Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,524 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: 8,698 out of 16524
  2. Mixed: 5,809 out of 16524
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16524
16524 movie reviews
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  1. The Big Town
    There's not a performance here that doesn't ring true, nor is there a period detail that's the least bit anachronistic in Bill Kenney's production design and Wendy Partridge's costumes. [25 Sep 1987, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  2. Chicken Little
    Chicken Little, though it has its moments, mostly just feels anxious and overreaching. It tries to be all things to all people and fails to be anything to anyone.
  3. Child's Play
    Fans of the real-deal Chucky movies, with their cheerfully low-rent effects and bawdy, impish humor, may well regard this slick new offering as a desecration masquerading as an upgrade. Which is not to say that this Child’s Play is entirely without its brutish, haphazard pleasures.
  4. The Idiots
    The group's intent is not to insult those physically or mentally challenged in any manner of degree but, rather, to disturb middle-class types as much as they possibly can.
  5. 21
    What might have been a complex story dealing with greed and high-stakes betrayal among the young intellectual elite in America's gaming playground is instead treated as a slick, glossy romp.
  6. I'm Gonna Git You Sucka
    There are misfires in Sucka, but there's also some funny stuff. Wayans shows a refreshing taste for self-mockery. [17 Feb 1989, p.8]
    • Los Angeles Times
  7. Civic Duty
    By the time the movie introduces an element of ambivalence in the story, lecture hall ennui has long ago set in, and no amount of jittery horror movie conventions can change it. With nowhere for any of the characters to go, literally, the story becomes a tendentious exercise in belaboring a point.
  8. Hit and Runway
    A little gem, a sparkling comedy with serious undertones about friendship, self-discovery and artistic integrity.
  9. Maze
    In Linney, Morrow has chosen a formidable co-star, an actress who seems to draw upon an unusual degree of self-awareness to endow every character she plays with dimensions beyond what any script could provide.
  10. Vertical Limit
    Vertical Limit, despite its weaknesses, finds the right director in Martin Campbell to energize this high-altitude thriller.
  11. The Core
    If The Core finally has to be classified as a mess, it is an enjoyable one if you're in a throwback mood. After all, a film that comes up with a rare metal called Unobtainium can't be dismissed out of hand.
  12. The Santa Clause 2
    Tony Burrough's vast Toy Workshop and Elf Village at the North Pole is the film's strongest asset. The workshop is a dazzling and accurate display of the Art Nouveau style in sinuous full flower.
  13. Orange County
    Starts out deliriously funny but allows sentimentality to squeeze it to a pulp by the time it's over.
  14. The Dust Factory
    A tedious, precious fantasy.
  15. Super Troopers
    There's nothing super about Super Troopers except for those deep into the low end of the frat-house mentality that equates smart-alecky with hilarity.
  16. Some Girl(s)
    Like us, the deft and merciless director Daisy von Scherler Mayer ("Party Girl") sides with the girls, and to stack the deck she's hired five tremendous actresses.
  17. 300: Rise of an Empire
    The spectacularly brutal fighting is the film's main calling card, and in that "Rise of an Empire" doesn't disappoint. Still, in the battle for best guilty pleasure, I'd give it to the Spartans of "300," by a head.
  18. Code 8
    The ideas outpace the action in a movie that’s clearly been made with passion and intelligence, but without the kind of zip that this kind of story demands.
  19. Chupa
    As with the similar ‘80s and ‘90s films of director Chris Columbus (a producer on this project), the characters in Chupa are likable and memorable, with a fun dynamic. And Cuarón — the son of the Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón — creates a rich sense of place here, encouraging the viewers to come to love Mexico as much as Alex eventually does.
  20. State Like Sleep
    The mix of genres and the overload of characters are too much of a drag on the film. Waterston, though, is a wonder throughout, capturing the deep confusion as a woman whose life has been so upended that she wonders if she’ll ever see straight again.
  21. Lockout
    Mostly Lockout is lost in space.
  22. Crazy Wisdom: The Life & Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
    Director Johanna Demetrakas has decided to simply present the man in all his demanding complexities and let him and his encounters with associates speak for themselves. Her only rubric is the one visible in her title: "Crazy Wisdom."
  23. Carnage Park
    Most B-pictures imitate other movies, but writer-director Mickey Keating’s Carnage Park steals so freely that it almost becomes derivative in an original way.
  24. Memoirs of an Invisible Man
    The special effects tricks are often nifty, but where's the wit? Memoirs of an Invisible Man doesn't earn its seriousness. It fades into invisibility while you're watching it.
