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. Slanted
    We’re left with a nightmare of identity that feels slighter than it should, unsure of where to point its knife.
  2. Over Your Dead Body
    Despite Segel and Weaver’s best efforts, they can’t make this bickering duo deliciously awful, the characters proving more grating than hilariously combustible.
  3. Backbeat
    Most movies about rock are such dithery jobs that "BackBeat" may seem more impressive than it really is. It's lively and full of good music and it plays around with a fascinating subject -- the Fifth Beatle and his one true love. But it doesn't really illuminate that subject or those years or that music. It's a Pop treatment of Pop. [15 Apr 1994, p.F1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  4. The Mirror Has Two Faces
    It’s a time-tested concept that is sandbagged by Streisand’s refusal to play it more like an actress and less like a star.
  5. The Wolfman
    Here's the surprise of the new incarnation of The Wolfman, starring Benicio Del Toro -- there isn't one. No bite either, or humor, or camp.
  6. Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
    This is generic filmmaking at its most banal, a simple-minded simplification of a not overwhelmingly complex book.
  7. Where the Wild Things Are
    When faced as a director with the rudderless screenplay he (Jonze) co-wrote with Eggers, he's been powerless to energize it in any involving way. Sometimes you are better off with 10 sentences than tens of millions of dollars, and this is one of those times.
  8. Surrogates
    An interesting idea, but unfortunately, the film's narrative and emotional engine operate as mechanically as the titular, dead-eyed glamazoids.
  9. The Invention of Lying
    Ultimately it's the characters who are the joke -- too thin, too vacuous, too unlikable for us to care what happens in the next 30 minutes, much less for the rest of their lives. Too bad, really, because the truth is Gervais is a very funny guy. The ugly truth is that The Invention of Lying isn't -- funny, that is.
  10. Law Abiding Citizen
    The film's greatest sin isn't its cynical moral posturing but its complete failure to engage audiences on even a visceral level.
  11. The Informant!
    While this film fits squarely into Soderbergh's recurrent goal of ignoring audience interest when possible, that's the only area in which it can be considered a success.
  12. AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem
    Aliens vs. Predator -- Requiem simply exists, nodding to the continuity of the larger series and opening the door for, yes, another entry in the franchise. In Hollywood as in outer space, spawn begets spawn.
  13. Saint John of Las Vegas
    The presence of the ever-reliable Steve Buscemi adds a welcome boost to Saint John of Las Vegas, an otherwise unremarkable debut feature from writer-director Hue Rhodes.
  14. Funny People
    Any sort of new insight into comedy's darker themes, to say nothing of life's, eludes Funny People. Instead Sandler and Rogen and the rest are left to wander aimlessly, with tedious comedy gigs, an even more tedious faux sitcom and relatively vapid relationships masquerading as a plot.
  15. Love Happens
    That this superficial romance between a successful self-help author and a nurturing florist is also a film about overcoming the tragedy of losing a loved one only makes its clichéd insipidity that much more irksome.
  16. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
    All told, this is going to make passable television. Eventually.
  17. Amelia
    So a pioneering feminist in the hands of a feminist filmmaker should have been a perfect match. But like her subject, the filmmaker gets lost in the clouds.
  18. The Devil's Rejects
    Crass, vacuous exercise in grind-house stylistics.
  19. The Brothers Bloom
    The leads aren't only miscast -- Brody over-mopes and the usually wonderful Ruffalo seems out of sorts as a rascally schemer -- but interest in the con plot fades as the director's bag of tricks empties further.
  20. Whatever Works
    A sour romantic comedy, only sporadically amusing.
  21. Happy Gilmore
    The result is a movie that's hard to laugh at when its hero would surely be either in jail or perhaps even a mental institution were he to behave the way he does on screen in real life.
  22. Babylon A.D.
    This is not a terrible movie, but it's too familiar by half and too confusing by a third.
  23. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
    What's missing is less a sense of the protagonist's inner nose (which is very well-trammeled) as a sense of his inner life, motivation or desire.
  24. Elektra
    No fun at all.
  25. Appleseed
    Dazzling visually but is flattened by corny dialogue better suited to the 1936 "Flash Gordon" serial, a needlessly hard to follow plot and heavy-handed exposition clotted with pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo.
  26. Boogeyman
    Has little to offer in the way of entertainment or originality.
  27. 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.
  28. 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.
  29. 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.
  30. Fabled
    Where Fabled flounders is when it attempts to reconcile the many contradictory story elements.
  31. 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.
  32. Smile
    Smile is like a dose of cod liver oil: It may be good for you, but it's no fun.
  33. Madison
    Benefits from Caviezel's ability to project earnestness better than nearly any actor currently working, but its near-comic predictability, "What else could go wrong?" plotting and cliché-ridden screenplay sink it.
