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. Hotel Room
    Judging by the stilted nature of both the dialogue and acting, that's what this film is -- a thesis project better suited to a grad-night exhibition.
  2. Big Fish
    The whole seems disjointed, incoherent and lacking in the startling originality of the other two Edwards (Scissorhands and Wood) who, half a career back, poured from Burton's distended outsider imagination.
  3. Honey
    Hinges almost completely on the taut body and delectable beauty of Jessica Alba, but is otherwise so riddled with limp clichés that it doesn't even qualify as a guilty pleasure.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Last Samurai
    The only history that bears a real influence on The Last Samurai is the history of Hollywood moviemaking, and the unfortunate way it has of turning extraordinary stories into hopelessly ordinary ones.
  5. Monsieur Ibrahim
    Excusez-moi, but I'd rather see Omar Sharif punching out croupiers in a casino than dispensing comfort and joy in this sugared-up tale.
  6. What Alice Found
    Bell forces us to see characters from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks in a distinctly human light, neither ennobling nor pitying.
  7. Man of the Year
    Bad improv is bad improv, and it’s a potent virus.
  8. My Flesh and Blood
    Despite, or perhaps because of, the jollity that reigns in this household, one wants to ask the Mia Farrow question: Why does this woman keep surrounding herself with others who are completely reliant on her?
  9. En la ciudad sin límites
    A career best for the daughter of Charlie Chaplin.
  10. In America
    The film is not emotionally subtle, but it is beautifully shot, by cinematographer Declan Quinn, with a grainy, impressionistic eye that mimics a perpetual dance of shards of remembered experience.
  11. The Triplets of Belleville
    This divinely eccentric movie feels as if it came straight to the screen from one man’s wild and wantonly free imagination.
  12. Bad Santa
    Gets stuck in a rut. Hearing Santa say “f---” isn't nearly as funny the 50th time as it is the first 49.
  13. The Haunted Mansion
    The movie is a funereally paced downer.
  14. Timeline
    Scenes stop and start abruptly, and the sub–"Lord of the Rings" action is more dulling than rousing -- and yet it can be funny.
  15. The Cooler
    The romance that ensues between Macy and Bello (both of whom are terrific) is exactly the kind of mature, sexy adult relationship that people complain doesn’t exist in movies anymore.
  16. 21 Grams
    Where "Amores Perros" was a feast of energy, wit and imagination, 21 Grams is like a starvation diet -- a movie that wallows so profoundly in its own misery that watching it is like atoning for some sin you didn't commit.
  17. The Cat in the Hat
    Myers is the movie's fatal flaw, squeezing out the other characters who fatten the plot, mostly with an eye to parents.
  18. Gothika
    Given her (Halle Berry) biggest part since winning Oscar, she responds with a zeal that's more than the movie deserves.
  19. The Barbarian Invasions
    A reunion movie, and while it's often very funny, it has none of the self-satisfied piety or strenuous jokiness of "The Big Chill." Its mood shifts between defiant exuberance and wistful contemplation, but it's never mawkish.
  20. The Big Empty
    More amiable than laugh-out-loud funny, the film pokes along, buoyed by the motel's bright Hawaiian color scheme, and a moonlit desert finale that's awfully pretty.
  21. Blindness
    As a calling card for the stylistic talents of a new filmmaker, writer-director Anna Chi's first feature is a success. As drama, it's a dud.
  22. The Missing
    What neither Howard nor his screenwriter, Ken Kaufman, seem to realize is that The Missing is that much bleaker and more unsettling when its horrors spring forth from the land itself and from the souls of wayward men.
  23. Anything But Love
    The movie's chief liability, though, is Rose herself, who also co-scripted with first-time director Robert Cary and who registers several notches below Nia Vardalos on the totem of unlikely double-threats.
  24. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    It is a dull and boring film, pretty as a Turner landscape and as sweetly becalmed as the glassy Sargasso Sea in which the men of the unfortunately named “Surprise” find themselves trapped for what felt, to me at least, like weeks on end.
  25. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    The movie looks like it cost a fortune, with Dean Cundey's glistening widescreen compositions and Bill Brzeski's towering, storybook sets providing the backdrop for seamless visual effects. What's more, it's equally rich in ideas.
  26. Tupac: Resurrection
    Needless to say, other voices -- any other voices -- would have given this legacy-obsessed film an invaluable context for such a fiery, scrutinized subject, but Tupac: Resurrection (with that fabulously unsubtle title) is intended to be more video bible than textbook.
  27. The Visual Bible: The Gospel of John
    It aims simply to relate a great and enveloping story -- one that may lead us to ponder the things that unite (rather than distance) peoples of differing belief systems, and may compel us to marvel at the many wonderful and horrible endeavors undertaken in the name of religion.
  28. The Singing Forest
    Bad movies can be a hoot, but rather than campy, Ameer appears to be dead serious; and it's hard to feel anything but fury toward a filmmaker whose opening title sequence intersperses black-and-white flashbacks of his sexy young lovers with actual concentration-camp photos of stacked, emaciated corpses.
  29. My Architect
    What makes it enthralling is the younger Kahn's openness to a range of emotional responses (his own and others') to his father's life above and below board, and his readiness to turn his own predicament into both entertainment and a provisional kind of puckish wisdom.
  30. Elf
    Charmingly irreverent.
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