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. Godzilla
    Can now be appreciated not just as a minor classic of tragic destruction, but also as a somber exploration of conflicted postwar emotions.
  2. A Foreign Affair
    The photography is clear and colorful, the acting just fine, and the pace steady. However, the wan script by Geert Heetebrij imbues the brothers with so little personality that their respective transformations -- pack no emotional punch.
  3. Oasis
    At once a romantic melodrama, a sharp social comedy and a fierce political commentary on Korean society's cruelty to social outcasts. It's also a triumph of artistic indirection: Not a single scene plays out the way you expect. This is a film that gives humanism back its good name.
  4. Off the Lip
    What comes off as clever at first quickly wears out -- even the sudden cutaways to spectacular surf footage can't save this wipeout.
  5. Seeing Other People
    Begins as a refreshingly subversive departure from the Hollywood studios' cookie-cutter romances, but the thin script can't sustain that initial charge, and it soon flattens out, like a punctured comic balloon.
  6. Super Size Me
    The speed with which a healthy, relatively young stud can morph into a tub of lard is as horrifying as it is entertaining to watch.
  7. Superstar in a Housedress
    Slow-starting but ultimately invigorating debut film by Craig Highberger.
  8. Envy
    Even the relatively successful pairing of neckless maestro of anxiety Stiller with the indomitably effervescent Black gets bogged down by Steve Adams' aimless screenplay. Would the Barry Levinson who once made "Diner" please wake up and pull himself together?
  9. Godsend
    Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos appear to be vying for the title of filmdom's least-convincing married couple, while Robert De Niro, as the movie's modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, takes his own expert career slumming to a new depth -- he's become an evil clone of a once-great actor.
  10. Mean Girls
    Lohan is a warm and engaging presence, but she's completely outshone by the bad girls, and when they're offscreen, Mean Girls is an oddly restrained, barely plotted movie.
  11. Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
    Sadly for dramatic purposes, Jones' achievements seemed effortless, and the movie could really use the odd Ty Cobb wig-out.
  12. Since Otar Left
    The kind of small film -- morally ambiguous, graceful in its admission of imperfect knowledge, at once specific and universal -- that expands our understanding of the emotional economy of family life, with its ebb and flow of love and hostility, secrecy and egregious candor. You must see this film.
  13. Bulgarian Lovers
    For his first feature in 15 years, Spanish filmmaker Eloy de la Iglesia has made a witty, unsentimental class comedy.
  14. People Say I'm Crazy
    His is a valiant story, though it doesn't quite work as a nearly 90-minute documentary -- the Cadigans simply don’t have enough material.
  15. The Saddest Music in the World
    The weirdest, freest-wheeling, most obsessively inventive motion picture you'll see this year. Parts are confusing, parts are berserk, parts are exasperatingly slow. But in a world of cookie-cutter movies, Maddin's movies are like nobody else's -- funny, Romantic, as deliriously overwrought as a drug lord's wedding.
  16. Pride and Prejudice
    Scottish director Andrew Black keeps the pace brisk and the images sunny, while screenwriters Anne Black (his wife), Jason Faller and Katherine Swigert afford lively dialogue that, without pressing the issue, hones in on some insightful parallels between the morals of Austen's society and those of contemporary Mormon culture.
  17. 13 Going on 30
    The director of 13 Going on 30, Gary Winick, was unable to infuse this material with either the sustained screwball cadences of his earlier "Tadpole" or an emotional resonance comparable to that of his superb "The Tic Code."
  18. Man on Fire
    A schizophrenic outing from habitually hysterical director Tony Scott (True Romance, The Fan), Man on Fire is a movie of two unreconcilable halves.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Close Your Eyes
    As Willing moves the movie along its well-worn, Ruth Rendell–ish path, it accrues a certain fusty British charm, along with the requisite (and, for this reviewer, most satisfying) amounts of satanic symbolism, creepy mute children and abandoned gothic churches.
  20. Morlang
    Morlang has surprises up its sleeve that even the seasoned genre fan may not see coming.
  21. The Twilight Samurai
    Perhaps because this is director Yoji Yamada's 77th movie, every aspect of his filmmaking is placidly assured and meaningful.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Agronomist
    Although the film may be about 20 percent overweight, the human story of a man who -- for four decades -- spat in the eye of his tormentors and gleefully accepted his role as a latter-day Sisyphus commands the viewer's attention.
  23. Faster
    An awesome introduction to the sport and the outspoken personalities -- riders, mechanics, engineers, lorry drivers, commentators, fans and girlfriends -- who support it.
  24. Sacred Planet
    Despite his obvious passion, Long never fully ties together the human and animal footage, and so the film feels disjointed, as if two different documentaries are being fused into one.
  25. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    Vol. 2 is the most sheerly enjoyable movie I've seen in ages, allowing for all the intimacy that was missing from its predecessor -- this time, the violence feels PERSONAL. Yet this film, too, would be richer if it didn't stand alone, but rather were part of one grand grind-house epic.
  26. Connie and Carla
    There are funny moments -- a cameo from Debbie Reynolds, an Evita sing-along -- but the film grows progressively more dispirited.
  27. The Punisher
    As bad as the movie is, when it tries to be funny -- a hired killer who sings to his victims, a fat man named Bumpo, and an interminable fight scene choreographed to “La donna è mobile” -- it somehow manages to get several degrees worse.
  28. Gypsy 83
    Karen Black gives her sharpest performance in years as Bambi LeBleau, a roadside-dive karaoke hostess who invites the kids back to her house for a night of booze and lounge classics.
  29. A Thousand Peace Clouds Encircle the Sky
    If first-time writer-director Julián Hernández lets his knotted narrative get away from him too often, he nevertheless shows a miraculous sense of style for a 31-year-old.
  30. Lana's Rain
    The titular precipitation in Lana’s Rain is a manifestation of the badness in the world -- but here, badness is pure Lifetime Channel.
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