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 Far Side of Jericho
    Unengaging and uninspired and that leaves far too much unexplored.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Even Money
    The film's subject is not race but gambling, yet the cynical message is the same: We're all pathetic.
  3. The Last Time
    The movie unravels pretty quickly as Caleo almost immediately gives away the "what" but remains marginally entertaining as he manages to maintain some suspense in the "why" and the "how" before blowing the genre completely by going soft in the resolution.
  4. Angel-A
    In essence, you get "It's a Wonderful Life" meets "Wings of Desire," swapping out the substance for self-help platitudes. If you can get past that, you can enjoy it as a 90-minute look at a lovely postcard.
  5. Mr. Brooks
    Evans and Gideon never really succeed in selling the idea that serial killing is a disease -- which would require a degree of realism that the slick, over-plotted Mr. Brooks doesn't otherwise aspire to. They seem to be content with occupying the audience with a series of twists and jolts.
  6. Evening
    For all of its class-act bona fides, Evening lurches between the morose and the sentimental, with occasional incursions into the absurd.
  7. Transformers
    Transformers' multiple earthling story lines are tedious and oddly lifeless, doing little besides marking time until those big toys fill the screen.
  8. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
    Fails to deliver on its main promise of big laughs, which is the film's truly unforgivable sin.
  9. No Reservations
    The movie feels stubbornly, resolutely disingenuous and one-dimensional. Everything in it isdesigned to make you feel better, so why does it feel artificial and palliative in that really depressing way?
  10. Skinwalkers
    There's a lot that remains unclear about the powers and abilities of the creatures in Skinwalkers, largely robbing the film of tension as events transpire in a slapdash, haphazard manner.
  11. The Ten
    David Wain, director of "Wet Hot American Summer," brings his popular brand of surrealist yet mundane humor to the big screen with more or less dreadful results.
  12. Becoming Jane
    It's neither very original nor very convincing. "Shakespeare in Love" did something similar by casting its writer protagonist as the hero of a story he himself might have written, but Becoming Jane lacks that movie's wit and playfulness.
  13. Cut Sleeve Boys
    The bones of something more interesting are there -- how people come to mentally and emotionally define themselves and the ways in which they often need to realign those beliefs -- but Yeung can never reconcile his impulses toward humor and human conflict, so things tend to sputter about, feeling disconnected and episodic.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Right at Your Door
    A dumb twist can be excused, however, if your characters keep the thing afloat, which makes perhaps the most unforgivable sin of this claustrophobic terror scenario the fact that we have to spend it with arguably the two least interesting people in Los Angeles.
  15. Hatchet
    Even after appropriately lowering expectations, it's kind to call this one a cut below.
  16. The Hunting Party
    Black comedy becomes funnier as the action becomes darker and more perilous, but The Hunting Party fails to locate the absurdity in the central situations and goes for midget jokes instead. In the end, you're not sure if you're supposed to be watching "The Three Amigos" or "Hotel Rwanda."
  17. The Brave One
    Trapped in a no man's land between seriousness and pulp trash, it plays like a combination of "Death Wish" and "The Hours." If that sounds like an awkward fit, it is.
  18. Sydney White
    Sydney White is a carnival of ethnic and social stereotypes that are rising up against the lily-white status quo. In Hollywood, blond princesses and fairy tales die hard.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee
    Only intermittently funny at best, but mostly full of dead air, the film is a let-down on both fronts.
  20. The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising
    Dreary, spectacle-driven adaptation.
  21. 30 Days of Night
    The movie thus moves from truly creepy to truly inane, which is, unfortunately, all too common in films of this ilk.
  22. The Comebacks
    You'll be goaded throughout The Comebacks to think of "Bend It Like Beckham," "Remember the Titans," "Rudy," "Hoosiers," "Field of Dreams" and their ilk. What you also think about is how much this stuff worked better in "Airplane!" or "Blazing Saddles."
  23. Reservation Road
    Neither involving as a study in grief nor compelling as a thriller about conscience, the cat-and-mouse tragedy Reservation Road is a misery windup so schematic and obvious it reduces its crisis-stricken characters to little more than emotional bumper cars.
