Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,523 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 16523
  2. Mixed: 5,808 out of 16523
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16523
16523 movie reviews
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  1. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
    Many viewers will find it challenging to see the substance hidden in the documentary’s over-the-top style that makes Michael Moore’s directorial stamp look subtle.
  2. Mute
    The references, conscious and not, serve as constant reminders to the audience of other, better, movies, rendering Mute more atonal hodgepodge than carefully orchestrated pastiche.
  3. Never Surrender: The Ed Ramsey Story
    In its present form, Ramsey’s story leaves you wanting more — and less.
  4. Mommy's Box
    Though it’s mildly enjoyable throughout, the movie is ultimately just a loose collection of nice little scenes, held together by a few palliative clichés.
  5. The Comedian
    De Niro’s scenes with Mann glow with warmth and wit, but something in his performance clenches up whenever Jackie gets behind a microphone and starts railing about masturbation, incontinence and other below-the-waist targets.
  6. The Hollow
    Writer-director-actor Miles Doleac’s sprawling Southern-fried mystery The Hollow has the rich characters and milieu of a good literary novel, but never quite works as a movie.
  7. The Circle
    Despite appealing features, including stars Emma Watson and Tom Hanks (who morphs his patented affability into casually sinister, Jobs-ian salesmanship), The Circle never builds up a head of steam as either dark drama, modern satire or dystopian thriller.
  8. Rainbow Time
    It’s not exactly side-splittingly funny, and it doesn’t amount to much. The ideas are strong, but the storytelling’s practically nonexistent.
  9. A Kind of Murder
    The story remains an academic argument, struggling to pierce the handsome surface.
  10. Detour
    What’s painfully clear is that all the artfully composed shots, hinky situations and extra conceptual surprises can’t make this Detour all that compelling beyond its crisp artifice.
  11. Mr. Donkey
    Mr. Donkey is deeply flawed but also fascinating. There’s a good story here, woven between the thudding jokes.
  12. Army of One
    The movie’s noisy, busy and not that funny. But there is a sweetness and a cockeyed optimism here. At heart, it’s a salute to American gumption — however misguided.
  13. Shangri-La Suite
    Though the movie’s well cast, its central story rarely shakes off the derivative cloak to become involving. But Ron Livingston’s turn as a sorrowful Elvis Presley is a quiet revelation.
  14. Growing Up Smith
    Growing Up Smith is a well-intentioned fizzle that misses what should have been an easily reachable mark.
  15. Apparition Hill
    Apparition Hill is actually a compelling but unnecessarily long-winded sociological study about a group of adults recruited to watch for signs and wonders in a small village in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
  16. The Shelter
    Overall, The Shelter is a bit too clever for its own good. The hero’s personal hell is too literal, and the movie as a whole is too slight.
  17. All We Had
    Holmes’ helming is unremarkable — unlike her and Owens’ acting, which is excellent.
  18. Gifted
    No one is likely to disagree with the basic correctness of the movie’s conclusions, though you may well object to the process by which it arrives at them.
  19. Beauty Bites Beast
    Beauty Bites Beast does lessen its usage of narration and animation as the film gets going, but the damage is already done. It blunts its own effectiveness by over-embellishing stories and facts that could have stood on their own.
  20. Love Is All You Need?
    This capably-acted and shot film...tries too hard to hammer home its points. So much so that its messaging becomes diffused, if not lost, amid the overlong picture’s mounting frenzy.
  21. The Last Word
    What initially augured a spiky portrait of late-age restlessness recedes into a woefully generic case of shopworn cross-generational uplift, sprinkled with tired wisecracks.
  22. The Book of Love
    For a film thats trying very hard to make you feel, it sure leaves you cold.
  23. Best and Most Beautiful Things
    Smith is certainly a worthy advocate for the mainstreaming and acceptance of “outcasts” or “others.” Unfortunately, Zevgetis doesn’t dig deeply enough here.
  24. A Boy Called Po
    The film over-relies on blunt messaging, one-note villains (bullies, bosses, administrators, worst mall cop ever) and several stacked-deck situations to align us with David and Po, even if we’re inherently on their side from the start.
  25. Trezoros: The Lost Jews of Kastoria
    As impactful as its rarely told story might be, “Trezoros” would have been better served by a shorter running time or a more focused approach to its central story.
  26. The Wall
    The kind of tension you would expect is never completely present.
  27. They Call Us Monsters
    There’s little doubt prison reform needs to address the severe effects of locking up kids for life, but They Call Us Monsters feels like a well-meaning skim rather than an impassioned, expertly reasoned plea for mercy.
