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. The Skeptic
    Old-fashioned in the worst sense, Bardwell's ghost story is heavy on Freud, light on fear.
  2. White on Rice
    It's revealing that writer-director Dave Boyle has said that in a way he fulfilled his lifelong ambition to be a cartoonist with the live-action White on Rice because his people in this wan, trite and increasingly silly comedy are little more than stick figures.
  3. Peter and Vandy
    Peter and Vandy has the decided disadvantage of arriving a couple of months after the similarly structured "(500) Days of Summer," a movie sporting a sunnier sheen, more appealing cast and an actual reason to care about the outcome.
  4. Bitch Slap
    Despite its obsession with décolletage, Bitch Slap is surprisingly puritanical (much teasing, no pleasing), substituting plentiful violence and a howlingly predictable "shock" ending for the payoff it promises.
  5. Blood Done Sign My Name
    The material gets away from him (Stuart) quickly, leaving emotionally forced, clunky filmmaking that feels simultaneously rushed and dawdling, like a chopped-down TV miniseries. (It even has natural commercial breaks.)
  6. The Last Song
    One of those maudlin romantic melodramas you just can't warn folks off.
  7. Mercy
    A romantic drama with some good qualities -- among them earnestness and strong performances -- but not enough to completely overcome the strain of its clichés.
  8. Multiple Sarcasms
    Rather than some deeper understanding of the human condition, what we get from Multiple Sarcasms is a lot of heavy breathing.
  9. The Last Airbender
    Airbender, whether intentionally or not, is pegged almost exclusively to a small-fry state of mind.
  10. The Living Wake
    The number of clearly talented individuals who committed themselves to the folly of The Living Wake were fearless too.
  11. Grown Ups
    The new Adam Sandler comedy has all the charm of a home movie that does not star your own family, which means it's overly sentimental, filled with you-had-to-be-there moments, bad jokes and even worse camera angles.
  12. Raajneeti
    Aims for something trenchant about thwarted destiny and ugly ambition in modern Indian democracy but mostly winds up with a convoluted and tonally awkward "Godfather" rehash, with nary a character worth rooting for.
  13. Charlie St. Cloud
    For now, Efron remains an unrealized dream and Charlie St. Cloud an unrealized movie, though judging from the "ooohhs" and "awwwws" from the audience, for his core tween-girl fans, that's more than enough.
  14. Spoken Word
    With the patiently assembled '90s films "Ruby in Paradise" and "Ulee's Gold," director Victor Nuñez gave independent film a quiet luster of hand-craftsmanship sorely lacking in his dreary new effort, Spoken Word.
  15. The Dry Land
    Shaped more for message than for convincing narrative impact, The Dry Land ends up feeling like a PSA to raise awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder.
  16. The Disappearance of Alice Creed
    A glum British kidnap movie in which writer-director J Blakeson manages to generate tension and some suspense, never rises above the mechanical and contrived, finally lapsing into the improbable.
  17. Tales from Earthsea
    It also features deaths by strangulation and immolation as well as a nasty bit with a flying severed limb.Kids may be less put off by all that, though, than by the film's uninspired hand-drawn animation, visual flatness and elongated running time.
  18. Legendary
    A bold-faced name for a lowercase effort, a school wrestling drama so mired in family-film clichés it can never shake loose the suspicion that - not unlike certain high-gloss mat bouts - the emotional fix is in from the get-go.
  19. Monsters
    An attempt to counter noisy, hyper effects-laden alien invasion flicks with something teasing, indie and good for you. Instead, it's like a pendulum swing too far in the other direction.
  20. The Romantics
    This sour spin on "My Best Friend's Wedding" (crossed with a pale dose of "The Big Chill") proves unsatisfying not only because of its unlikable characters and often contrived conflicts but for the thoroughly implausible bride and groom at its core.
  21. Barry Munday
    Greer's wallflower is bitter, and their respective families - played by Jean Smart, Malcolm McDowell, Cybill Shepherd and Chloë Sevigny - come off like a second-rate sitcom's castoffs.
  22. It's a Wonderful Afterlife
    While her latest, It's a Wonderful Afterlife, is affectionate and energetic, its comic premise seems too silly, and at times, too tedious, to hope for much cross-cultural appeal, despite a fine, committed cast.
  23. The Next Three Days
    About 33 minutes in, I couldn't help but think, if they do another close-up of your watch as it tick, tick, ticks toward another three, I will scream. But honestly, any screaming should be directed at Paul Haggis, who both wrote and directed this mess.
