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. Soap Girl
    Silly and pretentious would-be romance.
  2. To End All Wars
    The dialogue and voice-over narration (by Gordon) are homily-heavy, and the staging sometimes awkward. The prison extras in particular are often left to stare blankly at the gut-wrenching action before them, with many, including Sutherland, looking awfully fit for men who've been starving for years.
  3. My Kingdom
    A baffling subplot involving smuggling drugs inside Danish cows falls flat, and if you're going to alter the Bard's ending, you’d better have a good alternative. Boyd does not.
  4. Adaptation.
    Adaptation is hardly profound, but it's one of the most soulful and loopily romantic movies I've seen all year.
  5. Equilibrium
    The fun here is not so much in the solid if stolid performances from Bale and co-stars Taye Diggs and Emily Watson (gussied up to resemble the Jefferson Airplane–era Grace Slick) or in Wimmer's overpolished plot devices as it is in the production values.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Russian Ark
    High art, low comedy, hard labor and royal prerogative are here thrown together in an elegant unity, a breathtaking demonstration of Russian cinematic -- hence artistic -- brilliance.
  7. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Noyce wants us to feel the joy of the homecoming, but he's honest enough to show, in a coda that tells what happened to the girls after their break for home, how Rabbit Proof Fence finally must be more a tale of courage than of victory.
  8. Eight Crazy Nights
    In the end it's only "The Chanukah Song, Part 3," playing over the closing credits, that manages to capture the joy of the season.
  9. Solaris
    While I could tell the love story was supposed to be moving, I kept feeling the characters' passion struggling against the virtuosity of Soderbergh's direction, which is so tight, so gorgeously lit, so worked that even when he wants scenes to be emotionally incandescent, they wind up detached, even chilly.
  10. They
    The film stinks from start to finish, like a wet burlap sack of gloom.
  11. The Emperor's Club
    This likable but utterly conventional movie works harder than is necessary to unpack for us Ethan Canin’s short story "The Palace Thief."
  12. Die Another Day
    The result is the niftiest Bond movie in years -- fresh, funny, and jammed to the rafters with demented stunts, Boys'-Own gadgetry and brazen promiscuity.
  13. Friday After Next
    Loud, chaotic and largely unfunny (veteran actors John Witherspoon and Anna Maria Horsford seem at best indifferent to the material), Friday After Next is the graceless sodomizing of a cult classic.
  14. Phantom
    First-time director João Pedro Rodrigues' unwillingness to define his hero’s background or motivations becomes more and more frustrating as the film goes on.
  15. Talk to Her
    Talk to Her is as melodramatic -- and, sporadically, as funny -- as any Almodóvar comedy, but its mood is one of muted, aching loneliness, while the color scheme leans less to hot reds and magentas than to rich, elegant shades of ochre.
  16. The Quiet American
    Noyce has made a good-looking, intelligent stab at the novel, mildly undermined by a tendency to seek contemporary relevance.
  17. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    Liberal use is made of freeze-frame and flashbacks as a kind of emotional chronology, yet it's precisely in this regard that the characters feel tentative and half-formed. I'm still trying to figure out why this perfectly serviceable movie won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance last year.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    Plays more like a disjointed radio show with pictures -- The power of Chomsky's intellect and message are poorly served when pigeonholed by the hagiography of some of his supporters.
  19. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    Columbus' sequel is faster, livelier and a good deal funnier than his original, due to the presence of some new characters.
  20. Interview with the Assassin
    Burger at first toys with his unlikely premise, panning through the streets of this stuccoed suburbia as if meditating on the banality of evil, and indeed, our first few encounters with the assassin.
  21. The Way Home
    A conventional if appealing tear-jerker, The Way Home would like to grandmother us all.
  22. Bánk bán
    Where Káel stumbles is in having his stars lip-synch, sometimes poorly, to a recording. It's a devil's bargain that allows for more natural staging, but that fails to convey that an opera's power lies less in cinematic shadings of character than in raw emotions refined by the spectacular art of a rigorously trained human voice.
  23. Ararat
    Egoyan has always constructed dense ensemble films, and here again the writer-director hopes to reinforce his themes by piling layer upon layer of character. Unfortunately, the layers end up cluttering the story.
  24. Half Past Dead
    The most exhilarating fight by far is an acrobatic wall climber between Ja Rule and Nia Peeples, choreographed by Hong Kong's Xin Xin Xong (The Musketeer) who, in terms of thrills per minute, is the movie's real star.
  25. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    The film's energy is primarily due to the rich storytelling skills of the musicians, who trot out anecdotes and memories filled with humor and wry philosophizing.
  26. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    The tragic ending they tack on to the film reinforces the same fear-mongering notion of cause and effect that gives the Church its power to abuse and exploit, and the film winds up muffling its own powerful protest.
  27. Revolution #9
    So riddled with unanswered questions that it requires gargantuan leaps of faith just to watch it plod along, while McCann's overly broad strokes miss crucial details as he tries to mount an attack on both the power of the media and an indifferent medical profession.
  28. The Rising Place
    As a first-time filmmaker who juggles such duties as writing, directing, producing, even playing piano solos on the soundtrack, Rice is in over his head.
  29. 'R Xmas
    R Xmas offers a poetic and profane ambiguity that's vintage Ferrara. The drug dealers are community leaders, the cops are corrupt, and the materialistic wife has unimagined emotional reserves.
  30. The Flip Side
    An intriguing failure that promises more than it delivers.
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