  28. Burn Your Maps
    It's all very strange and more than a bit silly, but somehow — even as characters travel halfway around the world — the plot never journeys anywhere that surprising.
  29. The Crash
    While writer-director-editor Aram Rappaport draws effectively weighted performances (especially from the always committed Driver) and maintains a crisp pace, he’s less adept at balancing those big picture thriller elements with Clifton’s personal journey, which ultimately serves to rob both aspects of greater potency.
  30. City of Dead Men
    While City of Dead Men has an appealingly polished look and uses its unusual locations thoughtfully, it teeters on the edge of pretension.
  31. The Ardennes
    The Ardennes is an odd mixture of glum-chic style and emotional curiosity, a story of brotherly tensions that primarily comes off like a movie posing as a story of brotherly tensions.
  32. The House That Jack Built
    Von Trier has managed to cobble together just enough of interest — odd moments, pieces of performance, stray ideas and the simple audacity of putting this mess out into the world, that it feels like there may be something there worth considering, a maddening possibility. And that may be his cruelest prank of all.
  33. 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.
  34. Don't Knock Twice
    The best reason to see Don’t Knock Twice is the volatile chemistry between genre favorites Katee Sackhoff and Lucy Boynton.
  35. The Case for Christ
    Give credit to the filmmakers for making a faith-affirming picture that aims to be more thoughtful than maudlin. But what they’ve ended up with is a fairly rote Christian redemption narrative — albeit with more charts and graphs.
  36. Victoria and Abdul
    For all the anti-colonialist sentiments expressed in Victoria & Abdul...those criticisms are ultimately subsumed in a warm, troubling glow of British Empire nostalgia.
  37. Murder on the Orient Express
    As cinema or literature, Murder on the Orient Express may be little more than a clever parlor trick. But in its final moments, even this overstuffed, underachieved movie offers a morally unsettling reminder that — with apologies to Chandler — the art of murder isn’t always as simple as it appears.
  38. All Nighter
    It’s all feather-light, low-stakes stuff where it’s about the journey not the destination, and not judging a book by its cover. It skates by on the charisma of its stars but evaporates on contact.
  39. Lost & Found
    A sporadically fun, heartfelt ride whose script by director Joseph Itaya and Erik Cardona is filled with too many broad strokes, faux close calls, plot conveniences and questionable story points to feel fully baked.
  40. Drifter
    Sometimes it’s impressively funky and stylish, and sometimes tediously derivative.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Havenhurst
    A reveal about the nature of the building and its violence works initially, but is never fully explored. There are some truly disgusting kills, making sure that horror fans who thirst for blood will get their fill.
  42. The Little Hours
    The Little Hours gets freaky, but it never feels truly subversive, or even that titillating.
  43. Burning Sands
    In the absence of a more dramatically dynamic approach to that awfully familiar subject matter, “Burning Sands” proves neither as incendiary nor as challenging as intended.
  44. Landline
    Tonal swerves can be a source of useful friction; here they’re simply awkward, and Robespierre’s efforts to meld sentiment and laughs grow increasingly strained.
  45. 1 Night
    Unfortunately, the film doesn’t fully explore its big ideas or give its talented cast dialogue to match.
  46. Wolves
    There’s plenty of predatory behavior on display in the impressively acted Wolves, a curious if unsuccessful cross-breeding of gritty domestic drama with conventional coming-of-age sports crowd-rouser.
  47. Lavender
    Gass-Donnelly has a great eye and brings some genuine beauty to his movie’s rural setting. The preoccupation with aesthetics though means that “Lavender” is sometimes quieter, slower and artier than the material warrants.
  48. Wonder Park
    Imbuing a story like this with issues of grief and trauma can be a good lesson for kids, but it just makes the whole affair that much less splendiferous and that much more solemn.
  49. Headshot
    Where “The Raid” films used a thin story to efficiently showcase the rapid-fire lethality of silat, Headshot attempts to wrangle an emotional back story into the proceedings, which is a hard combination to stomach when the characters are brutally beating one another senseless.
  50. Train Station
    Intriguing in concept but problematic in execution.
  51. Sex Doll
    Tighter pacing, more dimensional and compelling characters, and twistier consequences could have helped better propel this dark, semi-intriguing tale.
  52. Bornless Ones
    This movie is still, ultimately, a generic shocker. But the amount of care lavished on the character-building and scene-setting is impressive, even if it doesn’t add up to much.