  24. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    Really, truly, very scary … At least until about 30 minutes in, when you start to be distracted by the lack of logic in the storytelling and the fact that the nasty little gremlins responsible for all the bumps in the night can be offed pretty easily.
  25. Douchebag
    This underdeveloped, lackluster glance at brotherhood practically demands a response of "Is that all there is?" at its 70-minute fadeout.
  26. Red Dawn
    While a foreign regime exerting its emergent power over America certainly has a familiar ring to it, if anything, this new Red Dawn is a movie in search of its moment.
  27. The Tempest
    In the face of The Tempest, the stormy tragicomedy of rage, romance and redemption that is among Shakespeare's last and greatest works, Julie Taymor, a filmmaking savant of extraordinary vision and voice, suddenly and surprisingly folds.
  28. Walkaway
    Only 97 minutes but feels much longer. It suffers from a marked lack of energy, a condition not cured by its many, many pop-music-scored montages.
  29. The Roommate
    The Roommate proves that the one thing worse than a crazy, stalker roommate is one that's boring, predictable and no fun.
  30. Frankie & Alice
    Berry's florid physicality has a certain silent-melodrama pull. The film around her, however, is lamentably by-the-numbers.
  31. No Strings Attached
    Sadly, an obsession with raunchy one-liners trips everything up, turning a clever conceit into something closer to a sleazy, cheesy affair.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Priest
    The film is somehow a disappointing combo of too-full and oddly empty. Even with all the various parts and pieces going into its structure, it feels bare-bones.
  33. Hall Pass
    After scoring big in 1998 with "Mary" - the zipper issue, the "hair gel" mix-up, the roving troubadours - their (Farrelly brothers) raw inventive edge has never been quite as sharp. Hall Pass, starring Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis, continues that creative slide into everyday crude.
  34. Apollo 18
    Even if Apollo 18 is not exactly as it presents itself to be, it is less of a stunt than a low-key and unassuming film of rising tension rather than big scares or wild shocks.
  35. Something Borrowed
    Despite the pretty overload and the smoldering blue-eyed handsome of Egglesfield, the heart-pounding, palm-sweating, heavy-breathing chemical reactions that should be causing major blackouts in Manhattan, where this story unfolds, are nowhere to be found.
  36. Now & Later
    The clumsily shot and scripted Now & Later is a hollow concoction of sex, politics and endless chatter that's just a few camera angles short of hard-core porn.
  37. Brotherhood
    Brotherhood isn't badly acted or without some skillfully tense moments, but it doesn't have much in the way of entertainment value either.
  38. The Chaperone
    Levesque has rough, in-the-moment charm but paltry characterization skills, Corrigan's natural edge feels out of place as a Disney-esque hoodlum and Winter seems hamstrung playing an adolescent only a fraction as compelling as her hilariously bookish daughter on the ABC sitcom "Modern Family."
  39. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    The film doesn't have nearly the bite - ferocious or delicious - that any self-respecting vampire movie really should. It's as if all the life has drained away.
  40. X-Men: First Class
    A tedious two-plus hours. There were such possibilities in the origins idea.
  41. Take Me Home Tonight
    Overall Take Me Home Tonight represents a lateral move at best for its 24-hour party people, a step back at worst, and not worth your time either way.
  42. Mars Needs Moms
    Instead of breathing life into cartoonist Berkeley Breathed's cheeky kids morality tale, the movie - with all its 3-D motion capture animation flash - flatlines.
  43. Zookeeper
    Zookeeper has the territory-marking scent of a franchise product from the Sandler-produced stable: pratfalls, caricature and aggression, which the likeable-enough James isn't as effective at getting laughs with as he is the more recessive, aw-shucks moments.
  44. The Darkest Hour
    Capable and compelling performers like Hirsch and Thirlby seem left to their own devices to make some connection with the material. The idea of semi-invisible aliens, an unseen enemy, should mean the film has a lingering sense of paranoid abstraction (not unlike "Right at Your Door"), but Darkest Hour never gets beyond rote efficiency.
  45. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World
    This fourth "Spy Kids" picture isn't so much bad as it is just boring, lacking the buzz and brio of even some of the earlier entries in the series. It feels like someone is now just marking time.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Damsels in Distress
    Stillman too often substitutes pith for insight, until even that is drowned out by the sound of him chortling into his sleeve.
  47. Dream House
    With its telegraphed twists and clunky pacing, the film would be unbearable were it not for the fine trio of Craig, Weisz and Naomi Watts, all more or less slumming.
