Los Angeles Times' Scores

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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
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  1. The Treatment
    Odd, funny film.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Inlaws & Outlaws
    Because Emory doesn't grapple fully with the issues that loom over the film, there is something soppy and soft-headed about Inlaws & Outlaws.
  3. Jindabyne
    Jindabyne's strength and power come from a number of factors: its origin, its current landscape and the unusual way its writer-director, Ray Lawrence, has chosen to work.
  4. The Condemned
    Condemned is, if nothing else, an object lesson in how to punish women for fun and profit. But it's all for a point, the filmmakers would have us believe. One suspects that's a point of sale.
  5. The Invisible
    Little more than an extended excuse for a soundtrack.
  6. Kickin It Old Skool
    A witless, mind-numbingly inert comedy.
  7. Next
    For an action thriller based on a Dick story, Next is peculiarly low-tech and hokey.
  8. Snow Cake
    Modest but well wrought and witty, Snow Cake is full of unexpected moments and clever observations.
  9. Les amitiés maléfiques
    Steeped in shrewdness about the often contradictory workings of human nature, Poison Friends is gratifying in the best tradition of French cinema.
  10. The Wedding Weekend
    A breezy, well-paced diversion, amusing rather than scintillating yet clearly personal.
  11. The Far Side of Jericho
    Unengaging and uninspired and that leaves far too much unexplored.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wind Chill
    This isn't merely a horror film about things going bump in the night, but a study of the effects of desolation on our sense of personal consciousness.
  13. Diggers
    Archetypal characters and somewhat formulaic plot notwithstanding, Diggers has the conviction to avoid tying things up with a bow and allows us the privilege to imagine where its denizens will go afterward.
  14. The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez
    Mournful and engrossing, the film traces Gutierrez's life through the people he knew and the places he lived.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Something to Cheer About
    The outline of a great story, but it never fills in the gaps.
  16. Banished
    A trite, incoherent tale.
  17. Fakers
    The scenario isn't entirely plausible, but the actors are engaging and you can't beat the running time.
  18. Zoo
    Zoo is a cool sensibility married to a hot topic, a poetic film about a forbidden, unsettling subject. Elegantly made and eerily lyrical, it deals with what director Robinson Devor has accurately called "the last taboo, the boundary of something comprehensible."
  19. Triad Election
    Like any good sequel, this film takes what is familiar with the original's concept -- in this case, an internecine struggle for supremacy -- and deepens it.
  20. Hot Fuzz
    Wright and Pegg are storytellers who weave their naughty bits into genuine characters and a plot. It's a ridiculous plot, but one that's absolutely in the spirit of the films they're satirizing.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vacancy
    A ruthlessly efficient stalk-and-slash machine.
  22. Fracture
    It boils down to experience's arrogance, intellect and wealth versus youth's cockiness, resilience and hard work, and the actors appear to have a good time playing the game.
  23. In the Land of Women
    The 27-year-old Kasdan displays an ability to bring a refreshing, human touch to what could be overly familiar material that echoes what his father did in films like "The Big Chill" and "Body Heat."
  24. Alice Neel
    The finely crafted Alice Neel is at once tribute, investigative journalism and messy family drama.
  25. The Valet
    A complete master of cinematic farce, Veber's latest venture, The Valet, makes creating deliciously funny comedy look a lot easier than it has any right to.
  26. Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
    Although ill-served by the lack of expert voices or elaboration on viable choices, Plagues and Pleasures is an often-fascinating document of change -- incremental as evaporation, or catastrophic as flooding.
  27. Stephanie Daley
    Brougher has taken material that sounds contrived and potentially exploitative and used her gift for careful observation and restrained emotionality to give it surprising authenticity.
  28. Downtown: A Street Tale
    As writer as well as star, Dedio expresses passionate concern for the lost young souls of Lower Manhattan but by and large doesn't define his characters strongly enough to involve the viewer in their fates very deeply.
