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. To Be and to Have
    To Be and To Have works in the grandest tradition of documentary filmmaking -- it keeps company with a small, specific place going about its business, and from it parses the whole world.
  2. Blue Hill Avenue
    The film is naive in its glorification of violence and vengeance.
  3. Cabin Fever
    The result is something neither scary nor funny.
  4. Matchstick Men
    Its characters are as flimsy and expendable as the title suggests, while only the most gullible of viewers (i.e., those who've never seen a David Mamet picture) will likely be duped by the painfully et cetera who's-conning-whom antics or the mounds of forced sentimentality under which they're ill-disguised.
  5. Once Upon a Time in Mexico
    The movie is stolen by the gorgeous, droll and hilarious Depp. The movie crackles when he's onscreen and only fitfully sparks when he's not.
  6. Dummy
    Milla Jovovich, as Steven's Yiddish-spouting punk-rocker friend, is so bad, she's downright entertaining.
  7. Lost in Translation
    Fraught with a deep sadness and sense of yearning. Yet, it is also an enormously -- at times, even uproariously -- comedic film, not because it feels any obligation to be "funny" in some contrived, screenwriterly sort of way, but because Coppola has set out to make a movie set to the rhythms of real (rather than reel) life.
  8. Millennium Actress
    Satoshi innovates not by pushing off into more extreme realms of adolescent fantasy, but by using all the resources of animation to tell complex dramatic stories, resources that in his hands seem almost limitless.
  9. So Close
    The protracted final sequence, which involves balletic swordplay worthy of the famous scene in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," will take your breath away.
  10. The Year That Trembled
    There's a nice reunion of Martin Mull and Fred Willard as beleaguered Ohio parents, and a spacy turn from Henry Gibson, but the tentative muddle of the interlocking stories makes you wish that Craven could live up to his ambitions.
  11. The Same River Twice
    Far from an arthritic exercise in hippie nostalgia. There is a seasoned richness and vivid specificity to these lives, for all their hurts and losses. Yet the movie is shot through with an undeniable note of elegiac wistfulness.
  12. Carnage
    Carnage is a film about the violence of living, of finding and keeping a place in the world, and though it's a work of preternaturally sophisticated philosophy from a director who's barely out of her 20s, this beautiful, bizarre movie could function quite well without its capable screenplay.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star
    Occasionally funny, cameo-speckled marshmallow.
  14. The Order
    All the fine cinematography -- lots of beating wings and impossibly large dust motes floating through slanting beams of sunlight -- can't hide the sad fact that the second half of the film delivers none of the shocks and starts required of atmospheric horror.
  15. Home Room
    There are moments of real power here -- mostly courtesy of Phillips ("Dawson's Creek"), who does a remarkable job of turning her caricature into a character -- but even more of astounding naiveté.
  16. Party Monster
    There's really only one reason to see Party Monster, and that's Seth Green's scene-stealing performance as former (and somewhat reluctant) New York club kid James St. James, the boy who would be queen.
  17. Taking Sides
    Stellan Skarsgård's deceptively low-key performance as the beleaguered musician -- furtive, indignant, drowning in self-pity blended with a kind of ruined nobility -- pushes the emotional temperature to a quiet fever pitch.
  18. Grisbi (re-release)
    Grisbi is hard (new subtitles bring out the chill of the gangsters' argot) and gray: a meditation on what we are left with when life has let us down, played out in the haunted eyes of Jean Gabin.
  19. Where's the Party Yaar?
    Mathews has obvious storytelling chops, and a sharp eye for absurdity. But there are sacred cows in hip, progressive America, too, and the truly fearless satirist has to be a carnivore.
  20. Jeepers Creepers II
    There's greater consistency to it, and considerably more humor, with macabre slapstick and fun-house ghoulishness that, at their best, recall early Tim Burton.
  21. Civil Brand
    There are also strong flickers here of a film that might have been.
  22. Once Upon a Time in the Midlands
    A movie saved by great acting.
  23. The Backyard
    Though engaging from beginning to end, be warned that this is also harrowing, utterly depressing stuff.
  24. The Other Side of the Bed
    The dancing is dazzling in director Emilio Martínez-Lázaro's The Other Side of the Bed, but the movie itself is a dud.
  25. Suddenly
    The 26-year-old Argentine director Diego Lerman shows a sure hand in his debut, from his contrasty black-and-white compositions to his sly, jumpy edits, reminiscent of Godard.
  26. Dog Days
    Dog Days is in fact a bleak but deeply felt humanism -- a yearning that we might all learn to better love our neighbors and, perhaps more importantly, ourselves.
  27. Don't Tempt Me
    Perhaps only a filmmaker from a country steeped in Catholicism could turn out a consistently sharp and profane "divine comedy" (the title means "blessed hell") that is also, for the most part, theologically correct.
  28. Dust
    Whatever ghost-story intrigue the film musters gives way to a tedious cycle of fighting, screwing, shouting and storytelling stuck together by two hours worth of hard-boiled dialogue gone gummy.
  29. Rana's Wedding
    The movie's wistful tone leavened with breaks into farce recalls Elia Suleiman's superbly controlled "Chronicle of a Disappearance."
  30. Venus Boyz
    Empty details pile up, awful performance art is doled out, talking heads are intermittently identified, and the late Brandon Teena is evoked to little real purpose.
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