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. State Property
    It almost appears like a little thought went into this otherwise grim exercise in soullessness.
  2. Orange County
    This genial comedy is as unambitious and, at times, as funny as its high concept.
  3. Brotherhood of the Wolf
    Brotherhood has its goofy side -- it's a sleek, creepily atmospheric popcorn entertainment.
  4. What Time Is It Over There?
    Takes raw grief as its point of departure only to play out as a comedy of deadpan heartbreak.
  5. Impostor
    Written by a team of three, the script is more plagued by groupthink than is the film's future Earth.
  6. Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    Very few art documentaries are as deeply in tune with the spirit of their subjects, and the implications are enormous, since Goldsworthy is the rare contemporary art star whose work (what a radical notion) is actually about something.
  7. Black Hawk Down
    In the end, neither the appealing cast -- nor the force of Scott's stunning imagery is enough to make us understand why these men died.
  8. Charlotte Gray
    Charlotte Gray is not a subtle movie, but it is an honorable and surprisingly gripping one.
  9. I Am Sam
    By-the-numbers Oscar bait -- but Penn does manage, against such odds, to make us see Sam as a person, not a performance.
  10. Dark Blue World
    The uneasy meeting of cultures is mirrored all too well in the stiff and clumsy direction.
  11. Monster's Ball
    In its exploitation of human misery, Monster's Ball doesn't just invite cynicism; it provokes hostility.
  12. Gosford Park
    At his best, Altman turns us into interlopers who have stumbled into a world that seems to predate us and persuades us it will continue to teem with life long after we leave the theater.
  13. Ali
    Ali boasts a whole tribe of outstanding secondary performances, of which Jon Voight's Cosell, in an outrageous rug and several tons of pasty-face makeup, is easily the funniest.
  14. The Shipping News
    Spacey is nobody's idea of a goodhearted innocent, and I wonder why nobody has told him he'll blow his career if he keeps trying to pass himself off as Mr. Sensitive. It's time to go back to playing assholes. That's what he's good at, and that's why we love him.
  15. Kate & Leopold
    This winning confection, from a director (Heavy, Cop Land) not known for the lightness of his material or his touch, shows a fine understanding of what the screenwriters of the '40s instinctively grasped, that good screwball is about dialogue and chemistry.
  16. Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
    A witty, well-crafted comedy that combines primal slapstick with sharp satiric banter to keep children and parents laughing together.
  17. How High
    There is something fun about a movie that so brazenly portrays excessive pot smoking.
  18. A Beautiful Mind
    While I don't doubt that Howard's done the best he can, it's sad to see a beautiful mind whittled down by such a plain one.
  19. The Majestic
    May just be the most boring movie ever made; certainly it's the most boring movie I've suffered through to the bitter end.
  20. Joe Somebody
    It all misses the mark emotionally, hindered by one-dimensional characters and telegraphed developments.
  21. Little Otik
    Magnificently twisted black comedy.
    • L.A. Weekly
  22. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    The film is a virtuosic triumph, but parlor tricks don't make movies, and it's Jackson's unwavering sincerity that elevates The Fellowship of the Ring into the increasingly rare Valhalla of the rousing, well-told tale.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Piñero
    The main drawback is Claudio Chea's vertiginous camera work -- and the print's continual alternations between black-and-white and color add nothing but a distracting ornamentation.
  24. Iris
    The film is not a biopic or a portrait of a famous marriage so much as it is an imaginative essay on what made a union between two radically different people work as well as it did.
  25. Lantana
    Notable for its power of surprise and its refusal to immediately clarify the confusion of these lost souls.
  26. In Search of Peace
    The film at times feels less than objective, in part due to Douglas' often breathless narration.
  27. The Royal Tenenbaums
    In a film that verges on greatness, it is a sign of terrific faith, as well as of Anderson's promise as a director, that when one of the characters in The Royal Tenenbaums wears hospital pajamas after a detour into grief, the words over his heart read "recovery area."
  28. Not Another Teen Movie
    Of course, this is just another teen movie -- with tons of dick jokes that don't know when to quit, and buckets of realistic-looking "excrement" splattered all over its "juvenile" cast, and even a couple of gags that actually fly.
  29. Vanilla Sky
    Crowe, for his part, is decency itself, but unlike Amenábar he's a pop romantic with no stomach or aptitude for noir.
  30. Behind the Sun
    That tragedy looms heavily in Behind the Sun only makes its life-affirming moments -- resonate more deeply and powerfully in a film that is one of the year's best.
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