  24. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    Gives new meaning to "costume drama" in that it is a drama primarily about costumes. But the drama is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the temple.
  25. Lions for Lambs
    Redford and Carnahan would like us to ponder our role in their fate. And maybe we would, if the lecture weren't so dull and self-satisfied.
  26. Beowulf
    Beowulf appears so cartoony, in fact, that the academy just put it on the short list of films to be considered for the Oscar in feature animation.
  27. Awake
    Trashily in-your-face thriller, which leans heavily for its effects on intense sympathy pain, improbable reversals and the mystifying star appeal of Jessica Alba.
  28. Elegy
    Elegy seems determined to make real every ageist dig that could be thrown its way -- out of touch, balefully slow and, for a film at least partly about the zesty enterprise of sex, awfully lifeless.
  29. Over Her Dead Body
    For what is essentially a screwball comedy, Over Her Dead Body is surprisingly uninspired, a frothy concept that offers little satisfaction in the way of execution.
  30. Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
    A near continuous assault of clichés, Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins doesn't become truly bothersome until its denouement, when it attempts to wring unearned sentiment from the inevitable, awkwardly staged family rapprochement.
  31. Vantage Point
    The truth is that two other films with Greengrass' name on them, "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Bourne Ultimatum," have spoiled us for this kind of thriller filmmaking, and stacked against that, Vantage Point doesn't have a chance.
  32. College Road Trip
    As over-the-top as Raven-Symoné and Lawrence are, the most live-action cartoon characters in College Road Trip are the father-daughter tandem of Doug (Donny Osmond) and Wendy (Molly Ephraim), whose nitro-powered perkiness pass the point of grating and move into a perversely antic state of grace.
  33. The Grand
    Lacks any sort of urgency or inner propulsion; the actors do their little goofs, then hand them off to the next, lending the jest the frolicking but ultimately monotonous quality of a game of tag.
  34. Dark Matter
    It is easy to see the film as two movies crammed together, neither of them being very good.
  35. The Fall
    There is never a sense that The Fall exists for any reason besides simply being something nice to look at. Yet no matter how good-looking a film may be, if it's as sleep-inducing as this, there's simply no point.
  36. The Love Guru
    The film's sunniest moments occur whenever song preempts all the fighting and smirking. Myers leads the cast in sitar-accompanied covers of such Bollywood favorites as "9 to 5" and Steve Miller's "The Joker," revealing a glimmer of the cross-cultural romp that could have been.
  37. Hancock
    It's a strange feeling to see the summer's most promising premise self-destruct into something bizarre and unsatisfying, but that is the Hancock experience.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Meet Dave
    Pays lip service to the joys of exploring new worlds, but it never steps off the tour bus.
  39. Miss Conception
    Isn't so much a movie as an extended sitcom -- it looks like one, it acts like one, it reduces everything to the lowest common denominator like one.
  40. Space Chimps
    The film is suitable for all ages, but there's probably not enough fuel beyond cute chimps in Candyland to achieve orbit for the kids.
  41. Das wilde Leben
    Any film that uses the Stooges' drone-y song "We Will Fall" to underscore a drug-love scene can't be all bad, but they, as apparently does Uschi, deserve better than this.
  42. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
    Though the new film has some good things, it does not have enough of them to make the third time the charm.
  43. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
    Despite some absolutely gorgeous animation and adjusting expectations for what Clone Wars is meant to be, the Force is not strong with this one.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Spirit
    Miller's flat, humorless yarn is set in Central City, a vacant metropolis whose only residents seem to be cops and crooks.
  45. Fly Me to the Moon 3D
    This oddly paced kids' entertainment displays flashes of intelligence -- then misspells terms on NASA control panels.
  46. Mirrors
    An empty enterprise that provides a few moments of goofy fun, Mirrors reflects back nothing.
  47. Henry Poole Is Here
    Though not strictly a religious tract, Henry Poole Is Here is undeniably selling spiritual reawakening. If only its makers believed that aesthetically useful adage: God is in the details.
  48. Disaster Movie
    The product's not 100% giggle-free: Several songs have amusing lyrics, especially parodies of "Juno" and "High School Musical."