  25. Flock of Four
    Cathey brings a burnished, bone-deep authority to the question of who music belongs to, and it's handled in a way that doesn't forgive the movie's tonal missteps, but also doesn't dampen its earnest nostalgia for a lost time.
  26. Sleeping with the Enemy
    Everything that might have set Sleeping With the Enemy apart and made it memorable--textured central characters, psychological depth or a shred of believability--has been swept aside in the rush to make the movie a luxury item, sleekly gorgeous, blankly watchable, not unlike its star Julia Roberts.
  27. Bullet to the Head
    Bullet to the Head is an adrenaline shot to your movie memory if the blunt, gleefully dumb, no-nonsense ways of '80s-style action flicks are your nostalgia drug of choice.
  28. The Den
    Like many found-footage films before it, The Den never entirely suspends disbelief. It doesn't satisfyingly account for how the characters are producing all the footage.
  29. Just Cause
    If the movie had been about Sullivan it would have kept its viewers awake nights. But audiences for Just Cause will be able to sleep soundly, perhaps even catch a few winks in the theater.
  30. Not Forgotten
    A movie that's more convoluted than satisfying.
  31. Operation Dumbo Drop
    Under Simon Wincer's brisk, efficient direction, Glover, Liotta, Leary, et al., give the kind of full-bodied portrayals essential to making basically formulaic material come alive. [28 Jul 1995, p.F14]
    • Los Angeles Times
  32. Kiss of the Damned
    The confident, female-driven sensuality of Kiss of the Damned anchors this handsome nonsense.
  33. I'm Still Here
    Fake or not, I'm Still Here is no fun to watch, and in fact Phoenix's situation comes off as so dire that it becomes a reason to doubt the film's authenticity. Filming someone having a mental breakdown is embarrassing and exploitative at best.
  34. Cat Person
    If anything, the new stuff’s brazenness is truer in tone to what this “Cat Person” clearly wants to be: a slick, snarky, pulverizing horror-comedy rather than the compressed, low-key Mary Gaitskill-meets-Eliza Hittman cringefest that Roupenian’s delicate storytelling conjured with every peek into Margot’s drifting psyche.
  35. The Girl on the Train
    The empathy that Taylor summoned so effortlessly in his previous films feels strained and unpersuasive here, and moments that should be lacerating...are overplayed to ghastly effect.
  36. Angels & Demons
    Ultimately everything wilts under the weight of the complicated story lines of its many saints and sinners.
  37. The Fantasticks
    Manages to honor the theatricality of the source yet becomes a fully cinematic experience. A gem.
    • Los Angeles Times
  38. Dummy
    A romantic comedy of considerable charm and humor.
  39. High Crimes
    The problem with High Crimes, acceptable though it is, is that it's not close to anyone's best work.
  40. Shallow Hal
    Lacks even a vestige of subtlety and is rarely so much as amusing. Viewers with fond memories of the brothers' wildly funny "There's Something About Mary" will be astonished at how few laughs the current venture has.
  41. Incantato
    A poignant love story, laced with tenderness and gentle humor and told with the warmth of Italian movies in their seductively good-natured mode.
  42. Orgazmo
    Blissfully outrageous.
  43. Mojin: The Lost Legend
    Embracing the worst of Hollywood excess, director Wuershan crams in enough CG effects to fill a dozen Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay features, but the uninspired payoff quickly grows tiresome.
  44. Fortress
    For a film that first seems a throwaway, it has unusual intensity and grip. It’s not another over-reaching, under-financed “Terminator” or “Total Recall” wanna-be.
  45. The Longest Yard
    If you're thinking of seeing it, and you're old enough to drive (or even read this), do yourself a favor and rent the original instead.
  46. Alien Trespass
    While Alien Trespass stays true to the era and the genre, it forgets that its mission in this galaxy is not merely to pay tribute but to entertain.
  47. One Day
    As so often happens with love, what you hope for is not even close to what you get, and in this case we are left with a heartbreaking disappointment of a film.
  48. Angel of Evil
    Though there's no shortage of mustache-quivering energy and wide-collared strutting, Angel of Evil can't separate itself enough from the pack as a character piece to be memorable as anything other than a blood-spattered timeline.
  49. Hungry Hearts
    Dubious ending aside, Constanzo's approach to structuring, shooting and pacing the tricky material proves masterful and memorable.
