Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,522 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 2.3 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:
  1. Positive: 8,697 out of 16522
  2. Mixed: 5,808 out of 16522
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16522
16522 movie reviews
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  1. Humanité
    A film of stunning impact.
  2. Intimacy
    A triumph for all concerned, it is especially so for the multitalented Chereau.
  3. Teaching Mrs. Tingle
    In his knockout directorial debut writer Kevin Williamson taps into such universal memories with his shrewd and energetic dark comedy.
  4. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
    Halloween: H20 is as stylish and scary as it is ultra-violent. It's a work of superior craftsmanship in all aspects.
  5. The Missing
    The combined intensity of these two performances (Jones and Blanchett) obliterates objections and raises the stakes in what might otherwise have been a standard western.
  6. Grosse Pointe Blank
    A wild at heart, anarchic comedy that believes in living dangerously.
  7. Juliet of the Spirits
    Remains a timeless, major work of a master.
  8. Italian for Beginners
    A delicious and delicately funny look at the residents of a Copenhagen neighborhood coping with the befuddling complications life tosses at them.
  9. Nowhere in Africa
    This is an intelligent epic told without special pleading, a film able to cut deep enough to reveal a keen specificity of experience.
  10. Wonder Boys
    A handsomely mounted, graceful production that is well-played across the board.
  11. Bull Durham
    It's just that when a movie is this close, with so much of the sports flavor (co-producer Thom Mount is co-owner of the real Durham Bulls), you like to see it perfect. [15 June 1988]
    • Los Angeles Times
  12. Tarzan
    We may have seen it all before, but when it's done up like this, experiencing it all over again is a pleasure. [16 June 1999, Calendar, p.F-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  13. Together
    Aside from superb ensemble work from an 18-member cast, "Together's sense of human potential is its greatest pleasure.
  14. Lawless Heart
    Charming, disarming and in some ways humbling film.
  15. Alice et Martin
    Boldly structured, intensely focused and briskly paced, Alice and Martin has a tremendous emotional density that places the utmost demands upon its actors--and asks a lot of audiences, too.
  16. Jerry Maguire
    A wholly unexpected film, as heady and surprising in its humor as in its emotional texture.
  17. Our Lady of the Assassins
    As the film, with its haunting score and inspired use of popular music, builds flawlessly to its resounding conclusion, it is accompanied by a pitch-dark humor that grows out of the sheer absurdity of the city's daily body count.
  18. Enigma
    It is such a grand, romantic entertainment that it sweeps the viewer along in its swiftly escalating suspense.
  19. Godzilla
    An expertly designed theme park ride of a movie that packs nonstop thrills.
  20. So Close
    A martial arts valentine to the power of fighting women. It's a slick and delirious Hong Kong action film.
  21. Kandahar
    This remarkably revealing and timely film, in which the depiction of pain and sorrow is suffused with a sense of beauty and a graceful, flowing style, more than lives up to glowing advance notices.
  22. What's Cooking?
    For so brisk and entertaining a film, sharp in its observations but light in its touch, Cooking has unexpected substance and is a formidable accomplishment in that it brings dimension to its nearly 40 principal characters.
  23. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [re-release]
    A provocative political thriller that is as troubling today as when it came out in 1970. Maybe more so.
  24. Lost in La Mancha
    Records an accident while it's happening, revealing a situation that makes you laugh again and again while weeping, metaphorically at least, for the sheer frustration of it all.
  25. I Capture the Castle
    It's a rich, emotional story, a wonderfully appealing film made with humor and intelligence, but there is also something almost magical about how it takes the stuff of innumerable previous films -- love, romance and adolescent coming of age -- and turns them into something that feels one of a kind.
  26. The Son
    There are all sorts of ways to look at The Son -- as a philosophical thriller, as a statement of faith, as a call to political arms or just as a terrific entertainment.
  27. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (re-released)
    The Umbrellas of Cherbourg has stood the test of time as beautifully as Deneuve and seems likely to enchant future generations as fully as it has audiences over the past four decades.