  49. Bangkok Dangerous
    Pretty much all the things that made the original so original are filtered out of this un-original.
  50. Phoebe in Wonderland
    There are problems for us as well in Wonderland. Like its main characters, the film is having an identity crisis -- is it a parable for adults or a fable for children? Its childlike whimsy doesn't always fit with its very grown-up themes.
  51. The Women
    Becomes unfocused as it stumbles over all the points it wants to make.
  52. Smother
    A promising effort that doesn't cohere into anything more, Smother never fully comes to life.
  53. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
    The putrid showbiz comedy How to Lose Friends & Alienate People appears to hit DEFCON 5 in mistaking its brand of moral laxity for cutesy irreverence.
  54. Pride and Glory
    The movie is as histrionic as it is ham-fisted, a bad combination that leads to scenes such as the one in which officers threaten to torture a baby to get their point across.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Haunting of Molly Hartley
    A dead-on-arrival thriller that resolutely fails to come to life.
  56. Nobel Son
    Shows strains of stylistic overkill with egregious flash-edit tricks and sped-up camera moves, while the signal-flare plotting indicates that perhaps a bit more time could have been taken on the screenplay.
  57. Timecrimes
    Only half as clever as it thinks and even less entertaining.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Nothing But the Truth
    Lurie spins off into invention like a "Law & Order" writer on deadline, scrambling the issues so thoroughly it's no longer clear what, if anything, the movie is meant to address.
  59. Good
    Regrettably, the long-delayed adaptation from director Vicente Amorim and screenwriter John Wrathall gets crushed by the weight of trying to be something more; it's really just the story of a rather ordinary but disappointing man. The filmmakers reach for metaphor and allegory, but it comes at the expense of an emotional connection.
  60. Inkheart
    With no unifying sensibility, the magic thuds more often than it soars.
  61. The Pink Panther 2
    There is no real plot, the movie's filled with friends of Steve, the comedy is terribly overplayed, or the comedy is overplayed terribly (again, you can choose) -- what you're left with is a bag of tricks that has seen better days.
  62. The Objective
    The scenes of servicemen feel somehow false, a screenwriter's idea of military life rather than the real thing. Myrick does an admirable job of spinning tension from a group of guys mostly standing around, but too often the film's portentous tone seems more silly than suspenseful.
  63. Sherman's Way
    It's lost-in-life meets lust-for-life in the reliably regenerative wine country, which means most moviegoers could hand this emotionally stranded odd couple a road map of where they'll be by the closing credits.
  64. The Edge of Love
    Sometimes glossy, sometimes hard-edged, the film alternates between glitz and unpleasantness and ends as a kind of glum soap opera, too glam to be bleak and too bleak to be so glam.
  65. Skills Like This
    Too bad all the forced whimsy of this "Bottle Rocket" wannabe feels maniacally scattershot -- like an off night at an improv club -- rather than organically inspired.
  66. Spinning Into Butter
    Despite the film's haphazard choices and aversion to subtlety, Parker and Williamson come off as appealing sparring partners.
  67. The Haunting in Connecticut
    Part of what makes "Connecticut" oddly watchable even as it drags is the oil-and-water mix of acting styles of the leads. Virginia Madsen's refined naturalism is an awkward fit with the sharp mannerisms of Martin Donovan.
  68. Dragonball: Evolution
    Director James Wong ("Final Destination") and writer Ben Ramsey are utterly blasé in their approach to the series' mythology and structure, cobbling together an 84-minute movie that seems to exist only to rile up fanboys. On that count -- and that count alone -- Dragonball Evolution triumphs.
  69. The Soloist
    By consistently and relentlessly overplaying everything, by settling for standard easy emotions when singular and heartfelt was called for, by pushing forward when they should have pulled back, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Susannah Grant have made the story mean less, not more. Instead of enhancing The Soloist's appeal, they have come close to eliminating it.
  70. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
    The leads can't lend either spunk or gravitas to what was already a preposterous yarn 50 years ago.
  71. Julia
    As Julia struggles to survive her bad decisions, the film struggles to survive Julia. We never get a good look at her demons, just the havoc they wreak.
