Los Angeles Times' Scores

For 16,516 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 38% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 Sand Storm
Lowest review score: 0 Saw VI
Score distribution:
16516 movie reviews
  1. Actually witnessing the audience’s emotional connection to her lyrics makes “Hit Me Hard and Soft” feel like an epic coming-of-age movie as much as a concert film. Still, by the 50th mascara-smeared face, I needed fresh air.
  2. As the memory of it washes back over you, Omaha lingers, like a devastating short story — devastating because it’s about a pained father for whom the road ahead only seems to get narrower.
  3. If One Spoon of Chocolate ultimately fails as a grindhouse banger, you still might understand why RZA developed this project for more than a decade. His rage at this inequitable country has only grown more acute as America’s racial divides widen and codify. But like Unique, RZA doesn’t know how to fight his way out of the hell that surrounds him.
  4. What’s left is a visually unappetizing Animal Farm that plays as if someone sloppily traced over a masterpiece. And Serkis (who also voices a rooster) doesn’t so much direct it as twist some grand knob with settings like “Louder,” “Faster,” “Jokier,” “Bigger.”
  5. Hokum is a fabulous horror film for all tastes.
  6. The storytelling is wonky, given the film’s competing needs to be Miranda-blunt about the modern magazine business while pairing marvelously with a glass of rosé.
  7. Sophy Romvari’s luminous debut feature “Blue Heron” is a loving and studious act of remembrance.
  8. That measured approach, exemplified in star Billerbeck’s arresting simplicity and the many fine supporting turns around him, allows us to clock Nanning’s growing awareness of what matters to others, what’s impossible to ignore and how to interpret an unjust world that’s still full of beauty and kindness if you know where to look. Which, of course, includes inside himself.
  9. Despite Segel and Weaver’s best efforts, they can’t make this bickering duo deliciously awful, the characters proving more grating than hilariously combustible.
  10. Thanks to the latest impressive turn from rising star David Jonsson, “Wasteman” even finds a few new notes to play within a familiar stark melody.
  11. Instead of bothering much about dialogue, Fuze is a blueprint of how stress and deference exert themselves upon a workplace.
  12. For all its careful evasions, I believe that the Michael this movie reveals is true and worth watching. But ultimately, it’s the music that breaks down our resistance, from the opening funk beats of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” to the climax, which essentially cues a greatest hits tape right when we know the bad times are about to begin.
  13. The film is tangled in its mess of references: a possession thriller that also wants to dish out some grainy video footage à la “The Ring” or “Bring Her Back” along with the expected mouth-to-mouth vomiting.
  14. The edgy appeal of Erupcja is in the way it maps humans as molecules and electrons, fizzed by location, inspired by connection, driven to hover, fuse and release. The characters may get bounced around a bit and some will feel stranded, but you’ll know you’ve been taken somewhere new by this charming indie.
  15. It’s a well-meaning impression of a soul-searching documentary (and only an impression), but impressions can still be plenty entertaining.
  16. Franҫois Ozon, with abiding respect for the high-wattage brilliance of his countryman’s spartan masterpiece about an apathetic killer, has given us a movie adaptation that does daylight-noir justice to its alluring mysteries, while threading in some freshly necessary political context.
  17. It wants you to feel that nightmare scenario of being stuck, but it also wants to be meditative. It’s not always successful at merging those experiences — as experimentation it falls short, and the horror label is also a stretch — but it ultimately earns a liminal fascination as it fuses your perspective to the protagonist’s.
  18. As a satire, it’s almost too implied — the filmmakers barely bother to develop their ideas, figuring correctly that people already agree the internet is, at best, a neutral-evil. I liked it and was impatient with it in equal measure, the way a teacher feels about a lazy, gifted child.
  19. Out of magnanimity, I’ll liken this trifle to a Rothko. The more I think about The Christophers, the more I imagine it has interesting layers. But I won’t fault anyone who just sees a simple square.
  20. Ultimately, The Drama is the movie equivalent of a half-glass of Champagne: a toast Borgli trusts us to decide whether its ideas are half-empty or half-full. I’ll raise my cup to full, but only because of how pleasurably it bubbles.
  21. This is a rebellious, empathetic adventure story about a grandmother who catches on that her society needs to learn how to think freely.
  22. Jude is hardly precious about his craft. But that’s because he’s confident you’ll leave bursting with thoughts and feelings about the price of progress, the weight of history and the ways we struggle to do right amid so much that’s wrong.
  23. That Shear knows how to bring the storyline’s seasonal time frame to a cyclical close with humor, warmth and hope is the grace note that makes Fantasy Life feel like the start of a promising writing-directing career.
  24. Yes
    It’s a movie about a citizenry at war with itself, hoping to keep the plates spinning for one more night. You watch it and think how easy it would be to envision an American remake — and wonder, too, if a filmmaker like Lapid even exists here.
  25. Dead Lover, in all its stinky, sexy, queer and grotesque glory, is one of the grossest and loveliest films about love I’ve ever seen. This one’s for the horny, hopeless goth inside all of us.
  26. While her previous pictures never shied away from tenderness despite their outré scenarios, her latest is a far more melancholy affair. Sadly, it’s also easily her least accomplished.
  27. “The AI Doc” is a well-intentioned but aggravating soup of information and opinion that wants to move at the speed of machine thought.
  28. As overdue tales of history go, Palestine ‘36 (currently one of the last films with access to its real-world locations) is certainly more of a blunt instrument than a novelistic endeavor. But its broad strokes and rooted passions easily earn their place, and deserve to inspire more such stories.
  29. There are many ways to portray authoritarianism, but Two Prosecutors is penetrating in its depiction of a society being slowly poisoned. The film might be too much to bear if it wasn’t so brilliantly conceived and executed.
  30. Somewhat miraculously, we’re carried out of this consequential collision of hearts and minds on the lightest of notes, with the sense that our capacity to rediscover harmony will always be beautifully mysterious.

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