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. A Rumor of Angels
    The emotional aspects of the story are treated with such a heavy hand, the supernatural aspects are so vague and uninvolving, and the group dynamic is so unconvincing that one can't quite imagine why anybody bothered.
  2. Cats & Dogs
    Irritating, childish and more frantic than funny, Cats & Dogs does manage some few pleasant moments, but they are not worth waiting for.
  3. Solomon & Gaenor
    By the time the heavy-handed Solomon & Gaenor is over, it has become such a punishing exercise in the self-evident that one is left numb and eager for escape.
  4. Celebrity
    Scattered, phlegmatic and an all-around weak effort, Celebrity turns out instead to be one of Allen's periodic misfires.
  5. Captain Corelli's Mandolin
    Given the polyglot nature of the cast, with actors from at least five countries taking their best shots at the English language, it's unclear why Cage felt he needed an accent or, stranger still, why it took him a reported seven months to come up with this one.
  6. A Guy Thing
    The three leads go through the motions with goofy geniality, and director Chris Koch has enlisted some consummate character actors -- to help hold up the sagging jokes and story line.
  7. Imagining Argentina
    Severely marred by a plot device so ludicrous it turns a serious drama into something silly.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Cabin Boy
    The problem is that it doesn't find a lot of laughs in much of anything, referential or otherwise. [7 Jan 1994]
    • Los Angeles Times
  9. The Battle of Shaker Heights
    The best thing that can be said about this lethargic coming-of-age tale, noticeably undernourished at 78 minutes, is that it's better than the even more pathetic "Stolen Summer."
  10. Raising Arizona
    The astonishing thing about Raising Arizona is how it can move so fast, be so loud, and ramain so relentlessly boring at the same time. [20 Mar 1987]
    • Los Angeles Times
  11. Snow Dogs
    Every generation is entitled to its dopey, sticky junk and, deep into the winter blahs, they don't get stickier or dopier than Snow Dogs.
  12. Simon Birch
    Johnson, on his maiden voyage as director, treats every scene as if it were a bonbon, almost too precious to consume, and Marc Shaiman's score is a running series of mood cues.
  13. Desperado
    A weakly comic splatter movie oversupplied with jokey, cartoonish violence.
  14. Anaconda
    Such a classic combination of feckless dramaturgy and rampant excess that giving way to giggles is the only sane response.
  15. Laws of Attraction
    Unlike Tracy and Hepburn, the loving and loathing here are absent music and wit and tend to imply that what Moore's character really needs is a good frolic.
  16. Pretty Woman
    Nothing works, except perhaps the sight of Julia Roberts' lean, well-tempered midsection and her roughly eight yards of legs that, in this frail comedy, are worked until they're almost a story point of their own. [23 Mar 1990, Calendar, p.F-14]
    • Los Angeles Times
  17. Shallow Hal
    Lacks even a vestige of subtlety and is rarely so much as amusing. Viewers with fond memories of the brothers' wildly funny "There's Something About Mary" will be astonished at how few laughs the current venture has.
  18. Cabin Fever
    Rather than steep his story in dread, ideas or something, anything, fresh and different, first-time director Eli Roth just pours on the blood, along with some recycled surrealism and plenty of giddy movie allusions.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Urban Legend
    A low-voltage drive-in movie, made strictly by the book.
  20. Twentynine Palms
    Embedded between all the sex and sunlight are some woefully underdeveloped ideas about American militarism and masculinity. Dumont doesn't bother to develop these ideas, principally because he seems to think it's enough to arrange his characters like puppets and tear off their heads.
  21. Sweet November
    A film that means to be seductive but merely progresses from the contrived to the manipulative.
  22. Black and White
    The voyeuristic indulgences of a middle-aged filmmaker playing out his most deep-seated and unresolved sexual fantasies and anxieties.
  23. Paid in Full
    a freefall into urban hell that doesn't give us The impetus to jump or the awful gratification of the ride.
  24. Marci X
    Despite the occasional topical reference to President Bush and Sen. Clinton, this movie is, like, so eight years ago, it isn't funny.