  48. Abduction
    Abduction is just the third movie John Singleton has directed in the past decade, and it contains neither the passion nor the competence of his two previous genre efforts - "2 Fast 2 Furious" and "Four Brothers."
  49. Texas Killing Fields
    As good as Worthington, Chastain, Moretz and Morgan can be as they try to untangle the morass and the menace - and get caught up in it - they just can't quite pull it off. The real killer, sadly, is the script.
  50. Goon
    Goon feels like a movie starring a gimmick, not a person.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Happythankyoumoreplease
    Treating their problems like they're the most important crises in the world is what people in their 20s do, but that doesn't mean we have to go along for the ride.
  52. Albert Nobbs
    When the filmmakers move into Nobbs' isolation, though, the movie flags - a surprise given Garcia's excellent work on HBO's minimalist personality study "In Treatment," on which he wrote and directed extensively.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cracks
    Atmosphere is about all Cracks has going for it. Although it's nominally set between the wars, the movie feels rootless and adrift, less a fable than a story only half told.
  54. White Irish Drinkers
    The clichés are what make White Irish Drinkers a drearily predictable bout, so much so that the decent last-round plot twist that momentarily dazes is immediately undercut by the sappy, life-changing-fuh-EV-uh jab telegraphed from the beginning.
  55. Super
    Where Gunn's last feature "Slither" was an enjoyably icky, funny riff on schlocky horror tropes, the split-personality Super merely repels with half-baked ideas, Wilson's and Page's scorched-earth overacting and atonal bursts of jokey gore.
  56. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
    Unexpectedly flatfooted when it should be light on its toes, Legend of The Fist fails to pack much of a punch.
  57. There Be Dragons
    It is a third man, a revolutionary, who nearly steals the show. Which might have been all right if writer-director Roland Joffé hadn't been so conflicted about whose story he wants to tell. But indecision can be deadly, and it proves to be here.
  58. Courageous
    Courageous, proves a particularly clunky, tunnel-visioned vehicle whose overbearing, overlong script nearly smothers the movie's quibble-free message.
  59. The Vow
    This is a movie that leaves you wanting more. To care more, to cry more, to love more.
  60. Lockout
    Mostly Lockout is lost in space.
  61. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
    The first "Ghost Rider" film, directed by Mark Steven Johnson, was sort of a fizzy goof, the kind of movie where you don't expect much and then think, "Hey, that was actually kind of fun." Spirit of Vengeance, though, is undone by increased expectations, as promising more only makes it feel they are somehow delivering less.
  62. One Day
    As so often happens with love, what you hope for is not even close to what you get, and in this case we are left with a heartbreaking disappointment of a film.
  63. Cat Run
    Falls squarely into the a-family-needs-to-eat category, because there is a careless lack of attention about the whole thing, something that could be perceived as smugness if the film didn't feel so haphazard and lazy.
  64. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    This movie version adds a whole lot of other stuff, most of it not very good and not in keeping with the spirit of the Seuss original.
  65. John Carter
    That John Carter is so hit and miss, and miss, and miss is unfortunate on any number of levels.
  66. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    Given the subject matter, an exercise in delicacy and restraint was unlikely, but it's too bad that the film's concept is way more entertaining than what has ended up on-screen.
  67. The Big Bang
    The movie never rises above a style-over-substance exercise.
  68. Sympathy for Delicious
    Despite the powerful sense of place, Sympathy for Delicious unwinds a narrative thread that grows increasingly tattered and flimsy.
  69. Here Comes the Boom
    The film works hard at its inoffensiveness. Throughout, jokes are left on the table, setups never pay off in any significant way.
  70. Total Recall (2012)
    Like a drug that starts with a rush and ends with a headache, Total Recall is too much of a good thing.
  71. Ranchero
    A 38-year-old man's coming-of-age story, the earnest Ranchero reaches for thematic resonance and ends up only cliché-deep.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Devil's Double
    Despite numerous pluses - Lee Tamahori's vigorous direction, handsome cinematography, outstanding production design, an impressive dual performance by Dominic Cooper as Uday and Latif - the film is more wearying than entertaining.
  73. The Ledge
    Despite a capable cast and attractive Baton Rouge, La., locales photographed by Bobby Bukowski, The Ledge suffers from a seriously flawed script that's just too implausible to be taken seriously.
  74. The Best and the Brightest
    Unfortunately, writer-director Josh Shelov's sendup of the Manhattan private school culture flies off its comic rails after an engaging start, never to land back on solid ground.
