Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,520 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 16520
  2. Mixed: 5,806 out of 16520
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16520
16520 movie reviews
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  1. Game 6
    Small and intimate, Game 6 is a meditation on American theater and the Great American Pastime that hovers above the surface of reality but never quite takes off, either.
  2. Shakespeare Behind Bars
    The main strength of "Shakespeare" is its ability to show the vulnerability of its subjects, neither judging nor smothering them with undeserved praise.
  3. 16 Blocks
    A ticking clock scenario and a terrific performance by Willis as an alcoholic NYPD detective make up for the film's occasional missteps and some strange pop culture references.
  4. Dave Chappelle's Block Party
    Most fun of all, however, is basking in Chappelle's ability to be effortlessly funny. Whether he's making believe he's a pimp in a Dayton clothing store or charming little kids in the Bed-Stuy day-care center that was concert headquarters, his personality infuses the film with infectious good feelings.
  5. Ultraviolet
    To her credit, Jovovich carries out her action-hero duties with swagger and conviction that never get out of control. Clearly, she's expecting a franchise out of this.
  6. Deep Sea
    It would be a mistake to think that if you've seen one fish up close and personal you've seen them all. Deep Sea 3D is a total-immersion undersea adventure, in which the oceans' glories are on vivid display in three dimensions.
  7. Merry Christmas
    The uncomplicated humanism of Joyeux Noël, with its Christmas message of peace, feels at once irrefutable and refreshing.
  8. In Cold Blood (re-release)
    The most memorable section of the film is the chilling quarter-hour devoted to the apprehension and eventual murder of the Clutter family. Captured in unblinking, neo-documentary detail, it freezes the blood just as they did all those decades ago.
  9. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Most of all we see what a coldblooded sport campaigning is, and how desperately the people who are good at it want to win.
  10. Tsotsi
    Whatever its weaknesses, Tsotsi is redeemed by its excellent performances.
  11. Madea's Family Reunion
    Reunion is an awkward compound of paradoxical tones and ideas... But one shouldn't underestimate Perry's ability to make such contradictions work and get away with the most wretched excess.
  12. Running Scared
    Running Scared is so desperate and surreally stupid that all you would have to do to see it as a brilliant sendup of everything that is corrupt, vulgar, sad, deluded and bad-for-you about Hollywood is squint.
  13. Dirty
    As good as the leads and the supporting cast are, and as much action as gets packed into the film's relatively brief running time, none of it draws us in dramatically.
  14. Unknown White Male
    An unexpectedly emotional, continually disconcerting film.
  15. Forgiving Dr. Mengele
    The very title suggests that this compelling and provocative film is going to be different from other Holocaust documentaries.
  16. Trudell
    Unfortunately, absent a more objective context, Trudell's gnomic utterances do little to support those sentiments. By preaching so relentlessly to the choir, this film misses an opportunity to show what got them to sing in the first place.
  17. Street Fight
    The story that first-time feature filmmaker Curry tells is extremely compelling, but where he really scores is in addressing politics and race in a way that allows events to speak for themselves.
  18. Date Movie
    The only thing remotely resembling parody in this depressing waste of time and money is Jennifer Coolidge's sendup of Barbra Streisand as an over-the-top string of Jewish mother clichés.
  19. Eight Below
    This family adventure about a team of sled dogs abandoned in Antarctica naturally invokes the traditional shout of "Mush!" urging the canines to go faster, but it's also an apt descriptor of both its shameless sentimentality and ineptly structured story.
  20. Freedomland
    Anyone who has seen the trailers for Freedomland, which don't exactly skimp on maternal angst, already knows this is going to be a sad-mommy story. What we don't know is that it may be a bad-mommy story as well.
  21. Battle in Heaven
    Reygadas asks audiences to plunge headlong into his chaotic vision of the world, no questions asked but complete trust required. Not everyone is going to be willing or able to take this leap of faith, but those who do go along with Reygadas may well feel they have come away having undergone a stunning revelatory experience.
  22. Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    Director Timur Bekmambetov has combined two things that never connected before. He's taken a glossy Hollywood-type fantasy thriller about the battle between supernatural forces of good and evil right here on planet Earth and infused it with a homegrown, distinctively Russian soul.
  23. The Second Chance
    A movie-of-the-week treatment of race and class, the film credibly portrays the day-to-day workings of an urban ministry.
