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. Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die
    While your personal estimation of this conservative counterprogrammer will depend largely on your politics, Chetwynd and company at least attempt to score their points honestly.
  2. Postmen in the Mountains
    Slow and stately.
  3. Happy Hour
    LaPaglia is a fine actor, but not even he can redeem such bathos.
  4. Sex Is Comedy
    Those who are already in her (Breillat) camp will find much to feed on in this at once intellectualized and accessible, documentary-style peek inside the head of a passionately driven woman and artist.
  5. Team America: World Police
    Accomplished yet uneven feature.
  6. Shall We Dance
    Shall We Dance?, which roams all over the emotional map without landing anywhere, is an unwieldy mess that gives every impression of having been made under a mandate to fill the Miramax crowd-pleaser slot.
  7. Being Julia
    But for all Bening’s high emoting and her trademark giggle, here overused to the point of annoyance, for most of its length Being Julia offers little insight into a woman whose life is ruled by theatrics.
  8. Hair Show
    Despite the claw-baring premise, this comes off as a tame, lame female cousin of "Barbershop," due to a maddening absence of storytelling momentum, editing continuity, fresh humor and even a modicum of detail about such a rich cultural topic as urban hair trends.
  9. P.S.
    This sappy stuff gets better direction by Kidd (who made the far superior Roger Dodger) than it deserves, and Linney gives a wonderfully wistful portrayal of urban loneliness.
  10. Moolaadé
    Quite possibly the most buoyant, exuberant film ever made on such an unpleasant topic.
  11. Riding the Bullet
    Writer-director Mick Garris has a real feeling for the horror master's melancholy worldview - love is loss - but he's too reverent toward the original story, the ending of which, both on the page and, now, on the screen, lands with an overly elegiac thud.
  12. Saints and Soldiers
    The triumph here is a matter of craftsmanship rather than art, but it's rare enough even on that level for a film to be worth celebrating.
  13. Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession
    A marvelous tribute to a heady age.
  14. The Final Cut
    The movie becomes so cluttered with concept and design, it fails to get even a toehold on the humanistic subtext it's clearly reaching for. A pallid performance by Mira Sorvino, as Williams' girlfriend and advocate for the fully lived and recorded life, doesn't help.
  15. The Scandal
    Director Lee Je-Yong gives the book a makeover full of wit and startling beauty as a tragicomedy of Korean manners at the dawn of the Chosun dynasty in the late 18th century, a period known for its gravitas.
  16. Vera Drake
    As a character study Vera Drake is coarsely drawn, and as pro-choice polemic, it’s both a blunt instrument and a red herring. Which may be why, among all the moviegoers who staggered from the theater wielding soaked tissues, I was among the few who remained dry of eye, and raised of brow.
  17. Friday Night Lights
    Country singer and sometime actor Tim McGraw excels as the bitter, besotted ex-Panther who can't cut his kid enough slack to follow his own game plan.
  18. Raise Your Voice
    Duff, who became a teen-set role model portraying Lizzie McGuire for Disney, has sold over four million records and toured to packed houses, yet screenwriter Sam Schreiber and director Sean McNamara, both making feature debuts, set her up to sing just one song through to completion.
  19. Around the Bend
    The final revelation which, however anticipated, however contrived, stings just enough to make it feel like life.
  20. Primer
    A dense and dazzling science-fiction mind-bender unassumingly dressed up in a tech geek’s short-sleeved oxford shirt, pocket protector and safety goggles.
  21. Go Further
    Without the actor’s name and amiably demented grin, Go Further would be an unspeakably tedious and preachy travelogue. With them, this insupportably long home movie, unremarkably directed by Ron Mann, is merely dull.
  22. Stage Beauty
    The movie blows a fresh wind of disrespect, high drama and lush romanticism through that stolidly middlebrow subgenre, the period drama.
  23. Yes Nurse! No Nurse!
    A little of this goes a long way.
  24. The Hillside Strangler
    A good horse kick, or a fistful of Valium, may help you get through this relentlessly sadistic exercise with your soul more or less intact.
  25. Vodka Lemon
    Exceedingly dry and precise and slow-paced comedy.
  26. Taxi
    The glitch, beyond the rote story, is that while she's an infectiously upbeat screen presence, Latifah is not, inherently, a major laugh generator, and neither, it would appear, is Fallon.
  27. Tarnation
    Caouette lifts his story clear out of the victimized whine that bogs down so many confessional memoirs and offers the viewer instead an intimate look inside his ravaged yet loving head, at once street-smart and haloed by the naiveté of a young saint.
  28. Ladder 49
    Phoenix, who initially seemed the kind of actor who was too cool, too angry, to appear in studio pap such as this, is a magnetic presence, despite the numbing pathos surrounding him, but isn't that what we used to say about Travolta?
  29. Shark Tale
    Falls prey to the lazy assumption that a parade of whiz-bang CGI will cover for the absence of a muscular story.
  30. I Heart Huckabees
    A fresh, buoyant, mischievous and rather jolly meditation - if that's the word for a movie as divinely nuts as this one is - on the meaning of life in an unhappy world.
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