would totally lack surprise were it not for Reese Witherspoon, and a healthy touch of ambivalence about the populist myth that bound The Man in Black to his adoring public.
  13. Oxygono
    It's a mean-spirited exercise in stilted outrageousness.
  14. Private
    Selected as Italy's entry for best foreign film at this year's Academy Awards, Private was disqualified for not being predominantly in Italian. A pity, since this meticulously nonpartisan film, even as it makes the case for passive resistance, shows what devastating lack of appeal the strategy has for young Palestinians.
  15. Breakfast on Pluto
    Jordan is trying for a surrealist romp, and it's as coy and callow as you'd expect from a movie with a lead character nicknamed Kitten.
  16. Gilles' Wife
    All but a silent movie, Frédéric Fonteyne’s strikingly atmospheric film - adapted by Philippe Blasband and Marion Hänsel from a 1937 novel - relies on the extraordinarily mobile face of Emmanuelle Devos to express the pain of a woman who has no language for her inner turmoil.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Syrian Bride
    By crafting its message in mostly understated strokes, The Syrian Bride touches your heart, which you might not even fully realize until its deft, wordless final moments sweep by you.
  18. Undertaking Betty
    It's rarely a good sign when a movie feels obliged to add the words "a fable" beneath its main title -- and Undertaking Betty is no exception.
  19. Derailed
    Directed by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström, who's clearly new at the genre, this aptly named movie is riddled with obvious parallels, crude moral talking points, a script so awful it's practically avant-garde, and a vain attempt at comic relief by RZA.
  20. Zathura: A Space Adventure
    The result is a glorious low-tech pleasure that may be the most lyrical, phantasmagoric boys' adventure story since Joe Dante's Explorers.
  21. Bee Season
    McGehee and Siegel's ornate structure and editing stay just this side of tricky, as does their borderline-goofy use of special effects to make us see the world (and the words) through Eliza's anxious eyes.
  22. Ellie Parker
    Fun, scattershot Hollywood spoof.
  23. Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic
    For all its shock-driven, laugh-out-loud moments, what makes Jesus so entertaining is that it puts you in the presence of a dementedly sharp mind -- one that understands that leftist subversion doesn't have to coddle or breast-feed the choir.
  24. Cape of Good Hope
    Grounded in the easy rhythms of daily life, this charming little film shows unexpected grit in sequences set in the white household where Lindiwe works, a place so oppressive that it suddenly seems way past time for South African movie characters - and their home audience - to experience a dose or two of Hollywood-style wish fulfillment.
  25. Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    Even more problematic is the script's clumsy, sprawling architecture, Sheridan's clubfooted sense of pacing and his grubby, indistinct visuals. The only upside? The Chieftains aren't on the soundtrack.
  26. Chicken Little
    Chicken Little is a clunky, arbitrarily plotted, over-caffeinated spritz that, despite colorfully visualizing a world of suburbanized animals, shifts from social-outcast comedy to underdog clichés to War of the Worlds mayhem as if the filmmakers were an improv troupe slamming through genre requests.
  27. Jarhead
    Curiously, Jarhead transforms Swofford himself (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) from the book’s duty-bound youth, desperate to live up to his father's military legacy, into an enigmatic voyeur whose feelings and motivations are rarely made clear.
  28. The Dying Gaul
    If you cut through Lucas' thickets of self-reflexivity, metaphysical mumbo jumbo and banal potshots at media violence, there are three ace performances here by actors who can elevate and enliven even as mediocre a piece of material as this.
  29. Gay Sex in the 70s
    It's fair to assume that most viewers likely to see the film, whose title is the very definition of truth in advertising, already own the knowledge being sold.
  30. I Love Your Work
    The filmmaking is actually quite polished, and Ribisi is fascinating to watch -- his fluttery weirdness has never seemed more grounded and resonant, turning Gray's self-destructive egoism into near tragedy.
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