  24. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    Julia Jentsch strong and graceful, quiet knockout of a performance is the film's most potent weapon.
  25. Winter Passing
    Harris, of course, is in a different league from the rest, and his depiction of the tortured writer is remarkably well-realized, considering the nonspecific yet somehow overly familiar inscrutability of the character. Despite its limitations, there's something appealing about the world Rapp has created.
  26. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America
    CSA is rough around the edges, especially where the acting and some of the film's invented characters are concerned. But the way CSA works out its ideas is so provoking that its drawbacks are not difficult to ignore.
  27. Curious George
    Turns out to be as simple, friendly, kid-appropriate and nontoxic as any major motion picmerchtainment franchise could ever hope to be.
  28. Firewall
    For though it is a reasonable facsimile of a successful thriller, this film (named after a barrier that protects computers from hackers) never manages to be more than mildly effective.
  29. The Pink Panther
    The best thing about the replica is how wholeheartedly Martin throws himself into the physical comedy, which is uniformly hilarious.
  30. Neil Young: Heart of Gold
    It's the record of a life, a musical and spiritual autobiography, and as directed by Jonathan Demme it taps into the kind of unashamed, unsentimental emotion that's become increasingly rare in films of any kind.
  31. A Year Without Love
    A Year Without Love is only Berneri's third feature yet is an elegant, economical work.
  32. A Good Woman
    The film is well intentioned and mildly diverting, but in attempting to modernize its story it has lost many of the things that make the original so memorable and not gained much in return.
  33. When a Stranger Calls
    Droopy remake.
  34. Something New
    The movie nicely captures the area around Baldwin Hills, is crisply written by Kriss Turner and portrays the upper-middle class black community seldom seen in mainstream TV and film. However, the characterizations, even the leads, rarely rise above archetypes.
  35. FAQs
    The campier aspects of the film are not enough to make up for its lapses into melodrama and just plain silliness.
  36. Cowboy del Amor
    Charming, bittersweet.
  37. Bubble
    Despite its refreshingly straightforward style and compelling performers, the movie feels encased in an invisible, filmy membrane of its own. Soderbergh keeps his characters on one side of the wall and his audience on the other. As to which is living in the real world, I guess that's open to discussion.
  38. Annapolis
    Franco is a refreshingly offbeat screen presence and in lighter moments boasts an appealing smile. He may be someone to watch, but too bad there's little room for emotional spontaneity - acting, in other words - in a rote Hollywood drill such as this.
  39. Big Momma's House 2
    This isn't your father's cross-dressing. At the same time, the science of comedy attains a new level of appreciation, since hardly anything about this sluggish sequel to the 2000 box office hit comes close to being funny.
  40. Nanny McPhee
    A spicy little pastry with just the right proportions of flakiness and gooeyness.
  41. Little Jerusalem
    Philosophy and religion become entangled with love and sex in Karin Albou's intelligent, sensual drama.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Manderlay
    Trier gets lost in his own rhetoric, forgetting to entertain his flock while raking them over the coals.
  43. Roving Mars
    Not having a way to capture images of the machines at work means that too much of Butler's film -- his credits include "Pumping Iron" and the Imax film "Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure" -- is disappointingly made up of computer simulations.
  44. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
    The trouble with describing a story this complex and digressive is that it's hard to keep it from sounding complicated and hard-to-follow. But for a movie about movies, it's surprisingly humanistic, cheerful and true to life.
  45. Go for Zucker
    Zippy, well-played, Wilder-esque farce.
  46. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
    Not Brooks' funniest film, but it possesses his trademark wry humor and is slyly observant.
  47. Why We Fight
    The long line of recent muckraking documentaries that has preceded Why We Fight does nothing to diminish its force.
  48. End of the Spear
    What creeps in is the dramatic simple-mindedness attendant with a purity-of-purpose mind-set.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Underworld: Evolution
    Wiseman, a former art director and music video director, has a definite sense of style and pace, and the creature transformations are eye-popping. In addition, the cast raises the movie above the level of routine genre schlock.
  50. The Real Dirt on Farmer John
    Though its title suggests an exposé on Dodger Dogs, the movie is the moving, inspirational account of John Peterson's discovery of an almost divine calling in the land beneath his feet.
  51. The Fall of Fujimori
    A confoundingly mercurial figure, Fujimori is a fascinating subject. But in her focus on the man, Perry fails to paint a broader picture of a racially diverse and extremely complex country.
