Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,522 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 16522
  2. Mixed: 5,808 out of 16522
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16522
16522 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. Coyote Ugly
    A bad movie for connoisseurs of the genre.
  3. 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.
  4. Yes Nurse! No Nurse!
    At once corny and precious, its humor seems too heavily ethnic to travel well.
  5. 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.
  6. Timeline
    Donner's most calamitous mistake, however, was forgetting to light the screenplay on fire and catapult it from the nearest trebuchet.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. Riding the Bullet
    The movie is so glum and flat-footed there's no reason to care.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. Dr. Dolittle
    A complete waste of time and potential.
  13. 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.
  14. The Hillside Strangler
    A garishly slick piece of exploitation with surprisingly high production values but nary a moment of suspense.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. Van Wilder
    Those 24-and-unders who are looking for their own "Caddyshack" to adopt as a generational signpost may have to keep looking.
  25. Me, Myself & Irene
    As the Farrellys have proved, tastelessness can be made palatable, but they've misfired with Me, Myself & Irene.
  26. The Hebrew Hammer
    Unfunny rather than outrageous as intended.
  27. 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.
  28. 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.
  29. The Manson Family
    The less-than-persuasive result is like mediocre leftover psychedelic '60s underground cinema.
  30. The King and I
    A dismal pastiche of threadbare plot devices and not-so-comic interludes.
  31. 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.
  32. Gone in Sixty Seconds
    It has a tendency to run ragged and spends an unhealthy amount of time idling pointlessly at intersections.
  33. Gothika
    How anyone in the cast manages to keep a straight face is one of the film's innumerable mysteries.
  34. Intermission
    Turns out to be a tedious and under-inspired comedy.
  35. 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.
  36. 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.
  37. Jersey Girl
    Despite that frisson of naughtiness and the occasional smile, Jersey Girl is overall too bland to hold our interest.
  38. 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.
  39. 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.
  40. 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.
  41. 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.
  42. Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd
    Falls wildly short of its inspirations.
  43. 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.
  44. 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.
  45. The Village
    It's tedious instead of provocative and so unconvincing as to be preposterous.
  46. 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.
  47. 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.
  48. 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.
  49. 9 Dead Gay Guys
    Feeble and unfunny.
  50. 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.
  51. 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.
  53. 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.
  54. Surviving Christmas
    A dismally formulaic hodgepodge of crude humor and wan attempts to tug at the heart.
  55. Wicker Park
    An elegant tale of romantic obsession weighed down by a needlessly convoluted plot that yields far more confusion than psychological suspense.
  56. 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.
  57. 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.
  58. Kazaam
    The odd truth is that the film's novice star is better than the material.
  59. High School High
    The laugh lines are mostly crude and the prevalent slapstick is weak and uneventful.
  60. 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.
  61. The Jackal
    Sporadically effective, it appears not to have particularly excited the people who made it, and that lackadaisical quality is a drawback.
  62. 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
  63. Mad City
    Mad City is an example of how enervated polemical filmmaking can become when its plot loses contact with plausibility.
  64. 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.
  65. Jumanji
    Something bad happened on the way from the book to the movie. [15Dec1995 Pg. F.01]
    • Los Angeles Times
  66. 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.
  67. 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
  68. 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.
  69. 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
  70. Jack
    Jack is more depressing than the weight of its demerits because of the quality of the work both these men have done before.
  71. 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
  72. 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
  73. 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
  74. Kindergarten Cop
    It would be lying not to say that some of the moviemakers here aren't working at the top of their craft, or that the movie won't reach audiences. On its own terms, Kindergarten Cop is nearly fool-proof: the last word in glib, shallow, soulless, spuriously warm-hearted commercialism. [21 Dec 1990, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  75. Swing Kids
    Except for that music and a bit of the acting, Swing Kids is unsatisfactory from just about every point of view. [05 Mar 1993]
    • Los Angeles Times
  76. The Dead Pool
    With its stylized story-line and almost styleless direction, it sometimes resembles a juggling act with sledgehammers. [13 Jul 1988, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  77. Rambo III
    Admirers of Rambo III will probably point out that it moves fast. But then, so does a gazelle-and a gazelle has better dialogue and more personality. [25 May 1988, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  78. Nightwatch
    Nightwatch is a seriously overcast B-movie with rote performances from everyone but Brolin, who gives James an edge of danger that says that if he isn't a killer, he will be.
  79. Kalifornia
    Not only are none of these characters particularly fun to be with, but the inevitable violence that enters their lives is strong and unpleasant. [03 Sep 1993]
    • Los Angeles Times
  80. The Adventures of Ford Fairlane
    It's camp noir, but the director, Renny Harlin, doesn't allow the jokes, feeble as they are, to take hold. He slam-bangs the action as if he was prepping "Die Hard 2," so that even Clay's self-infatuated strut and bleary leer don't have time to register. The film is pointlessly souped up. [11 Jul 1990, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  81. Takers
    Did I mention the dialogue? Well, really the armored car driver put it best when he said, "We're in trouble here…" No joke.
  82. Marmaduke
    Wilson's amiable vocal work keeps the predictability from becoming too grating.
  83. Suddenly Naked
    Crewson is a game, experienced actress but hasn't sufficient star charisma to lift Suddenly Naked out of the doldrums.
  84. Russian Doll
    Quickly becomes silly and tedious.
  85. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    George Clooney's first effort behind the camera was doubtless more stimulating to direct than it will be for audiences to watch.
  86. Union Square
    Far more troubling than the documentary's lack of data and analysis, its refusal to pose even basic questions -- whether, for instance, the so-called war on drugs is a total farce -- is the sense that these seven lost souls are principally on display for our viewing displeasure.
  87. Wake
    Nothing is allowed to build, so there is no tension or surprise left for the film's climax, resulting in a reductively pulpy rehash of 20th century American drama.
  88. September Tapes
    The visceral thrills do not make up for the ultimate banality of the movie.
  89. Bandido
    A bust. As murky as its release print, it is a stale, incoherent spy caper.
  90. Window Theory
    Too sophomoric to be believed.
  91. The Painting
    Moving from tragedy to tragedy, the film teeters along unsteadily, showing events we've seen countless times before and then imploding under the weight of its ridiculous ending.
  92. Surge of Power
    A campy, hopelessly amateurish vanity production.
  93. 95 Miles to Go
    A tedious experience.
  94. Peaceful Warrior
    The sage-elder/wayward-charge saga Peaceful Warrior aims for inspirational highs but mostly feels like a self-help book read aloud by actors.
  95. The Dogwalker
    There seems to be a high level of personal commitment to the project. It is then all the more disappointing that such effort went into something that comes off so hollow and uninspired.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Arthur and the Invisibles
    Director Luc Besson, best known for "La Femme Nikita" and "The Fifth Element," admits he knew nothing about animation before he started this project, and it shows.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    In the Pit
    Equally as perplexing as its lack of perspective is the film's overall shortage of information.
  98. Tortilla Heaven
    The film and its makers simply try too hard. Director and co-writer Judy Hecht Dumontet can't stop "helping" with overactive editing and scoring, such as tinkling bells every time the sacred tortilla is shown early on.
  99. American Cannibal: The Road to Reality
    Audiences probably often wonder when the reality genre is finally going to eat itself. American Cannibal stands ready for that moment with a bib and vinegar.
  100. Provoked: A True Story
    Chopped into episodes headed by typewritten dates, Provoked turns the case of a lifetime into something straight out of Lifetime.
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