  53. Django
    Although Kateb carries a certain arrogant genius’ authenticity with his opaque portrayal, Django will leave fans of the legend merely eager to return to their beloved recordings and let their ears take in the greatness.
  54. 1 Mile to You
    The film feels cluttered by all the other nonsense of girls, rivalries and friendships that could have been pared down for a more efficient narrative.
  55. Erasing Eden
    Erasing Eden is an exploration of self-sabotage and destruction that makes vague gestures toward the self-empowerment found in personal choice, but those morals are lost in the downright disturbing and degrading gauntlet Eden has to walk through to find herself.
  56. Here Alone
    This is the first act of a better movie, stretched to fill a feature.
  57. Danger Close
    Ultimately, neither narrative receives sufficient attention, robbing the subjects and that unique p.o.v. of the focus and urgency that lent the previous two films their undeniable potency.
  58. Trolls World Tour
    Despite the range of musical genres represented and the obsessive attention to visual detail, there is a bland, wearying homogeneity to the way Trolls World Tour looks and sounds.
  59. 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.
  60. Death Note
    What Wingard has delivered is a fitfully entertaining, clearly compromised hybrid of action, horror and science-fiction.
  61. A Dark Song
    The two leads are resolute soldiers about it all, but they’re dutifully edgy elements in a stylist’s frame instead of fully realized characters living out what is supposed to be the riskiest time of their lives.
  62. Unlocked
    A straight-ahead political thriller that fails to ratchet up the requisite tension despite its timely subject matter and (largely) effective cast.
  63. For Here or to Go?
    In attempting to address its many concerns, the film’s agreeable, lightly satirical tone gives way to increasingly didactic dialogue and a stalling pace.
  64. Blue Gold: American Jeans
    Blue Gold: American Jeans is intermittently engaging, but its attempt to weave together the journey of vintage clothing dealer Eric Schrader with the history of the apparel ultimately falls apart.
  65. Airheads
    Airheads, directed by Michael Lehmann and scripted by Rich Wilkes, is far from great. But it sure is ripe. It's bursting with bad ideas, half-good ideas, good and bad actors yelling and mugging. Like a lot of youth comedies, it's frenetic where it should be inspired.
  66. Goodbye Christopher Robin
    If you do see the movie, by all means surrender to its portrait of an earlier era of toxic celebrity culture, and also to the bracing nastiness of the central performances.
  67. Deadpool 2
    In Deadpool 2, the manic antics fly fast, but the franchise loses its edge as wise-cracking antihero Deadpool goes dadcore, attempting to infuse standard-issue four-quadrant studio blockbuster beats into what was once a revolutionary R-rated premise.
  68. Flower
    Mistaking provocation for insight, and failing to sell the presumed heroism of its cunning central character, the movie grows less involving with each step. It can't make Erica Vandross' fate matter, but in Deutch it gives us a motor-mouthed wonder who commands attention.
  69. The Trip to Spain
    A certain exhaustion sets in well before the end, collapsing any meaningful distinction between camera-hogging self-indulgence and critical scrutiny.
  70. The King's Case Note
    As choreographed by director Moon Hyun-Sung, the adventure seldom gets sufficiently up to speed, and on the occasions it threatens to come to life, the pedestrian action sequences fail to compensate for that lethargic pace.
  71. Glass
    While Glass is an intermittent showcase for his undeniable filmmaking gifts — his meticulous attention to detail, his shivery command of technique — the movie winds up feeling less like a progression than a dead end.
  72. Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait
    Rather than explore his place in the arts and balance all that adoration with insight, Corsicato opts for hero worship. The result is a visually exciting but emotionally monotonous film.
  73. Vincent N Roxxy
    There’s an absence of character details that could make the central romance of Vincent N Roxxy more believable. Luckily for the film, the palpable chemistry between Hirsch and Kravitz imbues the relationship with realism, even if we don’t have much else to go on.
  74. The Incomparable Rose Hartman
    The movie is most interesting when addressing how important belonging in the world she covers is to Hartman as her recording it, and there’s obviously a hard-bitten, self-obsessed personality to explore, but it’s lost in the surface-skim technique.
  75. Wrestling Jerusalem
    Rather than pulling the viewer in, all the inter-cutting between the barren stage and the barren desert ultimately has a distancing, artificial effect that waters down much of the dramatic potency generated by the shared experience of a live performance.
  76. Devil's Domain
    The film as a whole doesn’t make a lot of sense, but from moment to moment it is effectively visceral and raw. It’s compelling almost by accident.
  77. 24 Hours to Live
    Until it devolves into testosterone-drenched, operatic silliness, the mix of bullets, blood and banter is dumb fun.