  75. What to Expect When You're Expecting
    Rather than the engaging enlightenment of the source, the film becomes bloated by confusion.
  76. The Cold Light of Day
    A by-the-numbers thriller that often looks as murky as its plot.
  77. The Guilt Trip
    There is something promising about the match-up of an old-school show-biz kid like Streisand with the modern, anxiously self-aware Rogen, but what could have been the multigenerational Thunderdome of Jewish Humor instead turns out bloodlessly disappointing.
  78. G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    It's massive, all the retaliation and the world saving stuff. And it's convoluted. Frankly no one should have to think that hard to keep up with the Joes.
  79. Resident Evil: Retribution
    As always, Jovovich's game face is admirable - whether giving gunslinger shade or play-acting a protective mother storyline straight-outta-Cameron. But it can't be easy when all around her are line readings that recall the glory days of baroquely dull foreign-movie dubbing.
  80. Hotel Transylvania
    There are some crowd-pleasers - but Hotel Transylvania never becomes the great monster mash that seemed in the offing.
  81. Vincent Wants to Sea
    What's missing is any of the real-life messiness that might have lifted this material from its creatively tic-ridden confines.
  82. The Family Tree
    Director Vivi Friedman's inability to successfully reconcile the film's duality undercuts an eclectic cast gamely committed to Mark Lisson's thematically ambitious, if scattered, script.
  83. W.E.
    W.E., Madonna's second go at directing a feature film, leaves one wishing she'd find other creative outlets for those times when she's bored with the pop-star life.
  84. Ironclad
    Though the hambone acting quotient is high (and not necessarily unenjoyable), the loud, closely photographed limb-hacking becomes as monotonous as the movie's unrelentingly gray palette.
  85. The Ward
    The Ward is bland shock therapy from the guy who reinvented bloody peek-a-boo with the classic "Halloween."
  86. Texas Chainsaw 3D
    The original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" leaves audiences feeling hollowed out, dispirited and dissolute. Texas Chainsaw 3D is simply a bummer for being a big nothing.
  87. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    Not only is the story dreamed up by producer Ahmet Zappa even odder than the title indicates, its execution gets increasingly irritating as the film goes on.
  88. Tanner Hall
    The better moments are fleeting. More often, the film feels flat-footed, and the story plays out as you'd expect. Long before Tanner Hall ends, you may well find yourself wishing for the final bell.
  89. The Double
    The movie's few pleasures, though, do belong to Gere, who makes the most of his preening caginess as a spook thrust back into the cold. Grace, though, comes off more whiny than tantalizingly adversarial.
  90. A Proper Violence
    Weakly developed characters, a lack of substantive tension and an ending that's more startling than sound round out the minuses of this earnestly motivated but undercooked morality tale.
  91. The Lady
    We have a fumbling and fawning - if sincere - tribute to the living legend and a director who has never seemed more out of his element.
  92. Fireflies in the Garden
    There's a strange sort of diffidence that seems to inhabit Dafoe and Roberts' performances, and the disconnect between the two Janes is simply insurmountable.
  93. Gangster Squad
    The soul of the era is missing, and with it any reason to care. In Fleischer's hands, the high-stakes shootouts are as stylish as a GQ spread, but it's nearly impossible to figure out who's zoomin' who.
  94. The Last Ride
    Dramatically thin, formally uninspired and thematically weak, The Last Ride really goes nowhere.
  95. Parental Guidance
    Lazy, smugly self-satisfied movie.
  96. The Divide
    Director Xavier Gens seems to have set out to fashion a taut, under-siege thriller, but he never lets the innate drama of the situation play out; too often, events are accompanied by loud thumps and whooshes on the soundtrack.
  97. The Reunion
    The "Midnight Run" meets "Bonanza" idea isn't exactly a terrible one, but writer-director Mike Pavone has only one point-and-shoot gear, whether the scene is light comedy, dysfunctional family drama or western-tinged gunplay. (Even television shows these days exhibit more directorial flair and editing variety.)
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Great Gatsby
    The director has steadfastly proclaimed his passion for the novel, but the film he's made of it too often plays as no more than an excuse to display his frantic, frenetic personal style.
  99. Now You See Me
    For all the talent up on the screen — and one can't fault the performances — the movie just doesn't deliver.
  100. Magic Mike
    Life, however, cannot be lived entirely on stage, and once the characters have to take off their thongs and return to their real lives, the film goes nowhere that is either interesting, involving or surprising.
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