Los Angeles Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 16,550 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:
  1. Positive: 8,714 out of 16550
  2. Mixed: 5,819 out of 16550
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16550
16550 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Synecdoche, New York
    Sprawling, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, frustrating, hard-to-follow and achingly, achingly sad movie.
  2. Changeling
    In other hands, these clashes of good and evil might have seemed ordinary, but Eastwood makes Changeling a hard story to shake off. To see this film is to understand both how fragile and how essential our hopes for decency and truth are in a world that must be made to care about either one.
  3. I've Loved You So Long
    Performances this strong and direction this sensitive make us simply grateful to have an emotional story we can sink our teeth into and enjoy.
  4. Passengers
    With these actors and Rodrigo García's sensitive direction, Passengers might have fared well as a short. But as a full-length feature, it's a long ride to a familiar destination.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Saw V
    A particularly dull and discombobulated affair, shot and acted with all the flair of a basic-cable procedural. Patterson and Mandylor are so wooden that their cat-and-mouse game has all the excitement of watching dust bunnies swirl in an air current.
  6. Pride and Glory
    The movie is as histrionic as it is ham-fisted, a bad combination that leads to scenes such as the one in which officers threaten to torture a baby to get their point across.
  7. High School Musical 3: Senior Year
    For those scoring at home, the third entry in the "High School Musical" series is better than the second but doesn't quite sustain the unvarnished, giddy highs of the first.
  8. Johnny Got His Gun
    Trumbo's aim was a kind of proletarian poetry, but McKenzie's broad emoting has the deadly earnestness of a school play.
  9. The Universe of Keith Haring
    The bane of documentaries on creative people is that they're often little more than a fan's note, of interest only to those who already know and love the work in question. The Universe of Keith Haring starts out that way but the force of the late artist's energy and personality is strong enough to win over the skeptics.
  10. Fear(s) of the Dark
    None of the segments are really interested in jump/scare/slasher horror, but rather the slow, creeping terror of feeling something is wrong and something worse is coming, making the film a most frightful Halloween aperitif.
  11. Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
    An exceptional film, at once disturbing and elevating, deliberate yet powerful.
  12. W.
    W. is not a dispassionate biography; it is an interpretation of personality intersecting with history, and as a piece of drama it is persuasive and perfectly creditable.
  13. The Elephant King
    Oliver's instant switch from bespectacled nerd to Thai-stick smoking, love-struck tourist is more embarrassing than convincing, as is the film's reliance on literally elephant-heavy symbolism.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Max Payne
    Turning video games into movies may be one way for studios to coax teenagers away from their laptops, but this time around, the results are miserable, in every sense of the word.
  15. Morning Light
    If the makers were hoping they'd chronicled a metaphor for life's struggle, they probably weren't counting on the struggle being monotony.
  16. The Secret Life of Bees
    What's being sold here is the movie equivalent of the honey-drenched sweet potato biscuits that are forever being passed around on-screen. Their nutritional value may be nil, but they sure look comforting.
  17. Sex Drive
    Occasionally sharp but never quite as smartly formed as it could be, this Sex Drive is only partly worth the trip.
  18. Frontrunners
    Makes for a thoroughly captivating film.
  19. Body of Lies
    Always crisp and watchable. But as the film's episodic story gradually reveals itself, it ends up too unconvincing and conventional to consistently hold our attention.
  20. Breakfast with Scot
    Has a sitcom format, but complex emotions and perceptions keep breaking through the surface in an engaging, thoughtful manner.
  21. City of Ember
    None of this means that the film is necessarily enjoyable to watch, however, which is often the problem when the rigors of inspired storytelling can't live up to an imaginatively designed filmic world.
  22. The Express
    If one will pardon the obvious analogy, The Express ends up feeling like a fumble at the goal line, coming across as simple-minded and melodramatic.
  23. Good Dick
    Good Dick carries its messed-up, highly improbable premise so lightly and gracefully that it ultimately comes off as a sweet, plausible and curiously grounded love story -- and touchingly old-fashioned.