  28. Senseless
    It's a laff riot that also contains a torrent of scathing social satire that couldn't be more timely in light of the dismantling of affirmative action.
  29. The Sea Is Watching
    An exquisite period film from a script Akira Kurosawa did not live to direct. It has a softer edge than the master probably would have delivered, but it is deeply affecting.
  30. The Faculty
    A smart, lively and unpretentious exploitation picture...Consistently funny and clever.
  31. The Ignorant Fairies
    This graceful and wise film moves to its denouement with subtlety and, at its end, strikes a note that seems just right for all that has gone before.
  32. Insomnia
    Insomnia shows an equally welcome ability: a gift of creating intelligent, engrossing popular entertainment.
  33. Babe
    That rare movie that completely fulfills its admittedly modest aims.
  34. Buena Vista Social Club
    Being able to hear this kind of playing is a special moment in time, one we don't want to end and one that we're privileged to experience.
  35. Hilary and Jackie
    It takes two to be sisters, two to have a rivalry, and two exceptional actresses to turn Hilary and Jackie into a compelling look at the most intimate and troubling of family dynamics.
  36. Pi
    It is a brilliant intellectual adventure that fans of bold independent filmmaking will want to experience, even though the ending is something of a letdown.
  37. Ronin
    It's a welcome throwback to the days when the world didn't have to end or tanker trucks explode to get an action audience's attention.
  38. A Walk on the Moon
    A film of exceptional emotional honesty.
  39. The Wood
    An across-the-board delight featuring a spot-on ensemble cast that treats the most awkward and embarrassing moments in the rites of passage with affectionate hilarity.
  40. Office Space
    Bristling with shrewd observation, inspired humor and all-around smarts, Office Space is a winner about a guy who's beginning to feel like a loser.
  41. Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys
    Haneke illuminates beautifully the lives of his people with an eye for the revealing nuance and detail.
  42. The Piano Teacher
    The Piano Teacher will surely be too strong for some audiences and is best left to those who like films that take big risks and get away with them.
  43. Teacher's Pet
    Smart and stylish, Disney's Teacher's Pet is one family film that has appeal for adults as well as children.
  44. Ça commence aujourd'hui
    Although there is real pain and suffering in It All Starts Today, it is too impassioned, too brisk and too embracing of life and human foibles to be depressing.
  45. Femme Fatale
    Here, the message is the moviemaking and the unparalleled joy you get from a film that can carry you off so completely, making you forget about everything save for the beautiful lies in front of you.
  46. To Die For
    The most accurate assault against the media age since "Network," To Die For's killer lines and wicked sensibility are given added poignancy by the off-center, sensitive performance of Joaquin Phoenix, River's younger brother, the only person more deluded about Suzanne than she is about herself.
  47. Kissing Jessica Stein
    For an American film it is a groundbreaker in exploring the realm of sexual fluidity, and it does so with wit, wisdom and in a completely entertaining fashion.
  48. Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII
    Artfully, even elegantly constructed, Secret Lives skillfully probes issues of conflicting emotions and allegiances in a dark time, yet emerges as a loving affirmation of humanity's remarkable potential for goodness in the face of pervasive evil.
  49. A Mighty Wind
    The jokes would be funny even if they weren't perfectly timed, but what makes them come across as so poignant is the seriousness with which the director and his co-conspirators deliver their jabs and japes.
  50. How I Killed My Father
    Truly, there can be nothing as complex as the simplest human relationships, and nothing as satisfying as a film that understands that as this one does.
  51. Scream
    It's sensational in both senses of the word: a bravura, provocative sendup of horror pictures that's also scary and gruesome yet too swift-moving to lapse into morbidity.
  52. Summer School
    It's no thigh-slapper like the Rodney Dangerfield's "Back to School," but it's exceptionally good-natured and perceptive, and Harmon, in his first starring screen role, is a real charmer. [22 July 1987]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    It's a nearly pitch-perfect melding of genres, influences and modes of expression--it's the first Mafia movie for the hip-hop age.
  54. Alien
    Twenty-four years later -- digitally spruced up, with some scenes shaved and others padded with previously cut material -- Scott's film still shreds nerves.