  72. Year One
    There is no real plot either; instead the narrative seems designed to get this prehistoric pair from one funny sketch to the next, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
  73. Land of the Lost
    Like its characters, the film keeps getting lost too, stumbling as it struggles to keep kids and adults from squirming in their seats.
  74. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
    It's not so much a movie as a series of running antiquity gags, good for a comedy club, not so much for the multiplex.
  75. Blood: The Last Vampire
    Blood's only surprise is that the filmmakers landed Gianna (also known as Gianna Jun, or Jeon Ji-hyun) for the lead. The South Korean megastar proves a more-than-capable action heroine, despite the creative detritus around which she has to navigate.
  76. I Love You, Beth Cooper
    Not a remake -- it just feels like one.
  77. Shrink
    Ironically for a film revolving around psychotherapy, Shrink doesn't stand up to analysis.
  78. Sorority Row
    It lapses into that familiar category of movies that go in for lots of fancy obfuscation along the way only to make its story seem all the more simple, trite and contrived by the finish.
  79. Ong Bak 2
    Elephants aside, the plot of this Ong Bak is rudimentary at best.
  80. Creation
    The prospect that this role would officially shift Bettany to a bigger stage, taking him from the character roles that have become his specialty to leading man status, dies a sort of Darwinian death from bad plotting.
  81. Frozen
    It's difficult to get into its "What would I do?" vibe, though, through so thick and transparent a barrier of contrivances.
  82. Alice in Wonderland
    It has its successful moments but it's surprisingly inert overall, more like a Burton derivative than something he actually did himself.
  83. Our Family Wedding
    Instead of invitations, they should be sending out apologies for Our Family Wedding, a cake-and-kisses comedy that has disaster written all over it and not for the right reasons.
  84. Repo Men
    There's a key organ missing from the movie itself: a brain. In its place is a memory bank of other, better movies.
  85. The Bounty Hunter
    Try as they might, Nicole and Milo, as they are called in the movie, don't steam. Wispy vapors is about as good as it gets.
  86. Bartleby
    It's not a bad idea, and it has the right cast and the right look. But, sad to say, it lacks the pace and energy to make it come alive and therefore remains more of a literary conceit than a movie.
  87. Armageddon
    Director Michael Bay's filmmaking style is so frantic and frenetic that it's often impossible to figure out exactly what is happening.
  88. Frequency
    After keeping its balance over much treacherous terrain, greedily overreaches and stumbles badly at the close.
  89. Ordinary Sinner
    It is a slack and preachy business that never comes to grips with its underlying theme of homophobia.
  90. The Lonely Affair of the Heart
    A handsome, intelligent film of rigorous austerity; unfortunately, for all its seriousness of purpose and fine performances, it's also a boring film about boring people.
  91. Biker Boyz
    There's more than a little Oedipal melodrama tossed into the mix. But the movie rarely gets as sappy or as contrived as one keeps expecting.
  92. Just Visiting
    Drains the original story of its satire and juices up its shtick, schmaltz and special effects.
  93. Where the Money Is
    The only way the film could have had a prayer of working--and thereby tapping its stars' considerable strengths--is by taking a much harder edge and going for dark, even bleak humor.
  94. Two Can Play That Game
    There probably isn't another actress anywhere who could make that corny self-advertisement work. And there definitely isn't another actress who could make such an overbearing heroine worth watching for an hour and a half.
  95. Sidewalks of New York
    The assumption among many when the movie was postponed was that Paramount Classics felt New Yorkers weren't emotionally equipped for something bright or frothy or vivacious. They needn't have been concerned.
  96. South of Heaven, West of Hell
    Overlong, overwritten.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Backstage
    It delivers the stars in unguarded moments that should give fans--if not everyone--some kicks.
  98. Returning Mickey Stern
    A bland romantic comedy that comes up short on both laughs and love.
  99. The Little Vampire
    (Lipnicki) is pressed into the service of mugging and shtick that would test the mettle of Roberto Benigni.
  100. Whiteboyz
    Documents accurately the capacity of pop culture to make mongrels of its consumers. But it doesn't quite know (or want to know) what to make of it.
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