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 8.7 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 Tracker
    None of Tracker's near-fatal missteps in execution or conception, however, prevents this superbly acted film, in the end, from becoming an engrossing study of race and history in Australia, or making the powerful indictment it intends to make.
  2. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    It makes a convincing argument that Dowd's personal history is a kind of history of the 20th century itself, encompassing the era's art, science, commerce and politics.
  3. Chasing Liberty
    The movie's saving grace is newcomer Goode, who has what they used to call smoldering good looks, and who can, not so incidentally, actually act.
  4. My Baby's Daddy
    Strictly Urban Comedy 101, as if the filmmakers had neither the inclination nor the chops to move the genre past timeworn stereotypes.
  5. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
    It makes an eloquent case against the death penalty, especially when imposed on the mentally incompetent. For if one thing is clear by the time she went to the execution chamber, it's that Wuornos is barking mad, her eyes wild and vengeful, yet also, on some level, already dead.
  6. The Battle of Algiers
    A classic of politically engaged filmmaking, based on a book by Saadi Yacef, a former FLN leader who also produced the picture and played a version of himself.
  7. Secret Things
    Though his work has been little seen outside of France, writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau's reputation as one of the most terribles of his country's filmmaking enfants precedes him. This 2002 film offers ample evidence as to why.
  8. Japanese Story
    The quiet and intimacy of what is essentially a two-character piece are well juxtaposed by Brooks against the vast desert expanses of her home country, captured in sumptuous wide-screen cinematography by the great Ian Baker.
  9. Millennium Mambo
    Jean-Luc Godard famously declared that all it takes to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Both turn up in Millennium Mambo, a ravishing bauble about la dolce vita in Taiwan, but frankly, the gun's an afterthought. This is a movie about the girl.
  10. Cheaper by the Dozen
    Nobody here, especially Martin, looks as if he's having much fun, apart from a dizzy cameo by Ashton Kutcher as oldest daughter Piper Perabo's model-actor beau, riffing heavy-handedly on his pretty-boy image, and loving it.
  11. Cold Mountain
    Zellweger looks like a big movie star roughing it à la Paris Hilton, and as if this weren't distracting enough, the hills are alive with big acting names from both sides of the Atlantic who pop up as help or hindrance to Inman's pilgrim's progress while straining, with variable success, for credible Southern twangs.
  12. Paycheck
    Paycheck is too smart for a mindless actioneer, and too slick to capture the full moral weight of Dick's dystopia.
  13. Peter Pan
    The movie belongs quite rightly to Wendy, the most enchanting little girl in English fiction, and to the untrained actress, Rachel Hurd-Wood, who plays her.
  14. The Company
    On the plus side, The Company is directed by Robert Altman, who's clearly drawn in by the rare opportunity of putting ballet on film, and who responds brilliantly...The rest of the time, the film fails to catch us up in the workaday intrigues of its characters (most of whom are played by real Joffrey dancers) the way Altman can when he's working in top form.
  15. The Young Black Stallion
    IMAX magnifies everything, including flaws, which are legion in this listless, awkward prequel to the 1979 movie based on the novel by Walter and Steven Farley.
  16. Monster
    This gifted actress (Charlize Theron), who hasn't always chosen her roles well, treats this as her big chance to show what she can do, and she's convincing enough that you're not constantly looking for a Hollywood star of more than average pulchritude under all the cosmetic baggage.
  17. Mona Lisa Smile
    What makes the movie seem crass is its refusal to present (or even to see) more than one side of any given issue. In the logic of Konner and Rosenthal, here abetted by director Mike Newell, you're either a Jackson Pollock or a Norman Rockwell.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    Morris is a more talented filmmaker than he is an interviewer. Mean-while, McNamara is a subject so complex and so rich in nuance that he requires no cinematic embellishment.
  19. House of Sand and Fog
    Everything about the movie seems excessive to the material. What should have been a small, independent feature without marquee casting -- the story's protagonists, after all, are meant to be the kind of people nobody ever notices.
  20. The Butterfly
    If there's anyone to credit for The Butterfly's eventual triumph over the inherent fatuousness of the material, it's the great Serrault and his tiny leading lady, who matches her elder nearly line for line and look for look.
  21. Calendar Girls
    The real-life calendar girls were actual human beings, and here they're merely comic patsies, lacking the distinctive personalities that made the men of "The Full Monty" so endearing, their final act of revelation so peculiarly dignified.
  22. The Hebrew Hammer
    But the corker-to-groaner ratio heavily favors the latter as the bagel-and-dreidel jokes begin to lose their spark, as does the story
  23. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    The deep satisfaction of The Return of the King is in surrendering ourselves to the finale, in letting Jackson's superb storytelling (with due credit to co-screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) surround us like a blazing campfire tale -- which it does, gloriously.
  24. Prisoner of Paradise
    An extraordinary documentary about the German entertainer Kurt Gerron, has been timed to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Week, but the film would also fit snugly on a double bill with "My Architect."
  25. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    Webber spins a slight but considerably enchanting tale of impossible romance and artistic discovery.
  26. The Statement
    A tolerable thriller.
  27. Love Don't Cost a Thing
    Remains short on charm, purpose or laughs.
  28. Something's Gotta Give
    Jack, the actor, smiles obligingly, but you can practically feel him rolling his eyes.
  29. Stuck on You
    By the time of its medical-operation climax, Stuck On You has focused so much on ennobling the disabled that it comes to resemble a segment of the Jerry Lewis telethon.
  30. AKA
    So never mind the Xmas schlock -- go treat yourself at once to this sensationally entertaining soul food.
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