  55. Blood Simple
    Blood Simple becomes a dazzling comedie noire, a dynamic, virtuoso display by a couple of talented fledgling filmmakers who give the conventions of the genre such a thorough workout that the result is a movie that's fresh and exhilarating (in the way that Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Diva” was).
  56. Bloody Sunday
    Once positions hardened, tragedy was all but inevitable, and Bloody Sunday" does the spirit of that awful day full and unforgettable justice.
  57. Small Time Crooks
    Handsome as all Allen films are, and it proceeds with the brisk, sophisticated air of throwaway confidence and lack of pretense that we expect from the contemporary master of grown-up comedy.
    • Los Angeles Times
  58. Chicken Run
    Never loses its priceless stamp of individuality. Reduced to its essence, this is a joke told by a person, not a corporation--and that makes all the difference.
  59. Harry Is Here to Help
    Moll, in only his second feature, evokes a sense of foreboding, playing the routine against the unnerving, the humorous against the sinister, with a wit and deftness that might have impressed Hitchcock.
  60. The Agronomist
    Director Demme has done other potent and meaningful films, but The Agronomist defers to none of them in its effectiveness and its power.
  61. Cuban Rafters
    The creators of the magnificent Balseros stayed involved with its subject, a group of Cuban boat people who made it to the United States, for a full seven years. If you put in that kind of time, you witness life happening in front of you in all its compelling, confounding drama. What could be better than that?
  62. Lantana
    A remarkably thoughtful drama, Lantana makes it clear not only how hard to come by any emotional comfort is in this life, but more important, why we can't give up on the struggle.
  63. The War of the Roses
    Biting and vicious, a styptic pencil on the battered face of "civilized divorce." It's also thoughtful, laceratingly funny, and bravely true to its own black-and-blue comic vision. [8 Dec 1989]
    • Los Angeles Times
  64. Monty Python's Life of Brian
    The more things change, the more we have to laugh if we are to have a prayer of remaining sane, and the Pythons are the best possible step in that direction.
  65. The Italian Job
    A fast and furious action-adventure. The film's comedy counts for as much as the clever and risky ways in which Wahlberg and company go after the nasty Norton, who has holed up in a Bel-Air mansion with a world-class security system.
  66. Zoolander
    Exuberant and insidiously funny satire.
  67. Bang Rajan
    The vigorous Bang Rajan moves with a sure sense of direction and authority to its major culminating battle, a singularly savage and wrenching encounter that for all its bloodshed is never exploitative and concludes the film on a resounding note of tragic grandeur.
  68. The Insider
    A dead-on tale of corporate power, courage, cowardice and how we live.
  69. 24 Hour Party People
    Amazing, rich in authentic period atmosphere and detail, an ever-changing cyclorama of a movie.
  70. Raising Victor Vargas
    His film may be something of a beautiful lie, but what's true about Sollett's characters is that their dreams, their grace and their struggles are as real as it gets.
  71. The Vertical Ray of the Sun
    A wholly enveloping experience. Gentle, ravishingly beautiful and awash in everyday sensuality, it so intoxicates you with the elegance and refinement of its filmmaking that even noticing, let alone caring, whether it has a plot starts to seem beside the point.
  72. Spellbound
    At a time when so many in this country are at odds about what represents America at its best, it's refreshing and then some to see a film that everyone can agree is an example of exactly that.
  73. Time Out
    Not just an especially subtle and thoughtful psychological drama, it's a provocative, even an unnerving one as well.
  74. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    If there is one moment in The Language of Music that will thrill old rock fans, it's watching Dowd, his fluid hands moving with a surgeon's grace, remix for the film's benefit the 24-track sub-master of "Layla."
  75. Trainspotting
    Exuberant and pitiless, profane yet eloquent, flush with the ability to create laughter out of unspeakable situations, Trainspotting is a drop-dead look at a dead-end lifestyle that has all the strength of its considerable contradictions.
  76. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
    It's sexy, brainy and slightly nuts.
  77. Bus 174
    What results is a thoughtful, analytical yet still emotional film, meticulously investigated and absolutely compelling.