  25. Conspiracy Theory
    It might even have made a good film, but it hasn't. In the hands of stars in denial about their stardom and a director who can't be bothered to take things seriously, it has come out implausible and unsatisfying, a comic thriller that is not especially funny or thrilling.
  26. The Cookout
    Good-natured but it's a dud.
  27. Never Die Alone
    Played by DMX in a gravel-pit monotone and a near-total lack of affect, King David cuts an unremittingly tedious swath through Never Die Alone.
  28. Max
    Just because people are objecting to Max for all the wrong reasons doesn't make it a good film, and it's not. It's a bizarre curiosity memorable mainly for the way it fritters away its potentially interesting subject matter via a banal script, unimpressive acting and indifferent direction.
  29. Coyote Ugly
    A bad movie for connoisseurs of the genre.
  30. Next Friday
    There is plenty of nasty patter and aimless jokes about hard-core sex, soft-core drugs, dog feces and flatulence to keep you occupied while you wait, in vain, for any reason to laugh out loud.
  31. Yes Nurse! No Nurse!
    At once corny and precious, its humor seems too heavily ethnic to travel well.
  32. People I Know
    It's not often that you see talented, well-meaning people joined together like cultists in the snare of a group delusion, but that's what makes this film fascinating, the proverbial accident you can't take your eyes off.
  33. Timeline
    Donner's most calamitous mistake, however, was forgetting to light the screenplay on fire and catapult it from the nearest trebuchet.
  34. The Big Bounce
    There may once have been a real movie rattling inside the empty studio package known as The Big Bounce, but no longer.
  35. The Postman
    Goofy and gee-whiz when it isn't being post-apocalyptic glum, it is such an earnest hodgepodge that only by imagining "Mad Max" directed by Frank Capra can you get even an inkling of what it's like.
  36. Riding the Bullet
    The movie is so glum and flat-footed there's no reason to care.
  37. Twisted
    Twisted is rubbish, but it looks good enough, moves fast enough and does improve as it progresses, principally because its plot disintegrtes to the point of outright comedy.
  38. Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
    Only the innate sweetness of both its lead character and its base premise keeps you from wanting to slap Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo upside its mangy, empty head.
  39. Dr. Dolittle
    A complete waste of time and potential.
  40. American Wedding
    Scott's energy helps keep the movie going during its sluggish moments and animates its few bright spots, including a pleasurably dumb showdown on the dance floor of a gay bar.
  41. The Hillside Strangler
    A garishly slick piece of exploitation with surprisingly high production values but nary a moment of suspense.
  42. 25th Hour
    There are two films at war in director Spike Lee's newest feature 25th Hour, one uninteresting, the other an epic of near-tragic miscalculation.
  43. Halloween: Resurrection
    It's not the worst film in the series -- "Halloween III" will never be unseated -- but there's not nearly enough scares, or humor, to make Halloween: Resurrection worthwhile.
  44. The Ladykillers
    An uncharacteristic if unsurprising dud.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Not Another Teen Movie
    That's not to say there aren't funny moments here. There are. Two, maybe three of them. But unless you're a hearty 14-year-old -- who of course is not supposed to be seeing this R-rated movie -- it's hardly worth fishing them out of the potty humor and repulsive sex talk.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Scooby-Doo
    As reformulated by the aggressively mediocre director Raja Gosnell and screenwriter James Gunn, this Scooby-Doo is entertainment more disposable than Hanna-Barbera's half-hour cartoons ever were.
  47. Godsend
    A consistently underused and often underrated actor, Kinnear gives one of those sympathetic performances that prevent you from believing the worst about a movie despite the sounding alarms.
  48. Equilibrium
    An accidental entertainment, Equilibrium is a science-fiction pastiche so lacking in originality that if you stripped away its inspirations there would be precious little left.
  49. The Man Who Cried
    There is even less going on between Ricci and Depp here than there was in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," mostly because Potter gives them nothing to play.