  24. Happy-Go-Lucky
    As is always the case with Leigh's protagonists, Poppy does not fit into a schematic log line, she simply is. She exists with an intensity that few other filmmakers' characters can manage because of the singular way Leigh creates his people.
  25. Quarantine
    Shame as well upon the advance marketing department for blowing the end of the movie in ads, thus exorcising any ghost of a chance Quarantine had of issuing a surprise.
  26. Dung che sai duk
    "Ashes" is glorious and ultimately wrenching, but it's a tough journey.
  27. Choose Connor
    What makes Choose Connor so special and unsettling is the consistent adroitness and perfect timing with which Eberl makes his revelations.
  28. Call + Response
    All in all, Call + Response makes alarmingly clear how ugly, pervasive and out-in-the-open the trade in humans for sex or labor often is.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    RocknRolla
    Ritchie whisks you along on a whirlwind tour, but he's not averse to putting on the brakes long enough to admire some of his favorite attractions.
  30. Rachel Getting Married
    Best and most unexpected of all, Rachel Getting Married dares to mix the bitter with the sweet. It understands that life-altering situations like weddings not only bring out the worst in human behavior but also the finest.
  31. Religulous
    Though he claims to be a seeker, someone who "has to find out" why believers believe, Maher sets out not after answers but cheap laughs that preach, so to speak, to the converted.
  32. Beverly Hills Chihuahua
    Despite its superficial lip-service to self-actualization/realization, there has to be more to life than what Beverly Hills Chihuahua is putting out there, which is fit for neither man nor beast.
  33. Blindness
    What was presumably intended to play like a fable plays, instead, like an overly long car commercial crossed with a scare-mongering public service announcement.
  34. Flash of Genius
    Wants so much to be liked, even with its prickly, difficult hero, that it misses the mark of nonobviousness necessary not only for a patent, but also for a thrilling, original work.
  35. An American Carol
    It's a gag-strewn, hit-and-miss affair that's not without its chuckles.
  36. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
    The putrid showbiz comedy How to Lose Friends & Alienate People appears to hit DEFCON 5 in mistaking its brand of moral laxity for cutesy irreverence.
  37. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
    It is a teen romantic comedy that largely fits the familiar template but is also fleshed out with atmosphere, a nice blend of broad goofiness and sophistication, and two appealing leads who bring it to life.
  38. Allah Made Me Funny: Live in Concert
    It has the potential to be culturally bridging in its way, and that makes looking for Muslim comedy in the Western world worthwhile.
  39. Ballast
    A quintessentially American story that unmistakably echoes European art house cinema, combining the aesthetic purity of France's Robert Bresson with the social consciousness of Belgium's Dardenne brothers. It also is a powerful, character-driven melodrama that easily holds our attention from first to last.
  40. Forever Strong
    The movie is well shot and edited, the rugby scenes are enjoyable (if likely puzzling to the uninitiated) and "Strong's" earnestness excuses at least some of its predictability.
  41. Smother
    A promising effort that doesn't cohere into anything more, Smother never fully comes to life.
  42. Miracle at St. Anna
    Pedestrian and awkward, this film is a disappointment not only in comparison with Lee's earlier epic, the underrated " Malcolm X," but also in comparison with another film with similar aims, Rachid Bouchareb's "Days of Glory."
  43. Choke
    As the story of a wallowing pig, Choke is often pretty entertaining, but when it comes to where-do-I-come-from poignancy, it can't always keep from gagging.
  44. The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela
    Their film is a rarity in that Rios emerges as a vibrant, reflective woman, an individual who refuses to be defined by her transsexuality.
  45. Obscene
    As vital, incisive and entertaining as its subject.
  46. Shoot on Sight
    Shoot on Sight has good intentions but winds up a thematically simplistic, dryly plotted and perfunctorily shot melodrama, one of those movies where dialogue is there to categorize people, not parse the complexities of human beings.
