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. White Boy
    Here, Lohman's luminous presence rises above the badly directed violence and mayhem -- even if the movie's a dud, she's a star.
  2. Under the Moonlight
    A flat, middlebrow variation on some of the central themes of recent Iranian cinema.
  3. Abandon
    Aiming to elicit a last-minute shiver from the audience, Gaghan is likely to get instead a mood-destroying giggle.
  4. The Grey Zone
    It's grim stuff indeed, but somehow the horror never quite overwhelms Nelson's sure-footed approach to raising all manner of frankly unanswerable questions -- in particular, what would or could one have done in such circumstances?
  5. Hansel & Gretel
    For trashing a classic, Tunnicliffe and his writing cohorts deserve a Grimm-style fate -- perhaps a long, slow boil in the witch’s vat?
  6. Real Women Have Curves
    Accomplished and invigorating debut feature from Colombian-born director Patricia Cardoso that took both the Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize at Sundance this year.
  7. Formula 51
    A waste of the filmmakers' time and ours, and offering further evidence that, outside the art house, much British cinema has its head jammed tightly up its own arse.
  8. Naqoyqatsi
    Incoherence reigns.
  9. The Ring
    In the final reel, the tension dissipates with a flabby hiss, as the film devolves into a banal, conventional ghost story.
  10. Auto Focus
    Certainly the movie is one of Schrader's most accomplished, and most entertaining, but there's something cold and unforgiving about his vision, delivered with a severity that only a bred-in-the-bone Calvinist could muster.
  11. Fidel
    It's a refreshing change from the self-interest and paranoia that shape most American representations of Castro. At the same time, Bravo anticipates that such a view will drive some nuts.
  12. The Business of Fancydancing
    While The Business of Fancydancing is a thoughtful and complex work of sound and vision, it doesn't seem quite right to call it a film, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is plainly, if crisply, shot on video, with a bright, shiny surface that fairly screams low-rent. Second, the whole business is strangely non-cinematic.
  13. Brown Sugar
    Despite crisp photography and the director's gift for building a scene, the film doesn't click until the third act, when Mos Def's performance as Dre's protégé appears to energize everyone around him.
  14. Below
    Twohy moves effortlessly between conventions of the sub and horror genres, with long tracking shots and masterful sound design, shock cuts and mismatched mirrors and reflections.
  15. The Rules of Attraction
    It's so playful, wicked and unseemly, by the time you realize that the actual plot of this brilliantly sordid satire hasn't started, the party is already over.
  16. Knockaround Guys
    Koppelman and Lieven's toneless, generic direction style is slack, not slick, and they handle actors like livestock. Only John Malkovich, as Matty's psychotic uncle, retains his dignity.
  17. Bowling for Columbine
    It seems to have been made to delight European intellectuals and anyone else who believes that America is a land of bloodthirsty yet comical barbarians.
  18. The Transporter
    Immensely exciting and funny.
  19. Safe Conduct
    Alternately frustrating and rewarding film.
  20. Tuck Everlasting
    Tuck Everlasting is a wise and beautiful poem to the idea that the fundamental human tragedy is not death, but the unlived life.
  21. Comedian
    Has moments of real interest, but they require wading through a lot of dead air.
  22. Pokémon 4: The Movie
    It's animated cockfighting for children.
  23. Swept Away
    Suggests that we're supposed to take this love story as something more than farce. Please. Tom Hanks fucking that volleyball would have been more convincing.
  24. White Oleander
    With its open, spontaneous elasticity, White Oleander is that rare Hollywood film -- an attempt to understand, without judgment, a world on its own terms.
  25. Punch-Drunk Love
    The movie winds up being his sunniest, for Anderson takes care to keep their love sweet, daffy and punch-drunk. This is a film in which that modern obsession, frequent-flier mileage, becomes proof of fidelity, and true intimacy is portrayed by a man telling his lover, "I'm sorry I beat up the bathroom."
  26. Family Fundamentals
    It's potentially strong material, but the film is so determined not to demonize the conservatives that it winds up being an inadvertent profile in the banality of bigotry.
  27. How to Draw a Bunny
    Unlike most documentaries about arty types, John Walter's wonderfully capricious, wittily edited film about Johnson seeks to make precise all the different ways in which the artist managed to remain opaque.
  28. Welcome to Collinwood
    With a dream cast that also includes Patricia Clarkson and, in a cameo, a tattooed George Clooney, fullness of narrative may not have struck the filmmakers as key, and their film feels slight, as if it were an extended short, albeit one made by the smartest kids in class.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heaven
    The final product is so eccentric and resolutely uncommercial -- and so faithful to the spirit of Kieslowski's oeuvre -- that it's hard to doubt the purity of Tykwer's intentions.
  30. Pipe Dream
    Does have its charms.
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