  52. Glory Road
    Ripped directly from Disney's playbook of inspirational sports movies, it's devoid of any original elements that might deter it from that successful formula, hewing closer to the sentimental cliches of "Remember the Titans" than the much better "Miracle" or "The Rookie."
  53. Tristan and Isolde
    This "Tristan" has its slightly silly moments, but rather like those fondly remembered epics of Hollywood past, its energy and entertainment value carry the day.
  54. April's Shower
    The movie suffers from a malady common to tiny indies of the let's-put-on-a-show variety -- it strains for irrepressibly nutty, but lands squarely in annoying.
  55. Following Sean
    What emerges from Arlyck's musings is a penetrating cinematic essay on how generations in the last century struggled to take hold of history and reconfigure the shape of daily life.
  56. Fateless
    A first-rate contribution to the Holocaust canon.
  57. Hostel
    Seems to have been tailored to its designated R "for brutal scenes of torture and violence, strong sexual content, language and drug use."
    • 33 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Grandma's Boy
    It's as aimless and pointless as a joke told while stoned. There are some pretty decent shock-laughs, often provided by Jones, who hasn't ever been this nasty.
  59. BloodRayne
    The only thing left unsliced is the ham in BloodRayne, yet another video game adaptation by German genre specialist Uwe Boll and a movie with more fading - or faded - talent than an Italian basketball team.
  60. The Promise
    Chen's masterful, deeply perceptive direction of his superb cast is equaled by the film's luminous cinematography, rich yet spare and stylized production and costume design, and rousing score.
  61. Match Point
    It pretty much keeps its pulse steady, its blood cold and its nerves tamped down -- which, combined with cinematographer Remi Adefarasin's architectural Hitchcockian flourishes, lends a queasy, cool air to the proceedings.
  62. Wolf Creek
    An initially promising horror film that turns exploitive, Wolf Creek fails to deliver the requisite payoff considering its leisurely pace.
  63. Casanova
    In the exhilarating Casanova, giddy shenanigans effectively set off the dangerous, darker impulses of human nature.
  64. Rumor Has It...
    The resulting film is a muddled, melodramatic, sort-of remake of "The Graduate."
  65. The New World
    A work of breathtaking imagination, less a movie than a mode of transport, and in every sense a masterpiece.
  66. The Matador
    In The Matador, a delightfully sly diversion, Pierce Brosnan breaks the mold and turns in what might be considered the performance of his career, the kind of witty, relaxed star portrayal that recalls those of Cary Grant and other Golden Era legends.
  67. Munich
    Munich's even-handed cry for peace is not an act of equivocation but one of bravery. What Munich has to say, and its ability to say it to the widest possible audience, couldn't be more needed than it is right now.
  68. Caché (Hidden)
    A psychological suspense drama of the utmost rigor and originality.
  69. The Ringer
    Though the movie bears some of the Farrellys' trademark outrageous humor, it has a sweet demeanor and makes a noble statement.
  70. The Intruder
    Never has Denis demanded so much from audiences as with this shimmering enigma, at once intimate and epic, but it's worth the effort and then some.
  71. Cheaper by the Dozen 2
    A family comedy that is actually involving, even believable, and manages to be pretty funny too.
  72. Fun with Dick and Jane
    Plays like the setup for a movie that never materializes. It has all the elements for a successful comedy, but once the premise is presented, the film doesn't know how to deliver on its promise. That doesn't mean there is no fun in "Fun."
  73. The White Countess
    The White Countess takes place in a fascinating time and place, rife with conflict and turmoil. But to watch Fiennes float (and Richardson trudge) through it all, absorbed in themselves and their own private misery, is to wish they'd started falling earlier, if only to knock some sense into them.
  74. The Family Stone
    A film that's at times as ragged and shaggy as its family unit. But as written and directed by Thomas Bezucha, its offbeat mixture of highly choreographed comic crises and the occasional bite of reality make for an unexpectedly enticing blend.
  75. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    Incisive yet supple, wrenching yet deeply pleasurable, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada easily ranks among the year's best pictures.
  76. The Producers
    Whereas the original film is gleefully crass and energetically paced, the movie musical, weighing in at a robust two-plus hours, is bloated and self-satisfied. Whatever spectacle the stage musical possessed to make it such a box-office behemoth fails to transfer to the screen.