  34. Monster-in-Law
    All I could think about while watching Jennifer Lopez prance through Monster-in-Law was how cool and poised she was in "Out of Sight."
  35. Unleashed
    Includes a few scenes of impressively choreographed mayhem, but they're all but buried in Freeman and Condon's mystical grandpa and weirdo teeny bopper routines.
  36. A Wake in Providence
    The film aims for a light social satire but mainly falls flat. It feels more like a long-lost pilot for some never-aired 1970s sitcom or a misguided sequel to a Billy Joel song.
  37. Milwaukee, Minnesota
    Not quite the sum of its occasionally interesting parts. Most of its cast makes strong impressions, but the plot and motivation don't quite jell, resulting in a minor item that shows its star Troy Garity to good advantage.
  38. The Honeymooners
    John Leguizamo steals the show as its sleazy trainer -- not that there's much to steal from John Schultz's joylessly schematic paycheck.
  39. Bewitched
    Isn't a remake, really. It's a "reimagining," which is a sparkly word for what happens to a beloved TV hit of yesteryear when it's cannibalized by committee.
  40. Rebound
    If I were 6, I could enjoy Rebound without thinking about all the better movies made from its concept.
  41. Must Love Dogs
    Forces them (the cast) to reenact the entire unabridged Encyclopedia of Treasured Romantic Comedy Clichés and Chestnuts, Revised Second Edition.
  42. Sky High
    Weighed down with gimmicks and special effects, a number of which are far from special, Sky High is best left to 10- to 14-year-olds because it's not likely to do much for older audiences and is too violent for the very young.
  43. Asylum
    It's too over-the-top, too lurid and at times simply too silly to represent any kind of valid commentary on the repressive '50s or the way in which institutions tend to destroy rather than cure. "Far From Heaven," which nailed '50s angst to perfection, Asylum could not be farther from.
  44. Wasabi Tuna
    A shaggy dog tale in more ways than one, the campy comedy Wasabi Tuna is the kind of film that can give dumb blonds a bad name.
  45. Supercross
    Ultimately, Supercross is an example of how too much of anything will get annoying -- including VVRRRROOOOOOOMMM and flying bikes.
  46. Undiscovered
    The whole movie could be clipped by about 95 minutes and it would make a swell little video for Simpson's performance of the title cut from the soundtrack.
  47. Dirty Deeds
    Recycling is alive but not well in the outmoded teen comedy Dirty Deeds, with a result that is more toxic than intoxicating.
  48. Underclassman
    Marcos Siega's direction is well-paced, but writers David T. Wagner and Brent Goldberg haven't brought anything sufficiently fresh or original to a formula plot to allow Underclassman to rise above the level of a mildly diverting video rental.
  49. Into the Blue
    This logic-challenged dive-bum thriller directed by John Stockwell, who did the equally silly surf movie "Blue Crush."
  50. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
    But it's one thing to write a loving ode to your mother; another to direct an ode to an ode.
  51. In Her Shoes
    Ultimately, it's too self-conscious of its role in the marketplace and too hamstrung by its source material to risk being honest at the expense of being liked.
  52. Waiting...
    The filmmaker captures a certain exaggerated verisimilitude, but the comedy is surprisingly flat. The cast sells the occasional one-liner, but a Reynolds smirk can take you only so far.
  53. Domino
    So over-plotted that it's borderline incomprehensible.
  54. Stay
    The final twist does more to unravel what's come before than to tie it all together, making what's come before feel like a cosmopolitan goose chase.
  55. Three... Extremes
    All three look great and the filmmakers deliver a certain artiness, but their overall triviality and the unpleasantness of the first two make for an extremely distasteful experience.
  56. Oxygono
    Blackmail Boy reaches for tragedy but settles for soap opera.
  57. 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.
  58. 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.
  59. 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.
  60. Wolf Creek
    An initially promising horror film that turns exploitive, Wolf Creek fails to deliver the requisite payoff considering its leisurely pace.
  61. Rumor Has It...
    The resulting film is a muddled, melodramatic, sort-of remake of "The Graduate."
  62. 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.
  63. 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.
  64. 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.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Manderlay
    Trier gets lost in his own rhetoric, forgetting to entertain his flock while raking them over the coals.
  66. FAQs
    The campier aspects of the film are not enough to make up for its lapses into melodrama and just plain silliness.
  67. 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.
  68. 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.
  69. 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.
  70. Don't Come Knocking
    Despite a fine cast, the film feels as lost as Howard, unsure of its direction or tone.
  71. Stay Alive
    Stay Alive spends a lot of time inside the video game system, and what will terrify the audience very early on is the realization that there's better acting in the video game than on the big screen.
  72. American Gun
    The film is haphazardly structured, undercutting its potential power.
  73. Stoned
    Fans of the band will likely be disappointed (its music is represented by a handful of covers), and younger audiences will wonder what the fuss is about.