  78. Joy Ride
    Terrific escapist fare, stylish, outrageous and compelling.
  79. The Princess Bride
    It's Patinkin who scores a special triumph. In his role there's a poignant strain of weariness beneath the leaping bravado, a pain under the braggadocio. [25 Sept 1987]
    • Los Angeles Times
  80. Iron Monkey
    If Asian martial arts movies interest you even a little bit, you're going to want to see Iron Monkey. Not only that, you're going to want to see it more than once.
  81. The Station Agent
    Its charming story of the delicate intersection of three highly individual lives is the kind of completely personal yet universal film that the festival and the entire independent movement came into being to celebrate. And it does it all in 88 deft and funny minutes.
  82. The Wedding Singer
    A sparkling romantic comedy, the kind of picture that glides by so gracefully and unpretentiously that it's only upon reflection that you realize how much skill, caring and good judgment had to have gone into its making.
  83. Goyangileul butaghae
    There is a wonderful natural quality to Jeong's storytelling that is enhanced by cinematographer Young-hwan Choi's graceful camerawork and by a dynamic, contemporary score from M&F.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Song for Martin
    From its invitingly upbeat overture to its pathos-filled but ultimately life-affirming finale, "Martin" is a masterfully conducted work.
  85. Jesus' Son
    In a sea of one-note symphonies, this touching feature is bleak and comic, heartbreaking and affirmative, romantic and tragic, gimlet-eyed and sympathetic, all at the same time.
  86. Buffalo '66
    Alternately satirical and romantic, full of pain and humor, Buffalo '66 is a winner.
  87. Swiri
    In recent years, South Korean cinema has fully flowered, producing both uncompromising highly personal films and crisp, intelligent genre movies, with Shiri the most spectacular example of the latter to date.
  88. The Magdalene Sisters
    Graced with performers who bring a purity of emotion to their work, the film is always dramatically convincing. There is a fundamental air of truth about it, a sense that, horrific though things seem, this is how it must have been.
  89. Auto Focus
    In Auto Focus, the strangely wonderful and weirdly touching new film from Paul Schrader, the comedy and the tragedy keep getting mixed up.
  90. Bon voyage
    Not long into this most exhilarating and enjoyable of movies, it becomes reminiscent of such vintage jewels as Carol Reed's simultaneously thrilling and amusing "Night Train to Munich."
  91. Monsieur Ibrahim
    Surely there is room in the movies for a small film with an unabashed, even old-fashioned but timeless humanist spirit -- and a triumphant portrayal by a veteran star that is likely to be regarded as one of the year's best.
  92. What Alice Found
    Scrupulously fair-minded yet deliciously ambiguous, What Alice Found, a triumph of sound psychological and artistic judgment, is an unexpected treat for sophisticated audiences.
  93. State and Main
    A quintessentially wised-up insider comedy, ideally cast and filled with sharp writing from start to finish.
  94. The Sweet Hereafter
    Egoyan understands how potent a deliberate pace can be, how effective it is in making already powerful material strong enough to tear at your heart.
  95. Jawbreaker
    Wickedly hilarious. [19 Feb 1999]
    • Los Angeles Times
  96. 7 Days in September
    If ever there was a prime example of art bringing order out of chaos, it is Steven Rosenbaum's 7 Days in September. -- The result is a narrative at once personal, admirably coherent and, above all, heartening.
  97. Il Postino: The Postman
    Made under unique and wrenching circumstances, it gained poignancy and a kind of purity from its troubles, and an already affecting film ended up suffused with emotion.
  98. Signs & Wonders
    Abounds in psychological suspense and plays like a mystery film, even though the mystery at hand may be purely one of the human heart.
  99. Va Savoir (Who Knows?)
    This masterful celebration starts off slowly, even uncertainly, giving no hint of the rich and elegant exploration of love, jealousy and animal attraction it will in all good time become.
  100. The Big Kahuna
    A drama of extraordinary power and insight with dazzling performances from not only Spacey but also Danny DeVito (who may well be at his best ever) and from newcomer Peter Facinelli.
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