  77. Hoodwinked!
    Hoodwinked hasn't much time for soul or sentiment, but it is certainly amusingly smart and sassy.
  78. Angels with Angles
    Lame and overly contrived comedy.
  79. King Kong
    King Kong is an homage not just to the original but to the history of movies themselves.
  80. Happy Here and Now
    This is a droll, laid-back film noir steeped in Crescent City atmosphere and music that culminates in the colliding worlds of genuine and virtual reality.
  81. The Grace Lee Project
    What she finds is good for her and good for us -- a journey of realization for anyone who's ever felt lost in the crowd.
  82. Brokeback Mountain
    Confidently directed by Ang Lee and featuring sensitive and powerful performances by Jake Gyllenhaal and a breathtaking Heath Ledger, this film is determined to involve us in the naturalness and even inevitability of its epic, complicated love story.
  83. Memoirs of a Geisha
    Spanning two decades and a momentous war, Memoirs of a Geisha displays all the pomp and grandeur of an epic, but you wouldn't call it sweeping.
  84. Mrs Henderson Presents
    Just as there will always be an England, there will always be a certain kind of English film: the highly polished entertainment, well-acted, genteelly amusing and impeccably turned out. Mrs. Henderson Presents is the latest example of the trend and an especially satisfying one.
  85. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    What's best about it is that it seems real by the logic of childhood - it looks as things SHOULD look, if kids had it their way.
  86. Marebito (The Stranger from Afar)
    Provocative rather than scary, and it's made with visual flair.
  87. The World's Fastest Indian
    Based on the real-life exploits of Munro, it's a boilerplate fish-out-of-water/road trip/underdog sports movie -- but it's a heck of a ride with Hopkins leading the way.
  88. Æon Flux
    If Aeon Flux is what Charlize Theron does to pay the bills while otherwise being engaged in "Monster" and "North Country," it's probably a reasonable price to pay. For her. For us? No, no, no.
  89. Transamerica
    Felicity Huffman is such a wonder, at once funny and brave, playing a pre-op male-to-female transsexual in the uneven comedy Transamerica that she sustains several lapses that might otherwise have sunk it.
  90. First Descent
    As a result, what should have been a thrilling 90-minute sport adventure runs on for 20 more repetitive minutes. First Descent is exciting, but less would surely have been more.
  91. The Kid & I
    It is difficult to imagine anyone but Spheeris pulling off this movie, undercutting all mawkishness, bringing to it nuance and shading, not to mention wit. The result is an enjoyable family movie.
  92. Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt
    Brown's engrossing and poignant documentary on Van Zandt, is filled with appearances by celebrated performers who are simply fans of this legendarily troubled figure with the aching voice and haunted Lincoln-esque look.
  93. The Boys of Baraka
    A moving, troubling documentary. Moving because of the nature of the problem it explores, troubling because the film can't help but underline that simple solutions are never going to present themselves, no matter how much we want them to.
  94. Down to the Bone
    Down to the Bone emerges with an aura of authenticity so strong as to be mesmerizing, thanks to a superior script brought to life with infallibly natural performances.
  95. Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    As it is, Mrs. Palfrey seems to suggest the Claremont is located somewhere in the Twilight Zone. Where are the televisions? Where are the chain stores? Where are the immigrants? I see the buildings, but where is England?
  96. The Ice Harvest
    A droll, dark Christmas treat for adults, a delightful alternative to the usual holiday-themed fare.
  97. In the Mix
    A jumble of genres including mob melodrama, bodyguard romance and interracial love story, none of which is handled in a remotely satisfying manner by director Ron Underwood. The film's tone shifts with all the grace of a car with a balky transmission.
  98. Just Friends
    This is a standard-issue gross Hollywood knockabout comedy in which slapstick antics have been piled up with a steam shovel and driven home with a sledgehammer. Reynolds and Smart are game and even dimensional, but all others are stuck playing tiresome, obnoxious characters.
  99. Rent
    Rent is commodified faux bohemia on a platter, eliciting the same kind of numbing soul-sadness as children's beauty pageants, tiny dogs in expensive boots, Mahatma Gandhi in Apple ads.
  100. Yours, Mine and Ours
    Synthetic, strained and noisy, Yours, Mine & Ours is a clinker that doesn't bear comparison with the original. Quaid, Russo and others deserve better.
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