  74. The Benchwarmers
    From the beginning to its very end, The Benchwarmers seems to be struggling to justify its own existence.
  75. When Do We Eat?
    A self-consciously zany dysfunctional family comedy, When Do We Eat? strains so hard to be outrageous that it sacrifices characters for caricatures. They might have had something if they'd let everybody relax, be themselves and enjoy dinner.
  76. One Last Ride
    Director Tony Vitale, best know for "Kiss Me Guido," gamely tries to keep pace with Cupo's erratic storytelling and struggles to convey the inner life of Cupo's character.
  77. Hard Candy
    Maddeningly exploitative, the film takes a provocative subject -- pedophilia -- and wraps it in a sterile, vacuum-sealed package, devoid of meaning.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Herbie Hancock: Possibilities
    Possibilities ends up as a testament to only one thing: a missed opportunity to explore one of the most visionary and influential careers in modern music.
  79. The Sisters
    A pompous, overwrought and itchingly claustrophobic psychodrama.
  80. Stick It
    The film strives for some type of a girl-empowerment message that equates trading one type of conformity for another with self-determination but muffs the dismount and stumbles on the landing. In other words, it fails to Stick It.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Whore's Son
    The misfortune, of Michael Stürminger's low-boil melodrama is that it's entirely too familiar. Underneath the movie's cool surface beats the heart of a 1940s tear-jerker. It's a subzero "Stella Dallas."
  82. Revoloution
    A hopelessly muddled example of inspirational indie cinema.
  83. An American Haunting
    At times, the narrative thread slips the movie's grasp and there are flat spots in which characters just scream and thrash. Given what its ending aims for (don't ask), such interludes feel flabby and gratuitous even with Sutherland and Spacek providing gravitas to the ghoulishness.
  84. Mouth to Mouth
    As the film progresses, however, Murray becomes less and less sure of where things are heading or what it is she is trying to get at, such that the last few reels feel perfunctory and unengaged.
  85. Coastlines
    For fans of Nunez's previous work, it's almost as if he put in all the clichés he would normally avoid and left out the wonderfully textured internal moments that made "Ruby" and "Ulee's Gold" unique.
  86. The Oh in Ohio
    Parker Posey, the queen of the indies, is a stylish actress, but there's not much she can do with the flat, trite sex comedy The Oh in Ohio, written by Adam Wierzbianski and directed by Billy Kent without a trace of imagination or originality.
  87. America: Freedom to Fascism
    The film raises more questions than it could possibly hope to answer fully, devolving from an intriguing look at an enticingly obscure issue into a more broadly based mess.
  88. Another Gay Movie
    Writer-director Todd Stephens set out to make the raunchiest gay teen movie ever, which this picture most certainly is, but the result is far more frenetic than funny.
  89. SherryBaby
    The problem with Sherry is that, unlike Ryan Gosling's Dan in "Half Nelson," whose humanity transcends his addiction and who is still capable, no matter how uneasily, to maintain relationships with others, she is a terminally uninteresting narcissist with a bad case of arrested development.
  90. Keeping Mum
    Weirdly clueless.
  91. Feast
    A sad farewell to the promising Project Greenlight concept, this Feast leaves viewers with nothing satisfying to tuck into.
  92. El Cortez
    Perhaps in an effort to root the film in the genre, the dialogue reaches for a particular hard-boiled register but grasps only clichés. El Cortez, like so many before it, searches for that nugget in the genre mine but just doesn't find it.
  93. The Grudge 2
    This is not the cool, eerie déjà vu, but the "Hey, isn't that exactly what happened in the first movie?" déjà vu.
  94. Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker
    The film is forever trying to balance between being for younger teenagers and keeping their parents occupied as well, and never quite gets it right.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    One Night with the King
    There's not much joy in One Night With the King, a lavish but listless retelling of the biblical story of Esther.
  96. Running with Scissors
    Murphy, who created the creepy, funny, lunatic "Nip/Tuck," is a master of mordant and macabre camp. But here he loses his teeth, seeming to lack any ironic distance from material that practically begs for it.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Conversations with God
    Conversations has all the telltale signs of a religious film that keep your basic moviegoer away: stilted dialogue, overwrought music, the subtlety of a daytime soap.
  98. Shottas
    There's no social commentary discernible here; merely a rap-video style glorification of the gangsta life, complete with mad money, barely clad babes and that annoying affectation of holding pistols sideways. As to its treatment of women, well, it's not exactly a feminist film.
  99. Death and Texas
    While it would like to be nimble, light-footed satire, too often Death and Texas stumbles on its own earnestness, wearing cement shoes when it should be tap-dancing.
  100. Flannel Pajamas
    For all the time we spend watching Justin and Nicole negotiate their needs, we have no idea who these people are.
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