  47. Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
    A hugely entertaining, efficiently crafted documentary about a ruthless, if undeniably clever, American political force.
  48. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
    Rich in revealing detail and apt in its use of everyday Spokane settings, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers shows that Wang remains a master explorer of the landscape of the human heart.
  49. Appaloosa
    The two men collaborate so well, in fact, that the real love match of Appaloosa is between the two of them and no one else.
  50. Battle in Seattle
    Townsend's sincerity, his admiration for the idealism of the people behind the anti-WTO protests, is never in doubt, but combining drama with historical re-creation is frankly a challenge his filmmaking skills are not up to.
  51. The Duchess
    Even surrounded by all this quality work, Ralph Fiennes, who plays William Cavendish, the fifth duke of Devonshire, the most powerful man in England next to the king, walks off with the picture.
  52. Hounddog
    The problems that plague the movie land squarely with the writer, director and producer, Deborah Kampmeier, who has crafted a howler of a bad script, shows little affinity for working with actors and displays no visual sense behind the camera.
  53. Lakeview Terrace
    Jackson modulates Abel's internal turmoil and heated exchanges with enough shades of loneliness, steely generosity and wicked playfulness to give the actor firm control of our fascination and growing unease.
  54. Ghost Town
    Audiences who feel battered by Hollywood's usual hard-sell approach to farce may be disarmed by Koepp's soft touch and inclined to credit blandness as understatement.
  55. Igor
    One of those fever-pitched computer-generated whizbangs in which every character spits out lines like a caffeinated Catskills comic.
  56. My Best Friend's Girl
    Ultimately, its most unforgivable sin is that it's simply not funny.
  57. Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived
    Director Koji Masutani has masterfully assembled a wealth of archival footage, photos and audiotapes, some of which has been recently declassified.
  58. Burn After Reading
    Because it's a Coen brothers film before it's anything else, this is about as dark and nihilistic as comedies are allowed to get before the laughter dies bitterly on your lips.
  59. Flow: For Love of Water
    A smartly done, involving look at a number of interrelated water issues.
  60. Moving Midway
    His engaging chronicle of the physical, historical and psychological effect of the undertaking, is also an invitation for a film buff to meditate on the antebellum South's mythic power in stories and film.
  61. Towelhead
    On the upside, newcomer Summer Bishil turns in a gutsy, quietly riveting performance as Jasira.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Family That Preys
    Dude, what made you refuse to screen your film for critics before it opened Friday? I'm betting you would have received an earful of praise for your writing and directing.
  63. Righteous Kill
    Righteous Kill's script is credited to "Inside Man's" Russell Gewirtz, and you wonder how the sleek, nuanced flow of that earlier movie evaded this one.
  64. The Women
    Becomes unfocused as it stumbles over all the points it wants to make.
  65. Mister Foe
    Ultimately Mackenzie's tidy resolutions undercut the psychological depth, but as offbeat coming-of-age yarns go, Mister Foe has a commanding fleetness.
  66. Ping Pong Playa
    Breathes fresh life into the tired, bloated sports-comedy formula -- while remaining utterly formulaic.
  67. Save Me
    This is a modest, thoughtful, independent production of exceptional insight and quietly devastating power.
  68. Surfer, Dude
    The film is awash in doobies and breasts, clichéd cinematic language and clumsy exposition. It's reminiscent of the stoner-culture movies of the late '60s and early '70s but without the naive fun.
  69. Bangkok Dangerous
    Pretty much all the things that made the original so original are filtered out of this un-original.
  70. A Secret
    A harrowing and wrenching coming-of-age story.
  71. August Evening
    Though this artful film inches toward its not-unpredictable conclusion and could logically have ended several times before its final fadeout, I was sorry when it was over. How rare is that?
  72. The Pool
    In its leisurely, exceedingly subtle way, The Pool charts Venkatesh's gradual awakening to the larger world.