  50. Spun
    Maybe it's the sight of Leguizamo running around dressed only in boots and a well-placed sock that does her in, or maybe it's just that she's seen this movie too many times before. She isn't the only one.
  51. Van Wilder
    Those 24-and-unders who are looking for their own "Caddyshack" to adopt as a generational signpost may have to keep looking.
  52. Me, Myself & Irene
    As the Farrellys have proved, tastelessness can be made palatable, but they've misfired with Me, Myself & Irene.
  53. The Hebrew Hammer
    Unfunny rather than outrageous as intended.
  54. Jeepers Creepers II
    Where the first "Jeepers Creepers" came across like a dark, wacky dream, the inevitable Jeepers Creepers 2 seems more like a franchise under construction.
  55. Masked and Anonymous
    The look of the film is great, the soundtrack glorious, but more often than not the dialogue is atrocious, featuring a lot of long-winded gobbledygook.
  56. The Manson Family
    The less-than-persuasive result is like mediocre leftover psychedelic '60s underground cinema.
  57. The King and I
    A dismal pastiche of threadbare plot devices and not-so-comic interludes.
  58. The Trumpet of the Swan
    Nothing quite works about The Trumpet of the Swan, one of those animated films that make you realize how hard it is to strike the right tone for a family film.
  59. Gone in Sixty Seconds
    It has a tendency to run ragged and spends an unhealthy amount of time idling pointlessly at intersections.
  60. Gothika
    How anyone in the cast manages to keep a straight face is one of the film's innumerable mysteries.
  61. Intermission
    Turns out to be a tedious and under-inspired comedy.
  62. Series 7: The Contenders
    Getting progressively less involving as it goes along, the strongest feeling Series 7 creates is the passionate desire to change the channel and move on.
  63. A Day Without a Mexican
    Much of the humor is overly familiar, and the broader elements feel strained when it veers toward melodrama in its final third.
  64. Jersey Girl
    Despite that frisson of naughtiness and the occasional smile, Jersey Girl is overall too bland to hold our interest.
  65. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
    This noisy retread, a secondhand facsimile of a movie, is, except for the headache its boisterous sound level leaves you with, as forgettable as a bad day in the Disneyland parking lot.
  66. Titanic
    What audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality.
  67. EuroTrip
    While the cast members are all appealing, with characters that are barely penciled in it falls on their shoulders to make the film even passably watchable, which they only barely manage.
  68. The American Astronaut
    Has been described as a "midnight-style musical." And perhaps it should be seen that way, with a crowd of kindred knuckleheads and some moshing in the aisles.
  69. Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd
    Falls wildly short of its inspirations.
  70. Fight Club
    What's most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it's saying something of significance.
  71. Just Married
    Ashton Kutcher and Brittany Murphy are attractive and skilled performers as the film's newlyweds, but the movie is so mechanical it's like watching Barbie and Ken dolls going through the motions.
  72. The Village
    It's tedious instead of provocative and so unconvincing as to be preposterous.
  73. 2 Fast 2 Furious
    My hand trembles slightly as I type these words, but the truth is that while watching 2 Fast 2 Furious, the follow-up to the pleasurably cheap-thrills sleeper "The Fast and the Furious," I realized just how much I miss Vin Diesel.
  74. Flickering Lights
    Anders Thomas Jensen's Flickering Lights may have been a huge hit in Denmark, but it doesn't travel well. A bleak male-bonding comedy that's a queasy blend of brutal humor and escalating sentimentality, it is overlong, heavy-handed, slow and unpersuasive.
  75. Beyond Borders
    The hard truth is that the line between being deadly earnest and unintentionally silly is thinner than these people think, and Beyond Borders turns out to be an unreal film about a real situation, unavoidably cartoonish, as was the earlier "Tears of the Sun," in its attempt to join crucial issues to ridiculous melodrama.
  76. 9 Dead Gay Guys
    Feeble and unfunny.
  77. The Chronicles of Riddick
    Not since John Travolta sprouted a head of dreadlocks and strapped on platform boots for "Battlefield Earth" has cinematic science fiction been such good-bad fun as in The Chronicles of Riddick.