  50. The Secrets We Keep
    The genre elements are nicely balanced by the adult drama embodied in the lead quartet’s performances, especially Rapace’s turn that is part femme fatale, part damaged soul.
  51. Tolkien
    What Tolkien offers instead is a picturesque, amber-soaked balm for armchair Anglophiles: the manners and mores, the crisp witticisms and stirring, stiff-upper-lip sentiments. These pleasures aren’t negligible. But neither are they a substitute for a genuinely cinematic window into a genius’ mind.
  52. The Rider Named Death
    The force of the film is not as profound as Shakhnazarov clearly intended, and The Rider Named Death is easier to respect than enjoy.
  53. American Gun
    The film is haphazardly structured, undercutting its potential power.
  54. Wonderful World
    Josh Goldin, a longtime screenwriter whose credits include "Darkman" and "Out on a Limb" -- and whose wife is a writer at the L.A. Times -- makes his debut as a writer-director with Wonderful World. The results of Goldin's dual efforts are promising but uneven.
  55. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
    While endearingly heartfelt and G-rated to boot, its storytelling suffers from a lack of locomotive force and characters that feel disappointingly two-dimensional.
  56. The Perfect Host
    What aims for Hitchcockian slyness ends up an inconsequential jumble in the comedy thriller The Perfect Host.
  57. Dirty Laundry
    Overwritten and under-directed by Maurice Jamal, the movie contains several honest moments but remains too awash in clichés and stereotypes to take seriously.
  58. Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game
    Tripping over soapy subplots and maudlin conventions, it loses its footing just as Abe regains his mojo.
  59. Penelope
    There's no real rigor or craft applied to this story -- just mood, tone, neo-gothic imagery and frantic attitude. If only Penelope knew what it truly wished to be and how to go about it. Which is probably what this overly coy fantasy's modestly appealing title character wishes as well.
  60. Porto
    The best thing about Klinger’s time/memory/dream aesthetic is how it looks: the visual equivalent of an audiophile’s nostalgia for vinyl. But the time jumping feels precious, and the screenplay — written by Klinger and Larry Gross — falls too easily into clichés.
  61. Freud's Last Session
    The leads give it their all — Hopkins’ vinegary parrying is especially lively — but the overall takeaway is of historical puppets playing philosophical gotcha, when we yearn for three-dimensional humans filling up a room with their lives, learnings and flaws.
  62. Liam Gallagher: As It Was
    The documentary can’t help but feel like a promo piece despite providing some insightful backstage glimpses into its subject’s well-publicized life.
  63. 3 Needles
    Though not as coherent as it might be, 3 Needles, with its stunning cinematography by Thomas M. Harting, is never less than engaging and suggests powerfully the myriad reasons why AIDS, after a quarter of a century, remains so difficult to control and combat.
  64. Paradise Road
    A warmhearted horror show that puts cliched movie people into a realistic situation, the signals it sends out are nothing but mixed.
  65. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    This is a work of excess and passion, an untidy sprawl of a motion picture that is sometimes ragged, occasionally uncertain, but -- and this is what's important -- always warm, accessible and rich in emotional life.
  66. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    The moments of wit and feeling that occasionally steal into the frame. . .feel like emotional outliers in a flat, inexpressive void.
  67. King of Thieves
    If only this post-heist section had more tension, suspense and surprise, “King” could have been a real contender.
  68. Prisoner's Daughter
    Although Prisoner’s Daughter gets a necessary emotional lift from its strong lead performances, the blandly by-the-numbers redemptive family drama falls short of representing a return to early form for the “Thirteen” director.
  69. No Regret
    As a love story, it could scarcely be more tempestuous and as an exposé of class differences and sexual hypocrisy it could hardly be more scathing -- or, more important, entertaining.
  70. Murder at 1600
    Starring Wesley Snipes as the suave Regis, Murder at 1600 is the modern equivalent of the routine B-picture, diverting in a small potatoes kind of way, though its budget and stars are big league.
  71. Mooz-lum
    Having created rich roles for his actors, Basir elicits from them inspired portrayals. Well-crafted in all aspects, Mooz-lum is not only rich in nuance, but also an engrossing entertainment made with skill and passion.
  72. Somewhere Slow
    Frequently affecting and mordantly funny, Somewhere Slow acquits Gilsig as a gifted actress and a producer with great taste.
  73. Kampai! For the Love of Sake
    Kampai! For the Love of Sake serves as an occasionally enlightening if long-winded primer that will prove best suited to connoisseurs.
