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. The Day After Tomorrow
    This highly entertaining spin on eco-catastrophe could turn the most meteorologically challenged among us into Weather Channel freaks.
  2. Soul Plane
    Director Jessy Terrero's spasmodically funny air-travel parody unfailingly counters every one of its genuinely uproarious gags with at least two or three others rooted in retrograde racial panic.
  3. Baadasssss!
    The genuinely fascinating story is one of revolutionary intention and unrelenting grit, but while Mario is a competent enough filmmaker, he has neither the urgency nor, frankly, the chops to make his own movie fire up.
  4. Bukowski: Born into This
    As factoids do-si-do with testimonials from the likes of drinking buddy Sean Penn and fan-boy Bono, the movie all but becomes the very A&E Hagiography for which Bukowski would have had little or no patience.
  5. The Mother
    The Mother winds up unpersuasive, in large part due to writer Hanif Kureishi, who visits on all his mopey characters such calculated savagery, it's hard to care much for them or to get onboard for the hope implied in the hastily stitched-on ending.
  6. Saved!
    Though Saved! is funny and irreverent, Dannelly isn't just taking potshots at fundamentalism. He creates a viable world, then riddles its surface piety with underground transgressions that call into question not Christian belief but slavish, intolerant religious practice.
  7. Wake
    One feels sympathy for the ensemble, which, absent full-bodied characters to inhabit, mug furiously, as if big gestures conjure big themes.
  8. Raising Helen
    Raising Helen is the kind of movie you watch on a plane while muttering “utter crap” under your breath -- and then burst into tears.
  9. The Five Obstructions
    From its very first frames it exerts a powerful fascination.
  10. Frankie and Johnny Are Married
    Pressma's intermittently amusing screenplay, some good-natured cameos by a bunch of his famous friends, and an intelligent performance by Chess — playing herself opposite TV regular Alan Rosenberg -- save the day and the relationship.
  11. Love Me If You Dare
    The rueful ghost of François Truffaut hovers over writer-director Yann Samuell's wonderfully capricious tale of Gallic lovers with no idea of when to say finis.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Control Room
    Memorable, if not fully satisfying, film.
  13. My Mother Likes Women
    For a movie with a lesbian theme, My Mother Likes Women is absurdly coy about gay sex. It may be the most heterosexually minded film about lesbians ever made.
  14. Stateside
    If the contrast between Marine life and blue-blood luxury sometimes pulls the film in awkward directions, Anselmo's perceptive fondness for all his characters -- parents, children, grunts, even drill sergeants -- more than compensates.
  15. Twist
    A stripling of 24, Tierney has a very young man's immature passion for unrelieved misery, which borders at times on the tedious, at others on the downright comical.
  16. Shrek 2
    As it turns out, Shrek 2 is one of the funniest movies I've seen in years. But I'm far from sure that it's a kids' movie anymore, even though, like its predecessor, it's a thoroughly sugared-up reading of the book, by veteran New Yorker cartoonist William Steig, on which both films are based.
  17. Breakin' All the Rules
    Yet another unfunny buppie sex comedy in the manner of "The Brothers," "Two Can Play That Game" and "Deliver Us From Eva."
  18. Troy
    The thunderous clashes between armies of computer-generated Trojans and Mycenaeans, when they do arrive, feel decidedly un-epic, as though we were watching a child's toy-box war between plastic figurines. Which makes them perfectly in line with the rest of Petersen's artless approach.
  19. After Freedom
    The filmmaker shares with Martin Scorsese an obsession with that classic male triangle of hard man, soft heart and childlike loser, but where so many Scorsese wannabes jettison sociology in favor of mayhem, Babaian burrows into the hearts of these first- and second-generation immigrants.
  20. Carandiru
    Babenco's kindly, concerned eye seeks out the humanity in even the worst of his characters, and by the time he re-creates the massacre, with shocking power and force, one has been equally captivated and appalled at the world he shows. The result is one of the richest prison movies in years.
  21. Coffee and Cigarettes
    It's worth fidgeting through the mediocre stuff to get to three good pieces. In one, Cate Blanchett turns in a tour de force as both herself and her aggressive, resentful Aussie cousin in an awkward encounter that captures the pathological relationship between ordinary people and celebrities.
  22. A Day Without a Mexican
    A terrific premise is mangled to a pulp, then beaten to death in this forced mockumentary.
  23. A Slipping-Down Life
    Struggles valiantly to keep its head above whimsy, and though the movie finally succumbs to an excess of heartwarming, it's a promising college try from a first-time writer-director.
  24. Springtime in a Small Town
    Simply put, it represents the work of a filmmaker so exhilaratingly in command of his craft that he can, among other things, turn a single image of two people standing next to each other -- fully clothed, their bodies not quite touching -- into one of the most sublimely erotic moments we have ever beheld on the screen.
  25. Strayed
    There's no emotional weight to either character, or to this far-from-dangerous liaison. All you can do is watch the slight story sputter, and try to figure out whether Bèart's formidable lips were made by God or man.
  26. With All Deliberate Speed
    By cinematic standards, not exactly scintillating stuff: The mix of archival materials, talking heads and dramatic readings is strictly PBS 101. Filmmaker Peter Gilbert's great achievement lies in his integration of disparate historical threads and voices into one steadily paced, riveting tale.
  27. Valentin
    It's not that Noya is bad as kid actors go, but a pair of dewy, crossed eyes and a beyond-his-years melancholy do not an entire movie make.
  28. New York Minute
    Reverts to a fire-sale slapstick scenario that includes multiple tumbles into toilets/sewers/ dumpsters; a visit to a Harlem beauty shop that's all homily-spouting mammies and swishy, finger-snapping dandies; and the attempted inducement of a constipated dog's bowel movement.
  29. Van Helsing
    It's all cliffhangers, with no downtime in between.
  30. The Mudge Boy
    (Emile Hirsch) a miraculous young actor.
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