  78. De-Lovely
    Something certainly blows here, but it isn't the archangel's horn.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
    After suffering through two screenings of Dr. Strangelove, I would sooner drink hemlock.... To me, Dr. Strangelove is an evil thing about an evil thing; you will have to make up your own mind about it.
  80. The One
    Li's far too unthreatening a presence to cause much of a stir amid the din of hard rock music and the pall left by fight choreography that has had every last bit of life digitally drained away.
  81. Surviving Christmas
    A dismally formulaic hodgepodge of crude humor and wan attempts to tug at the heart.
  82. Wicker Park
    An elegant tale of romantic obsession weighed down by a needlessly convoluted plot that yields far more confusion than psychological suspense.
  83. Swept Away
    Madonna may be better in this film than she's been in some of her recent endeavors, especially when she stops screeching her lines, but she's done herself no favors with her choice of material.
  84. The Phantom of the Opera
    The real problem with "Phantom" is the problem with Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals in general. It's a slow-moving orgy of lowbrow grandiosity that's as tedious as it is overblown and pretentious.
  85. Kazaam
    The odd truth is that the film's novice star is better than the material.
  86. High School High
    The laugh lines are mostly crude and the prevalent slapstick is weak and uneventful.
  87. Sleepers
    The film's tone works overtime at mythologizing tawdry incidents into some ultimate epic about the lost innocence of youth. Gilded trash is more like it.
  88. The Jackal
    Sporadically effective, it appears not to have particularly excited the people who made it, and that lackadaisical quality is a drawback.
  89. Hoodlum
    Laurence Fishburne is one actor who has charisma to burn, but even his incendiary performance can't ignite Hoodlum, a would-be gangster epic that generates less heat than a nickel cigar. [27Aug1997 Pg 8]
    • Los Angeles Times
  90. Mad City
    Mad City is an example of how enervated polemical filmmaking can become when its plot loses contact with plausibility.
  91. Speed 2: Cruise Control
    Though it displays enough perils to put a dent in future cruise ship sales, the film has a makeshift, slapdash quality that is the opposite of its predecessor.
  92. Jumanji
    Something bad happened on the way from the book to the movie. [15Dec1995 Pg. F.01]
    • Los Angeles Times
  93. Basquiat
    A paint-by-numbers version of an artist's life, Basquiat is amusing for all the wrong reasons, especially at those horrible moments when you realize you're supposed to be taking it seriously.
  94. Indecent Proposal
    Redford's Gage is so busy being exquisitely sensitive and polite he neglects to project any energy, and without it the crucial morning-after part of the movie gradually collapses under the weight of its own self-importance. [07 Apr 1993 Pg. F1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  95. Return to Paradise
    Though the Strick-Robinson script is solid from line to line, the film's plot is finally too implausible for anyone to rescue.
  96. Bram Stoker's Dracula
    Coppola decided that he really wasn't making a horror film after all, but rather a love story, a comic burlesque, a costume drama, a piece of erotica, whatever. But no matter what else you do with it, a Dracula that cannot manage to be more scary than silly is as pitilessly doomed as that elegant old Transylvanian himself. [13 Nov 1992]
    • Los Angeles Times
  97. Jack
    Jack is more depressing than the weight of its demerits because of the quality of the work both these men have done before.
  98. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
    Loaded as it is with undeveloped notions about feminism and individuality, nothing about it is really memorable except the appealing musicality of the fine k.d. lang/Ben Mink score, which deserves better. [20 May 1994]
    • Los Angeles Times
  99. Falling Down
    Falling Down encourages a gloating sense that we the long-suffering victims are finally getting our splendid revenge. The ultimate hollowness of that kind of triumph reflects the shallowness of a film all too eager to serve it up. [26 Feb 1993, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  100. Lethal Weapon 3
    The latest, and, one fears, not the last episode in the kiss-kiss-bang-bang saga of L.A. police Detectives Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is even more of a comic strip than its immediate predecessor. [15 May 1992]
    • Los Angeles Times
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