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. Swimming Pool
    All shiny surfaces and clever moves designed to blur the lines between fantasy and reality and uncover the kinkiness that lies within us all.
  2. Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
    "Legally Blonde" was a splashy, wide-screen near musical, a movie made in the spirit of Elle Woods herself. Legally Blonde 2 is Elle Woods' eulogy.
  3. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
    Here's a picture that you actually want to see a second time, not for the sake of further wrapping your head around its gnarly conceptual matrix, but because of the sheer visceral charge it provides. Here, at long last, is a summer movie -- like its precursors in the Terminator canon -- worth its weight in cybernetic organisms.
  4. Friday Night
    Beguiling and intoxicating.
  5. On_Line
    As the characters mix and mingle, pouring out their tales of woe online and fumbling real-life connections, Weintrob leaves no cliché unturned in getting to root causes of behavior.
  6. 28 Days Later...
    The movie is mercifully uncontaminated by the smarty-pants self-reflexiveness that has sucked the lifeblood from nearly all post-"Scream" horror pictures. Clever enough not to be too clever, Boyle and Garland play their story straight -- they just want to give you the creeps -- and, by so doing, bring the undead back to cinematic life.
  7. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
    Can't sustain its manic pitch, or work the McMiracle needed to overcome a script (credited to three writers, though more were no doubt afoot) that's less a story than a sales pitch.
  8. From Justin to Kelly
    Full of gumption, Clarkson and Guarini soldier on, seemingy unaware that the perfectly adequate singing voices that brought them to the big screen are being drowned out, on a half-dozen same-sounding songs, by an overlayered backup group.
  9. Alex & Emma
    It's like a three-times-too-long sitcom pilot missing the laugh track.
  10. Francis Ford Coppola Presents: The Legend of Suriyothai
    The characters are flat creatures of duty, and the film is more a tale of the collective will of a state than of the rugged individuals behind it.
  11. Hulk
    The Hulk is a beautiful movie, but it's unlikely to win points as a monster flick -- it's too elegant, too whimsical.
  12. No Turning Back
    Heartfelt yet overly schematic debut feature.
  13. Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd
    Levy, Luis Guzman, Cheri Oteri -- utterly wasted. At 82 minutes it feels longer than “Lawrence of Arabia” -- and a lot less funny.
  14. The Hard Word
    The Hard Word’s greatest betrayal, however, is of its cast, of Pearce (hamming it up as the charismatic antihero) and Griffiths (as sexy as ever, but more or less abandoned by the movie midway through), who give it their all but get very little in return.
  15. Herod's Law
    A bracingly sarcastic political comedy -- it opens on a bound copy of Mexico's Constitution, stuffed with cash -- possessed of a baleful satiric eye for hypocrisy and greed, a delicious anti-clerical bent, and pitch-perfect comic timing.
  16. Rugrats Go Wild
    Paramount Pictures proudly informs us that the PG rating is for “mild, crude humor.” Too mild, too crude by far. If I were you, I’d take the wee ones and run for the vastly superior “Finding Nemo.”
  17. Hollywood Homicide
    Nothing, in fact, really fits together, most notably the partnership of Ford and Hartnett: Looking weathered yet professional, Ford carries what he can, but pretty and sullen Hartnett barely comes to life, leaving his partner stranded, and straining.
  18. Tycoon: A New Russian
    Lounguine’s biopic is chilly and convoluted, too eventful to be boring, but never taking the time to immerse us emotionally in Makovski's world.
  19. The Heart of Me
    While director Thaddeus O'Sullivan has some interesting visual ideas -- his period London is a heavily aestheticized, matte-painted dreamscape -- he never makes an emotional connection to the material the way he did in his fine Irish gangland drama, “Nothing Personal.”
  20. Manito
    Eric Eason's assured debut succeeds in the way Larry Clark's “Kids” succeeded -- through a feel for the rhythms of street life, and some extraordinary casting.
  21. Jet Lag
    Danièle Thompson's romantic comedy is excellent fluff français, leavened with charm, wit and smart observation about the way we love now.
  22. Garmento
    Maher's filmmaking is competent -- the sets are inventive, and all the camera angles match up -- but someone should have warned her that neither she nor her young cast is experienced enough to pull off the line “The only people buying it are the faggots.”
  23. Love the Hard Way
    Long-shelved 2001 clunker.
  24. The Eye
    Genuinely scary, especially when it strays from its lame plot to orchestrate some beautifully chilling set pieces, including one in the world's slowest elevator that'll raise the hairs on the back of even the most weary genre fan's neck.
  25. 2 Fast 2 Furious
    This shaggy-dog sequel is ultimately satisfying for the most low-tech of reasons: The competitive bond between the two central characters.
  26. Whale Rider
    Writer-director Niki Caro, who adapted the screenplay from the novel, has crafted a script replete with both crowd-pleasing touches and subtle but powerful insights into all the characters.
  27. The Weather Underground
    Through masterful editing, nimble music selection and smart use of documentary materials, the filmmakers shake the dust off cultural clichés to provide a provocative survey of the past. It’s a subversively sleek enterprise.
  28. Controlled Chaos
    The only real-life situations the movie evokes vividly are the circumstances of its own production: underrehearsed actors in hastily staged scenes speaking page after page of awkward expository dialogue.
  29. Wrong Turn
    The film does, in the end, raise something of an existential dilemma: If you set out to make a new version of something you know to be bad, and you make something that is in fact bad, have you somehow succeeded?
  30. Capturing the Friedmans
    Above all else, though, Capturing the Friedmans is a vividly personal, devastating story of a family that was hopelessly compromised years before it was scapegoated for crimes that two of its members may or may not have committed.
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