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. Under the City's Skin
    Under the Skin is distinguished, like so much contemporary Iranian cinema, by the way its striking visuals and strategic use of sound tell the underlying story.
  2. Spun
    The freak show of druggy squalor and the wired sexuality of hardcore kink and flaccid cocks float by solely for our carnivalesque amusement.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Hunted
    This superficial nonsense is easily ignored; that the movie runs out of gas at the midpoint isn't.
  4. Agent Cody Banks
    Unfortunately, two separate screenwriting teams...send Cody away from kid-resonant environs and off to exotic locales, culminating in an overproduced mountain-lair finale.
  5. Bend It Like Beckham
    Enjoyably shameless confection.
  6. The Safety of Objects
    A couple of unexpected revelations in the final act pack an emotional wallop that shifts the film (shot in clean, uncluttered takes) into the realm of old-fashioned tearjerker, but the tears are wholly earned.
  7. Tears of the Sun
    Despite the busy camera work, bombastic score and rapt attention to violence, director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) can't mask the script's white-savior paternalism.
  8. Nowhere in Africa
    The movie's real strength lies in its intelligent, sympathetic account of the dynamic, difficult marriage of Regina's parents.
  9. Laurel Canyon
    Cholodenko's new film relies on easy caricature over true character such that the film fails to build emotional momentum or resonance.
  10. Bringing Down the House
    Even the director's flat-footed moves can't quell Martin and Latifah, whose combined energy is fearsome and sometimes most amusing.
  11. Irreversible
    Noé calls Irreversible his "Eyes Wide Shut," though it's really more like "A Clockwork Orange."
  12. Ten
    One of the year's finest movies, it's not quite the masterpiece that some of Kiarostami's cultists want it to be.
  13. Dischord
    A disappointing hodgepodge that fails to tie up its conflicting strands of family drama and suspense thriller.
  14. Poolhall Junkies
    Callahan's feature debut is a one-way ticket to Palookaville.
  15. Cradle 2 the Grave
    Relentless, infantile and impossible to dislike.
  16. Horns and Halos
    Unexpectedly moving documentary.
  17. Lawless Heart
    For these gifted directors and their fine ensemble, the notion that every life forms into a mosaic of intimate, largely unobserved details is the story most worth telling.
  18. Open Hearts
    A very good new Dogme by Danish director Susanne Bier, begins with several lives in excellent working order, and proceeds by way of domestic tragedy to a full-court emotional train wreck.
  19. Dark Blue
    My own view is that, like me, the LAPD was defeated by the movie's incestuously proliferating plots. I've seen Dark Blue twice, and I still don't have a handle on all its comings and goings.
  20. Till Human Voices Wake Us
    I can find nothing nice to note about this excruciatingly slow, overly tasteful piece of whimsy.
  21. Old School
    The 1978 frat-house classic "Animal House," starring the late, great John Belushi, is the model for testosterone-mad comedies such as this, and while it hasn't that film's scope or finesse, Old School does have Ferrell, a man clearly in touch with his inner Belushi.
  22. The Life of David Gale
    The movie's one unalloyed pleasure is a funny Goth Girl, played by Melissa McCarthy, who grasps, as Parker apparently doesn't, that the script is energetic rubbish, not The Greatest Story Ever Told.
  23. Gods and Generals
    By highlighting the human costs of slavery to everyone BUT the enslaved -- here, relations between African-American domestics and their owners are cordial, even respectful, on both sides -- Maxwell risks being pilloried as an apologist for that institution.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Missing Young Woman
    The film is shocking, and, for better or worse, Portillo's refusal to offer solace kindles a potent rage that's not easily forgotten.
  25. The Ballad of Bering Strait
    While the film frequently concentrates on the wrong story, the humanity of the musicians comes through in their own words and actions.
  26. Ordinary Sinner
    What really hamstrings Sinner, though, is the hetero narcissism beneath its enlightened posturing.
  27. All the Real Girls
    Green is essentially a poet of moods rather than a teller of tales, and he adorns the movie with stylistic touches influenced by Terrence Malick.
  28. Gerry
    Van Sant ultimately reveals so little about this odd couple that we frankly don't give a damn what happens to them. Nor, apparently, does he.
  29. Painted Fire
    A beautiful and exhilaratingly clear-eyed new film by the equally celebrated South Korean director Im Kwon-Taek.
  30. The Jungle Book 2
    Bounces through the bush in search of good will and comes up with recycled charm as it reintroduces most of the original's major characters.
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