  78. How to Talk to Girls at Parties
    How to Talk to Girls at Parties is an aimless, sweet-souled jumble. Its ebullience is palpable, if rarely infectious.
  79. The Villainess
    While I’m generally inclined to applaud an action movie that seeks to be more than just an exercise in carnage, The Villainess turns wearyingly stop-and-go whenever it tries to fill in the void of its protagonist’s emotional and psychological history.
  80. Shot Caller
    It always feels like an exercise instead of an examination, a flow chart of bad decisions and explosive violence that may not glorify the poisonous nature of hard time but rarely skims below the surface of what it means to break bad.
  81. Bobbi Jene
    There may be an intriguing, perhaps even profound story behind Smith’s growth as a singular artist and woman, but director Elvira Lind keeps too much on the surface, making it hard to invest in Smith’s often esoteric, self-centered journey
  82. Austin Found
    The cast is rounded out with likable comedians, but this fable can’t decide if it’s going to be deliciously bad or morally upstanding.
  83. Sherlock Gnomes
    It's a fairly serviceable animated feature, with a few inspired elements, and more than enough gnome puns to go around.
  84. Pray for Rain
    The drought is ultimately presented as a man-made occurrence, wrapped up in regulations and red tape, rather than a troubling environmental reality. The reality is far more complicated than anything that can be neatly wrapped up within the conventions of genre filmmaking.
  85. Breathe
    In leaving out the rasp of life from this unusual story, Breathe too often feels like a mechanized exhale.
  86. Tatara Samurai
    Even with 15 minutes excised from its original running time, and stirringly photographed and well-acted, the film fails to deliver on a sense of mounting tension or convincingly staged battle sequences.
  87. The Pulitzer at 100
    Serving as something of an overstuffed sampler platter, the documentary The Pulitzer at 100, marking the centenary of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer’s effort to place journalism on equal footing with arts and letters, is big on variety but comes up frustratingly short on substance.
  88. Who the F**K Is That Guy?
    Who the … is That Guy shines a light on Alago’s amazing life story, but the film itself lacks the verve and style of its subject.
  89. Moscow Never Sleeps
    Moscow Never Sleeps is well made but stilted, following too many characters to give any their due.
  90. Miles
    At times Miles feels a bit rickety around the edges, but the character at the center is instantly relatable and has a relaxed charm that makes the story compelling.
  91. The Farm (La Granja)
    Striking images of sex and violence combine with an often effective sense of dread as these grim story lines unfold. But without sufficient context and psychological underpinning, less proves decidedly less.
  92. City Slickers
    The funny sequences and dumb jokes in City Slickers are so much more entertaining than the male-bonding blather that you wonder what the filmmakers had in mind. Did they think they would cheat audiences if they didn't also throw in the tears and the hugs? In comedy, the only cheat for audiences is not being funny. [7 June 1991, p.F-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  93. Pet Sematary II
    Pet Sematary II, which is too gruesome for grammar school youngsters and too easily laughed off for most high schoolers, ought to be a big hit among the junior high crowd. Not nearly as scary as the 1989 original, it nonetheless expresses and attempts to resolve in bold mythological terms the anxieties of being 13.
  94. The Night Flier
    A provocative though murky thriller from the horrormeister that's heavy on gore and laced with more irony than perhaps intended. It's far from first-rate King, but his fans probably will feel it delivers the gory goods. Best of all, it affords a big star role for Miguel Ferrer, a fine and distinctive actor.
  95. Souvenir
    Not that there aren't sporadic pleasures in store for the star's completists — a seasoned gesture here, a well-timed tear there and the steely beauty of her ageless gaze. But it's not enough to save Souvenir from the sense that without her anchoring presence, this movie would float away.
  96. Long Live the King
    The documentary by Frank Dietz and Trish Geiger is big on enthusiasm though it ultimately lacks depth.
  97. Good Fortune
    The movie itself plays more like a corporate recruitment video — or an extended episode of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” — than a deep, discerning dive into an American success story.
  98. Cartels
    As a budget-priced spin on “Sicario” — with elaborate paramilitary action sequences peppered into a story about how lawmen become compromised when they work with crooks — Cartels is passably entertaining.
  99. Neither Wolf Nor Dog
    This overlong film’s glacial pace and talky, unevenly told narrative undercut its potential power and accessibility.
  100. All the Rage (Saved by Sarno)
    The dearth of input from medical practitioners and others who have opposed Sarno’s controversial methodology makes this feel like an awfully one-sided exploration.
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