  29. Red Road
    A spellbinding, intelligent thriller that takes its time to get where it's going but is well worth the trip.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
    A little of this junk-drawer fusillade goes a long way.
  31. Pathfinder
    One of the funniest films of the year. That's not good news for this attempted action-adventure, which clearly lost its way in its own copious fog.
  32. Perfect Stranger
    It is an acceptable enough thriller, neither the worst you've seen nor the opposite.
  33. Redline
    Redline isn't exactly a car wreck, mainly because it's far less exciting, and you can, in fact, look away. Perhaps at your shoes.
  34. Everything's Gone Green
    The film's tone is on the sitcom side, but its likable cast and zany subplots make it palatable.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lonely Hearts
    While not much of a detective story, Robinson's period film does provide a captivating look at the dynamics that turn Fernandez and Beck into serial killers.
  36. Year of the Dog
    With pathos competing equally against the often pungent laughs for the audience's attention, it's a movie that is both unsettling and amusing, most comparable to "Chuck & Buck" in tone.
  37. Slow Burn
    Beach's storytelling tactics, much like the film as a whole, would simply be annoying if they weren't also borderline insulting.
  38. Private Fears in Public Places
    A masterpiece by any measure, is fresh, immediate and contemporary, but its wintry yet warm perspective is suffused with the wisdom and experience of a great filmmaker who turns 85 on June 2.
  39. Rock the Bells
    Stressful to watch, but its entertaining stage performances and document of people under pressure should interest even non-rap fans.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Disturbia
    What the new movie lacks in craft, suspense and metaphoric richness it makes up for with, um, gadgets.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Grindhouse
    A fascinating exercise in genre reinvention, a showcase for two radically different approaches to homage.
  42. The Hoax
    The result is an unexpectedly satisfying fantasia of reality and imagination, a meditation on the nature of lies and deception, on how we come to embrace not the truth but what it suits us to believe.
  43. The TV Set
    In general, the movie doesn't necessarily reveal anything we don't already know but delivers it in a personable, entertaining manner.
  44. Whole New Thing
    More satisfying than not, and it plays out credibly.
  45. Fighting Words
    A solid first film that suggests Edwards might well consider moving beyond conventional plotting, even though it serves his purpose here, enabling him to discover ways in which to bring to his images and style the intensity and punch of his words.
  46. Hoboken Hollow
    Writer-director-producer Glen Stephens does occasionally have grim fun, but something as irredeemably sadistic as this packaged as entertainment is almost depressing.
  47. The Reaping
    The seeds of most Biblical horror movies are sown in the Book of Revelations; The Reaping at least gets marks for originality for springing from Exodus.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Are We Done Yet?
    Although Ice Cube is still happy to haul out his old snarl when it serves his purposes, he's clearly trying to reinvent himself as a family entertainer. But the milder he gets, the less confident he seems. What's a reformed gangsta rapper to do?
    • 43 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Firehouse Dog
    Though it never completely catches fire, there's enough earnestness and warmth that makes it a welcome alternative in a family film arena dominated by computer animation and associated toy lines.
  50. Black Book
    As epic as its two-hours-and-25-minute running time indicates, Black Book is as subversive as it is traditional, both enamored of conventional notions of heroism and frankly contemptuous of them.
  51. Killer of Sheep
    Many small things happen in Killer of Sheep, nothing of much consequence. But the enlargement of life itself is profound.
  52. Blades of Glory
    The movie is at its funniest and most original when zinging the sometimes pretentious milieu of competitive figure skating. Whatever combination of choreography, camera trickery and special effects were required to render the over-the-top, hyper-real skate numbers, they're executed with wit and ingenuity.
  53. The Lookout
    A writer's thriller. True, it's cleanly and efficiently directed, and it showcases some crackerjack acting, but the reason it's a real pleasure to watch is that a writer's sensibility is the foundation everything is built on.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Meet the Robinsons
    Zippy if forgettable, Meet the Robinsons keeps the tone mildly tongue-in-cheek and ends on a dutifully inspirational note.