  73. Babylon A.D.
    This is not a terrible movie, but it's too familiar by half and too confusing by a third.
  74. I Served the King of England
    The new film is so leisurely paced and overly long that what means to be at once charming yet darkly satirical lapses into tedium and barely comes alive.
  75. Sukiyaki Western Django
    Not even a brief appearance by Quentin Tarantino and a ton of references to other movies enlivens the proceedings much.
  76. Young People Fucking
    The cast tries but rarely achieves an authenticity of emotional intimacy.
  77. College
    A tedious, by-the-numbers raunch-fest that exists strictly because it can.
  78. Disaster Movie
    The product's not 100% giggle-free: Several songs have amusing lyrics, especially parodies of "Juno" and "High School Musical."
  79. The House Bunny
    Among the sunnier, funnier films of the year, thanks largely to the zest with which Faris embodies a mental vacuum.
  80. The Longshots
    Cube fills the bill as the shaggy, aimless Curtis, a veritable ghost of glories past. It's not a particularly layered performance, but it works.
  81. Hamlet 2
    It's an unhinged, off-the-wall comedy that will try anything once, an uneven film in which the hits are so dead-on that the misses don't seem to matter.
  82. Cthulhu
    Cthulhu isn't awful, but it isn't particularly compelling either.
  83. Trouble the Water
    A stirring documentary.
  84. Momma's Man
    Mastery of tone is everything here, and Azazel's control, combined with his wit, perception, discretion and easy command of the visual and of his cast makes Momma's Man a gem.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Rocker
    For the most part, The Rocker is content to simply keep the beat, marking time as the summer movie season moves on.
  86. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
    Despite some absolutely gorgeous animation and adjusting expectations for what Clone Wars is meant to be, the Force is not strong with this one.
  87. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    Bardem's performance is so good it tends to mask how lacking much of what surrounds it is.
  88. Fly Me to the Moon 3D
    This oddly paced kids' entertainment displays flashes of intelligence -- then misspells terms on NASA control panels.
  89. Mirrors
    An empty enterprise that provides a few moments of goofy fun, Mirrors reflects back nothing.
  90. Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer
    As a horror-comedy, it boldly declines to scare or amuse.
  91. Henry Poole Is Here
    Though not strictly a religious tract, Henry Poole Is Here is undeniably selling spiritual reawakening. If only its makers believed that aesthetically useful adage: God is in the details.
  92. The Girl Cut in Two
    Impeccably made and uncompromisingly adult, Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two is unquestionably the work of a master.
  93. Tropic Thunder
    There is genuine humor and palpable satiric intent underneath the waves of unnerving bad taste and political incorrectness.
  94. Elegy
    Elegy seems determined to make real every ageist dig that could be thrown its way -- out of touch, balefully slow and, for a film at least partly about the zesty enterprise of sex, awfully lifeless.
  95. Beautiful Losers
    Fortunately, Rose's on-camera turns as a kind of "I-was-there" guide through the various incarnations of the Alleged Gallery and its starrier alumni, help give this freewheeling portrait a welcome heart.
  96. Hell Ride
    The film gets the scummy patina right, all phony-Leone dusty trails, but while everybody on screen looks to be enjoying themselves, it is no fun to watch.
  97. What We Do Is Secret
    Grossman bangs out a visceral, energized biopic that captures the vibrant idiocy of punked-out youth and a tortured soul gaining his wish of cult status.
  98. Pineapple Express
    In the role of dramaturge, Rogen and his co-scripter Goldberg lack Apatow's discipline and deft hand for peripheral characters; the writing in Pineapple Express gets lazy whenever it strays too far from its central axis of players.
  99. Bottle Shock
    The soul of the grape, that thing that elevates a wine to greatness, proves here as elusive on screen as in the bottle.
  100. Patti Smith: Dream of Life
    Impossibly long and angular, with a brutally beautiful face, she represents something that's been rare in the popular culture in the past decade: an artist with a voice and a vision.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »