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. Torremolinos 73
    It's a bawdy farce done with real delicacy, a charming adult comedy that ends up with unlooked-for emotional heft. If that doesn't cover all the bases, it certainly comes close.
  2. The Year of the Yao
    Provides little insight beyond hanging out with its super-sized star and would not be out of place as halftime filler except for its nearly 90-minute running time.
  3. Palindromes
    As depressing as it is hard to watch, Palindromes is also consistently, horrifyingly funny and sharp-witted, and the darker and more well-observed its humor, the more it belies the director's unsentimental, even grudging empathy for his fellow DNA monkeys.
  4. Sahara
    Breck Eisner, son of former Disney mogul Michael and something of a protégé of Steven Spielberg, for whom he directed an episode of the miniseries "Taken," guides Sahara's big action set pieces with assurance, but would have been better served by a tighter script.
  5. Fever Pitch
    Sweet and often hilarious.
  6. Kung Fu Hustle
    Brilliantly choreographed and shot, Kung Fu Hustle is often grisly, visually spectacular and unabashedly silly, sometimes all at once.
  7. Eating Out
    Eating Out might just make it as an amusing trifle, but on the big screen it's merely tedious and silly.
  8. Winter Solstice
    Sternfeld's approach is rigorously minimalist, which is a plus since the Winters family is in no way extraordinary or distinctive.
  9. Smile
    Smile is like a dose of cod liver oil: It may be good for you, but it's no fun.
  10. ...And They Lived Happily Ever After
    If this strikes some as some kind of gallingly blasé, ostentatious Parisian sophistication, it's far from it.
  11. Major Dundee (re-release)
    It's hard to imagine "The Wild Bunch" having the depth and grace it did without Peckinpah having this experience to draw on, and for that masterful film alone we're grateful to have Major Dundee back among the living again.
  12. Eros
    The only real reason to catch Eros is to see Wong Kar-Wai's beautiful opening piece, "The Hand."
  13. Voices in Wartime
    A thoughtful, provocative exploration of the ways poets have dealt with the experience of battle throughout history.
  14. First Love
    An elegantly told tale of obsession that, in failing to take on any larger meaning, rapidly becomes depressing to watch.
  15. Sin City
    For a relentlessly violent and exploitive noir knockoff, Sin City is mystifyingly flat and static - cartoonish, even, if you want to get tautological about it.
  16. Dust to Glory
    Like his father, Brown inserts himself into the action via folksy narration. His husky, laid-back voice sounds something like Kevin Costner, lending a regular-guy aura to the reverential treatment he affords his subject.
  17. Control
    Kontroll is in fact an allegory, but one that oozes a gritty, dynamic realism.
  18. Look at Me
    What makes Look at Me such a deeply satisfying experience is its ability to combine insightful character portraits like this with wickedly funny situations that slyly skewer all-too-human weaknesses.
  19. Beauty Shop
    For all the vivid, amusing characters that surround Gina, Beauty Shop rightly belongs to Latifah, who comes into her own as a star and an actress in this film.
  20. Oldboy
    It says something when you come out of a film as weird and fantastical as Oldboy and feel that you've experienced something truly authentic. I just don't know what. I can't think of anything to compare it to.
  21. Guess Who
    Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan milks the film's one joke for all it's worth - which isn't much - before settling into the rote rhythms of a buddy picture.
  22. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    Powered by an exceptional performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, this artfully disturbing film is a compelling, imaginative look at the potent emotional bond that forms not between romantic lovers but between fathers and daughters.
  23. D.E.B.S.
    For an unabashedly silly spoof of a girly action flick, D.E.B.S. is unexpectedly fresh, thanks mostly to the sweetly exuberant love story at its center.
  24. Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling
    What makes Lipstick & Dynamite its own animal is that, intentionally or not, the director has allowed something else into the mix, a glimpse of the unvarnished and the unsanitized.
  25. Nina's Tragedies
    Has too much depth, too much freshness and imagination ever to be adequately described in any of its aspects as merely "quirky" or "off the wall."
  26. Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous
    As awful as the original was inspired.
  27. Mondovino
    An entertaining film that is neither stuffy nor pretentious.
  28. Ice Princess
    Although this is the kind of entertainment designed to send its audience home happy, Ice Princess has its share of stinging moments and has a good deal more edge than one might have expected.
  29. The Ring Two
    The movie is as side-splitting as it is creepy, especially when it ventures into surrealistic nightmare imagery.
  30. Melinda and Melinda
    Allen's view of what's "deeply real" feels ever more deeply bogus as the movie progresses, his trademark wit having calcified into pastiche and unintended self-parody.
  31. Fifty-Fifty
    Schizo is an ugly name for a dark and lovely piece of work, but maybe that's the point. The world this film depicts can be a casually pitiless one, half modern and half tribal, but it can also offer compassion and beauty.
  32. Steamboy
    A stunning-to-look-at film marred by a less than searing pace and some narrative incoherence.
  33. 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.
  34. Hostage
    Made with energetic flair and no small dose of violence, mercifully handled with discretion, Hostage exemplifies taut, confident filmmaking.
  35. Robots
    The animated tale has flashes of brilliance but seems assembled from cultural flotsam.
  36. The Upside of Anger
    A squarely suburban movie with a distinctly bourgeois-shaped window on the world, but it's genuine and exceptionally well observed.
  37. Millions
    Despite being a pure fantasy that relishes not making literal sense, Millions retains a conviction about what it's doing that makes us believe and enjoy.
  38. In My Country
    Boorman's stars Juliette Binoche and Samuel L. Jackson are valiant - even impressive - but they cannot rescue this grueling film or its mechanical plot.
  39. Mail Order Wife
    A wickedly funny satire.
  40. Black Cloud
    There's considerable universality in Black Cloud's plight, yet Schroder makes it personal and deeply felt. In a direct, unpretentious manner, Black Cloud expresses most effectively its hero's struggle with himself.
  41. Don't Move
    has a rich, lyrical sweep and floats between past and present, reality and imagination, with ease. It is a richly satisfying experience.
  42. Dot the I
    First-time writer-director Matthew Parkhill prefers to lean on clever plot devices, amp up the roles of the movie's sideline jesters, crank up the static noise and fail to notice that his engaging little romance has broken with reality and veered into hollow pastiche.
  43. Fabled
    Where Fabled flounders is when it attempts to reconcile the many contradictory story elements.
  44. Nowhere Man
    The bleak absurdity of its predicaments cries out for a tone of pitch-dark comedy to stave off the unintended laughter that it is virtually certain to elicit.
  45. Off the Map
    It takes a rugged survivalist mentality to sit through 108 minutes of Off the Map, a self-consciously loopy and mystical drama about a family that lives off the map, off the grid, off the land and mostly off their meds in the mangy desert of New Mexico.
  46. Be Cool
    Although Travolta is as smooth as ever, the picture is a bust, a grimly unfunny comedy with no connection to reality, and worst of all, running on and on for two dismal hours.
  47. The Jacket
    Intermittently compelling but unavoidably improbable.
  48. The Pacifier
    Has sufficient mayhem to please Diesel's action fans while allowing the star to reach out to family audiences.
  49. Dear Frankie
    Dear Frankie's surprises are few and low-key, but the story wraps up nicely.
  50. Face
    No amount of goodwill can rescue Face from its painfully literal script and acting that's all about projecting recognizable attitude rather than drawing in viewers.
  51. Gunner Palace
    A striking new documentary that shows the war in a way it's not been seen before: from the ground up.
  52. Walk on Water
    The new Israeli film Walk on Water is complex and paradoxical, at times frustrating but always involving. Something like the country that produced it.
  53. The Best of Youth
    Those who see it will, quite frankly, not believe their luck. It is that satisfying, that engrossing, that good.
  54. Cursed
    Outdoes recent releases such as "Boogeyman" in the fright department, but the "Dawson's Creek" sensitivity and unsatisfying effects undermine the lupine anxiety.
  55. Diary of a Mad Black Woman
    These characters, which Perry worked into the narrative from other stage performances, may have been entertaining in those venues, but they undermine the film.
  56. Man of the House
    God-natured comedy.
  57. One More Round
    An unsuccessful concoction of sincerity, camp and crassness that is more interested in its parade of D-level celebrities than developing its characters.
  58. Up and Down
    Buoyed by an unreserved humanism and a cheerful sense of the absurd.
  59. The Other Side of the Street
    Spritely, tender and unpredictable.
  60. Sex Sells: The Making of 'Touché'
    A mildly amusing comedy about the vicissitudes of shooting porn that has little of the grit, sleaze and uncertainty that is the lot of the veteran pornographer striving for professionalism more often than not against all odds.
  61. Window Theory
    Too sophomoric to be believed.
  62. Turtles Can Fly
    Ghobadi uses the lack of resources and the surfeit of drama that had been the lot of the Kurds throughout Hussein's dictatorship and both Gulf wars much in the way De Sica and Rossellini used the European tragedies of the '30s and '40s,
  63. Because of Winn-Dixie
    Never quite works as a film. The failure to create appropriate cinematic metaphors reduces it to "happiness is a warm puppy" superficiality.
  64. Constantine
    Keanu Reeves has no peer when it comes to playing these sort of messianic roles -- he infuses them with a Zen blankness and serenity that somehow gets him through even the unlikeliest scenes with a quiet, unassuming dignity.
  65. Son of the Mask
    It's astonishing how dull a movie that packs so much visual overstimulation into its frames can be.
  66. Nabbeun namja
    What begins, rather promisingly, as a visceral yawp against class difference in contemporary South Korea slowly devolves into a prolonged exercise in pointless sadomasochism.
  67. Bigger Than the Sky
    This heartfelt valentine to the stage leaves no cliché unturned. If it has anything to recommend, it is the loving portrayal of the camaraderie of those who participate in art for art's sake who, to quote Cyrano, "work without one thought of gain or fame."
  68. Downfall
    The reality it confronts is so gripping, we cannot turn away. This may not be the most sophisticated retelling of what happened while Berlin burned, but what a story it is.
  69. Naked Fame
    An engaging and forthright documentary.
  70. Schultze Gets the Blues
    Simply too tedious and stretched out to be amusing. Had Schorr brought in his picture at 80 or 90 minutes Schultze might have been a different story.
  71. The Animation Show 2005
    If there's a theme to this group of films it's the richness of imagery gathered from a variety of forms including hand-drawn, computer-generated and hybrid work. Ink, pixels and clay are brought to life with equal parts darkness and light to evoke stories and moods that are anything but conventional.
  72. Ong Bak
    It's a display of phenomenal dexterity and nimble grace that's a joy to watch. That, friends, is entertainment.
  73. Bride & Prejudice
    Aside from the singing and dancing, it is the color and pageantry of India as filtered through the work of cinematographer Santosh Sivan that captivates us.
  74. Hitch
    Romantic comedies have become so cannibalistic lately that Hitch stands out for what seem like major innovations by comparison.
  75. Inside Deep Throat
    By turns funny and sobering, sweeping and intimate, the consistently entertaining Inside Deep Throat plays like a giddy prance through the minefield of the last three decades of American sex and politics.
  76. Uncle Nino
    A solid family film that strikes a shrewd balance between tough-mindedness and sentimentality and boasts a fine cast.
  77. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
    The mellow, serendipitous The Parrots of Telegraph Hill is here to show you just how magical happenstance can be.
  78. Pooh's Heffalump Movie
    Features some charming songs by Carly Simon and is warmly animated so as to evoke nostalgia in parents.
  79. The Letter: An American Town and the 'Somali Invasion'
    It could have been even more powerful with more context, clarity and a well-defined timeline. Undeniably strong, The Letter is at times misleading and confusing, possessing the raw materials for a much more coherent and potent film.
  80. Nobody Knows
    Beguiling but long-winded.
  81. Boogeyman
    Has little to offer in the way of entertainment or originality.
  82. The Wedding Date
    Winds up an oddly depressing, lost, little movie that eventually caves in on itself.
  83. Emile
    At heart a reverie, a meditation on the past and its treacheries.
  84. Harry + Max
    To consider Harry and Max as being about incestuous feelings would be shortchanging it, because the film is really about the evolving nature of love and the need to define it.
  85. The Nomi Song
    Horn, who knew Nomi, does an excellent job of evoking the exhilaratingly hedonistic period the film covers as well as the long shadow that the coming of AIDS casts over it.
  86. Rory O'Shea Was Here
    A shameless heart-tugger of considerable appeal that, like many movies that start off with much going for them, could have been so much better had its makers aimed higher.
  87. Swimming Upstream
    Swimming Upstream evokes time and place without being showy about it and offers an altogether invigorating experience.
  88. Sunset Story
    The result is a wonderfully humorous take on a seldom-broached subject.
  89. Assisted Living
    Only 22 when he began shooting the film, Greenebaum displays a prodigious understanding of the treatment of the elderly in contemporary America.
  90. Daybreak
    Strongly acted by a highly competent ensemble.
  91. Fear X
    Barely credible, but in the hands of the film's dedicated minimalists, "barely" is enough, and they turn the precious little they have to work with into a plus.
  92. Travelers and Magicians
    A warm, embracing film of transcendent beauty and spirituality.
  93. Alone in the Dark
    Since the film is based on the Atari video game of the same name, it also has much to appeal to headbangers: fast pace, lots of gadgets, monsters, explosive special effects, plenty of inscrutable plot twists and turns.
  94. Hide and Seek
    Unless you're a connoisseur of movies that are so bad they're good, Hide and Seek is one game you're not going to want to play.
  95. Aliens of the Deep
    Though Aliens of the Deep flirts with Zissou-Murray's divine madness, Cameron's vision seems somehow cozier. No wonder he's not yet ready for dry dock.
  96. Fascination
    A stupendously torpid thriller without a single redeeming quality.
  97. Lost Embrace
    It's a film of unexpected, almost indescribable off-center charm that deepens as it goes on.
  98. Are We There Yet?
    Gets nowhere. Its star Ice Cube remains characteristically amiable, but this thuddingly miscalculated comedy is way beneath him.
  99. Beautiful Boxer
    This altogether remarkable film is as much of a paradox as Nong Toom: at once poetic and sensitive yet as gritty and hard-hitting as any boxing movie.
  100. Head-On
    Impeccably made, uncompromising in its implacable vision of the deranging power of love, sex and controlled substances, this savage and staggering film knows how to take our breath away.
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