  55. After the Wedding
    After the Wedding would never pretend to have any answers, but in hands this skilled the act of exploration itself couldn't be more illuminating, or more dramatic.
  56. Race You to the Bottom
    Race You to the Bottom has an ending that is rightly open yet thoroughly satisfying -- as is the entire film.
  57. Ten 'til Noon
    A triumph of ingenuity over budget, a taut, darkly comic thriller with a dart of pathos that holds attention like Super Glue from the first frame to the last.
  58. Sacco and Vanzetti
    Regardless of your opinion about Sacco and Vanzetti, the documentary should prove thoughtful and thought-provoking.
  59. Shooter
    Carrying Shooter through its difficulties is, finally, not its crisp action sequences and definitely not the torture. It's Wahlberg's performance, which is the film's most old-fashioned element, and its best.
  60. The Hills Have Eyes II
    You'd like to think such bankruptcy of imagination means we've seen the last of these subterranean creeps. But you know they'll be back soon to collect their royalties from the gore hounds who apparently don't care how dull or warmed over the accompanying package.
  61. The Last Mimzy
    Being a "family film" may excuse many faults, considering the intended audience, but it's hard to think of a recent movie that has more determinedly married the engaging with the banal.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pride
    Howard seems to be in an altogether different and substantially more idiosyncratic film. When the story calls for him to be Patton, he plays Kurtz.
  63. Reign Over Me
    Movies about male friendship are often trivialized with the "buddy" tag, but this one resonates beyond that.
  64. TMNT
    That's really what TMNT lacks most -- humor. Despite the doll-like cartoonishness of the human figures, the filmmakers seem to expect us to take this animated romp seriously. Too seriously.
  65. Air Guitar Nation
    It's one of the charms of Air Guitar Nation that much of it plays like a mockumentary in which you're not quite sure who's pulling your leg. But it's real, even if the guitars are not.
  66. Boy Culture
    At times a little callow around the edges, Boy Culture upon reflection, displays considerable insight. It is buoyed by some incisive acting and writing and anchored by a standout portrayal from Bauchau, a versatile veteran of international cinema.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Color Me Kubrick
    Scarcely an insightful biographical portrait, Color Me Kubrick is still interesting, perhaps even intimidating, as a study of the way fandom can so readily be turned against itself.
  68. Journey from the Fall
    An example of sophisticated, impassioned filmmaking involving mainly people who lived through the harrowing experiences so unsparingly depicted, Journey From the Fall powerfully illustrates the refugee/immigrant experience.
  69. Offside
    A charming, character-driven film that conveys enormous feeling for its people
  70. The Page Turner
    Though this film is as formal and predetermined as a carved palace of ice, it builds interest through the strong performances of its pair of costars, the veteran Catherine Frot and relative newcomer Deborah Francois.
  71. Memory
    Oddly enjoyable at its most implausible.
  72. The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair
    The film becomes a dizzying descent into a world of contradictions, military illogic and ineffectual bureaucracy.
  73. What Love Is
    Devotes itself to inflicting serious pain upon innocent moviegoers who wander into what is perhaps the single most poorly conceived and ineptly executed movie released to theaters in quite some time.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Withdrawal from Gaza
    Withdrawal's most glaring omission is the lack of any serious criticism of the settlers, whether from the Jewish left or any Palestinian point of view.
  75. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
    Behind the Mask is original and weirdly delicious, and executed with gory aplomb.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Dead Silence
    A conflation of the horror genre's laziest tropes, plot angles and shorthands, this inept creation isn't so much a film as it is a smorgasbord.
  77. I Think I Love My Wife
    Despite the creakiness of the vehicle, there are some genuinely funny moments and observations.