  74. The Doom Generation
    The Doom Generation plays like a low-budget Natural Born Killers -- and that is not intended as a compliment. [27 Oct 1995, p.F6]
    • Los Angeles Times
  75. The Scary of Sixty-First
    This film offers a flurry of provocations and up-to-the-minute cultural references that never fully connect. It keeps coming to the brink of saying something clearly and furiously about sex, power and class before retreating back to the simpler path of raw shock value.
  76. Jolt
    Written by Scott Wascha, the script is simultaneously crude, rude and whip-smart. Wexler‘s direction is a rapid-fire attack of highly stylized skirmishes and aestheticized action.
  77. The FP
    The FP so desperately wants to be cultishly admired for its bad-taste rollout of wacko characters, ugly costumes and vulgar slang that it forgets to be genuinely offbeat or funny.
  78. Don't Worry Darling
    Don’t Worry Darling, for all its sinister undercurrents and feints at subversion, turns out to be a disappointingly heavy thud of a movie.
  79. Martian Child
    Martian Child would like to be "About a Boy (Who Thinks He's a Martian)", but, disappointingly, it doesn't even come close.
  80. No God, No Master
    So much blandly sweeping, speechifying history and so little personalized dramatic focus turn No God, No Master into a series of issue-driven snapshots instead of something genuinely illuminating.
  81. Leap!
    Though the distressingly large lollipop heads of the characters are often disconcerting, some of the animation is striking and near photorealistic. At times though it seems all of the resources have been put into the background environment instead of the characters.
  82. I Feel Pretty
    It's a sweet, klutzy charmer, with moments of wit, insight and, yes, beauty, some of which it seems to stumble upon by accident.
  83. The Sweeney
    Don't look for The Sweeney to win any awards. It's not going to, not even close. But that doesn't stop it from being a briskly involving British crime entertainment of the old school. You've seen the type, and more than once, but the genre still has enough juice to take us for a ride.
  84. The Mountain Between Us
    The Mountain Between Us is an uneasy hybrid of a film, and its successes and disappointments show the benefits and drawbacks of hitching your film to a pair of stars.
  85. Blues Brothers 2000
    There are funny sight gags strewn throughout, but because so many scenes and confrontations are repeated from the original, there’s a staleness and sense of melancholy to the whole affair.
  86. The Great Raid
    A plodding, squeaky-straight Time-Life tribute to the greatest generation, the movie plays like a commemorative plaque.
  87. Rememory
    Despite a soulful turn by Dinklage and some thoughtful themes and emotions, the film, capped by an anti-climactic ending, never coheres into the gripping, mind-bending package that was clearly intended.
  88. Black Nativity
    Many of the transitions between narrative and music are rough. The temptations of the street, all too real in the real world, feel forced. Confrontations become clichés. The substance of human motivation is missing. And thus the heart never beats as it should.
  89. Night at the Museum
    The bulk of the movie is a series of sight gags and set pieces that wreak much havoc but little else.
  90. Condo Painting
    Has an edgy feel and a knockout soundtrack.
  91. High Strung
    In the end, you'll either succumb to the silliness of it all and cheer Johnny B. on to his green card or, more likely, be in desperate need of your own exit visa.
  92. Adam & Steve
    Much of Craig Chester's good-hearted love story Adam & Steve is silly and contrived, but the film boasts four engaging actors.
  93. F/X2
    The craftsmanship that went into the making of this film has to have been formidable, yet a key part of its enjoyment is its throwaway, unpretentious charm.
  94. Critters 2
    Though it's somewhat better than its predecessor, largely through sheer directorial and photographic panache, it's still pretty disreputable and mindless. [29 Apr 1988, p.4]
    • Los Angeles Times
  95. Rock Dog
    It doesn't gel and lacks the kind of visual kinetic energy we’ve come to expect from films of this ilk.
  96. Pet
    Pet isn’t much more than a twist on an old conceit, and the character beats are painted with overly broad strokes, but it’s sharply shot with a crystalline sense of unease, and Monaghan and Solo lean into their creepy performances wholeheartedly.
  97. The Thing About My Folks
    Sweet but dramatically inert.
  98. The Last Mercenary
    The plot chugs along with no surprises, but that’s beside the point. While it’s not exactly a laugh riot, the film’s humor tends to land.
  99. Semper Fi
    The movie’s most memorable material is also more grounded.
  100. In the Shadow of the Moon
    This is an appealingly polished thriller, with something modest but profound to say about how selfish choices can ripple across decades.
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