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. A Tale of Two Sisters
    While all the pieces don't quite add up in the end, as memory, fantasy and delusion collide, the film succeeds again and again at pulling you to the edge of your seat and keeping you there.
  2. Bandido
    Director Roger Christian (Battlefield Earth -- yes, that Battlefield Earth) and screenwriters Scott Duncan and Ned Kerwin have been influenced more by James Bond than El Mariachi–style spaghetti Westerns.
  3. Blade: Trinity
    By and large, the jokes fall flat, and the entire film often seems as fatigued as its star.
  4. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    Born Into Brothels will break your heart, then warm it up and leave you with that 7-Up longing to know what happens next to Zana's kids.
  5. Closer
    Strip away the cavernous lofts, the minimalist art galleries and the pricey consulting rooms, and you have four characters unable to earn their keep with the audience.
  6. House of Flying Daggers
    The most seamless piece of sensuous expressionism Zhang has created since "Ju Dou" (1990).
  7. After Midnight
    Rich in lovingly assembled silent-film clips, as well as in intimate views of the magnificent Mole, this impassioned yet somewhat too precious fable from writer-director Davide Ferrario feels calculated to make a cineaste swoon, and yet . . . it never quite does.
  8. Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
    Game Over provides no answers.
  9. The Green Butchers
    While the acting is top-notch, the real star of the film is the script.
  10. The Aryan Couple
    We get director John Daly's feel-good tedium and a waste of a performance by the magnificent Landau.
  11. A Very Long Engagement
    Shuttles between schoolboy humor, calculated savagery and, at the end, a rank sentimentalism in which love all too easily conquers all.
  12. Easy
    In forced, quirky tedium, it drags us through love triangles, mommy issues and crying jags that make you want to shake this chick.
  13. Ae Fond Kiss...
    Gradually, and with a kind of inquisitive generosity, the filmmaker's scope expands to take in Casim's parents and two sisters, whose public shame and private despair at having the only son move in with a “goree” - a white girl - is made palpably, wrenchingly real.
  14. Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
    A remarkably clear-eyed look back at a moment in which real revolution seemed possible - even probable - in America's streets.
  15. Purple Butterfly
    Hectic, lyrical, swooningly romantic and almost unwatchably brutal, Purple Butterfly deploys a modern Asian gangster-movie aesthetic to tell a love story of Shakespearean dimensions.
  16. Straight-Jacket
    Writer-director Richard Day, whose debut feature, the drag comedy Girls Will Be Girls, was shamefully neglected by critics and audiences alike, proves again that he's the new master of the catty one-liner, and he's also becoming a striking visual stylist.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Alexander
    What Stone has delivered instead is no folie de grandeur, but rather the last thing one would have expected from him: an honorable failure.
  18. Christmas with the Kranks
    Other lumps of coal in this celluloid stocking include director Joe Roth's leaden pacing - like trudging through heavy snow - and screenwriter Chris Columbus' tireless affinity for pain gags.
  19. Notre musique
    Strikes me as one of Godard's most accessible works - one in which the graying, stubbly maestro, who turns 74 today, presents himself and his ideas to the audience in a less combative way than he sometimes has in the past.
  20. Paper Clips
    There is something quite heartening about watching these kids earnestly guide others around their memorial.
  21. National Treasure
    Can't match an ounce of the suspense generated by contestants frantically buying airline tickets on Bruckheimer's own TV money quest, "The Amazing Race." This movie is a fortune wasted.
  22. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
    The movie is driven almost entirely by its exhilaratingly subversive characters.
  23. Bad Education
    It's the director's most complexly ordered film to date - a labyrinth of ids, egos and alter egos waiting around blind corners - and may be the movies' most deliriously inventive narrative spiral since "Adaptation."
  24. Fear and Trembling
    Testud, who learned to speak Japanese phonetically for the role, is nothing short of sublime, her expressive face morphing from tear-stained frustration to slaphappy delirium with the speed of lightning flashing across the Tokyo sky.
  25. Ya lyublyu tebya
    Though the progress of this ill-matched love triangle is fun to follow in its self-consciously wacky way, the movie's chief pleasures, at least to a Western eye, are anthropological.
  26. Days of Being Wild (re-release)
    Like Proust's madeleine unleashing a flood of reminiscences in the narrator of his novel, Wong works the elements of his aesthetic — music, beautiful people and emotion — into a mood that so overtakes you it's nearly impossible to emerge from his films without feeling slightly drunk.
  27. After the Sunset
    Instantly forgettable caper comedy.
  28. Finding Neverland
    Surprisingly wan film.
  29. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
    If you liked "Love, Actually," you'll love this too, another small jewel in the crown of unabashedly commercial, cheerfully middlebrow, eminently exportable British fluff.
  30. Kinsey
    The movie's strength lies in its portrayal of a many-sided genius, as manipulative as he was charming and persuasive, monomaniacal to a fault, generous and sweet yet utterly clueless about the emotional havoc he wrought in the name of science.
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