  78. Premonition
    Its biggest failing -- and the ultimate one for a lightweight entertainment such as this -- is that it's a deadly bore from start to finish.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Caffeine
    Detailing the sexual and romantic misadventures of the employees and patrons at a London cafe, Caffeine is about as appetizing as a pot of dishwater coffee.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Brother
    My Brother is brimming with would-be life lessons. But the movie goes in so many directions, and follows through on so few of them, that all it transmits is a vague glow. It's watered-down chicken soup for the soul.
  81. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
    The Wind That Shakes the Barley turns out to be a more complicated, more dramatically potent story than it appears at first. It's concerned at its core not with how bad the British were but with what the cost of dealing with them was for the Irish.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Adam's Apples
    The movie is all surface, loudly clamoring for attention and then losing its voice.
  83. Tortilla Heaven
    The film and its makers simply try too hard. Director and co-writer Judy Hecht Dumontet can't stop "helping" with overactive editing and scoring, such as tinkling bells every time the sacred tortilla is shown early on.
  84. American Cannibal: The Road to Reality
    Audiences probably often wonder when the reality genre is finally going to eat itself. American Cannibal stands ready for that moment with a bib and vinegar.
  85. 300
    300 is something to see, but unless you love violence as much as a Spartan, Quentin Tarantino or a video-game-playing teenage boy, you will not be endlessly fascinated.
  86. The Host
    With a subversive streak as wide as the Han and a title open to interpretation, The Host confounds our expectations while providing top-notch entertainment. For Bong, the monster movie is an ample vessel, one that he can fill with social criticism while discovering exuberant amusement in the process.
  87. Beyond the Gates
    Tense and gut-wrenching, Beyond the Gates is a horrifying story told with grace and compassion.
  88. Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders
    Scurlock does well to counter the more dire aspects of the film with a razor-sharp sense of humor.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Namesake
    Despite being rooted in knotty issues of identity, Lahiri's novel forgoes didacticism in favor of vivid portraiture. Nair and her uniformly superb cast take the same tack: The characters are individuals before they are emblems.
  90. The Ultimate Gift
    The film constantly teeters on the fulcrum of its own treacly good intentions and simplistic parable-like storytelling, and the extent that it stays balanced is largely thanks to its agile cast.
  91. The Exterminating Angels
    The film -- buoyed by its cast of excellent actors -- loses its momentum in the final half-hour when it starts to take itself too seriously.
  92. Zodiac
    Zodiac is primarily a complex character study, despite the film's grim and gruesome subject matter. It's a role reversal of sorts for a director who normally emphasizes the brutal tension in his movies.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Wild Hogs
    By the time it sputters across the finish line, Wild Hogs feels as if it's gone on forever -- like a trip in a hot car with the windows rolled up. The air is stale and hard to breathe, and it sure feels good when it's over.
  94. Black Snake Moan
    Though Black Snake Moan is unadulterated deep-fried silliness from "Hustle & Flow" filmmaker Craig Brewer, Jackson makes it indisputably more palatable. It's still not a very good movie, but it's intermittently entertaining (and sometimes unintentionally funny).
  95. Full of It
    A new teen fantasy movie, is indeed loaded -- with things you've seen many times before.
  96. Into Great Silence
    A transcendent, transporting experience, a trance movie that casts a major league spell by going deeply into a monastic world that lives largely without words.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wild Tigers I Have Known
    The film is a persistent spectacle of audio-visual mood and twee posturing: Strange musical currencies underscore almost every scene, and Logan's acts of scoping and cocooning, in and out of Joey's planetary-themed bedroom, are punctuated with fuzzy video of animals on the hunt.
  98. The Astronaut Farmer
    Much of the credit for the movie succeeding goes to Thornton. In his able hands, Farmer is not so much someone who simply has faith in what he is doing but a man who believes with incontrovertible knowledge of what can be accomplished.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Reno 911!: Miami
    Often mildly amusing but rarely laugh-out-loud funny, the film works best in scenes with a distinct Miami flavor.
  100. Amazing Grace
    Fortunately, director Michael Apted and his team understand the challenges of this kind of story and have met them with intelligence and energy.
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