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. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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.
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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.
  9. Marmaduke
    Wilson's amiable vocal work keeps the predictability from becoming too grating.
  10. Suddenly Naked
    Crewson is a game, experienced actress but hasn't sufficient star charisma to lift Suddenly Naked out of the doldrums.
  11. Russian Doll
    Quickly becomes silly and tedious.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. September Tapes
    The visceral thrills do not make up for the ultimate banality of the movie.
  16. Bandido
    A bust. As murky as its release print, it is a stale, incoherent spy caper.
  17. Window Theory
    Too sophomoric to be believed.
  18. 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.
  19. Surge of Power
    A campy, hopelessly amateurish vanity production.
  20. 95 Miles to Go
    A tedious experience.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  25. 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.
  26. 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.
  27. Provoked: A True Story
    Chopped into episodes headed by typewritten dates, Provoked turns the case of a lifetime into something straight out of Lifetime.
  28. The Parallel
    The film's theory, that maybe we're all living two parallel lives -- if we even exist at all -- is intriguing, but it's rarely taken beyond the notion that Danny's just dreaming it. The result is, to be charitable, underwhelming, narratively and visually.
  29. Macbeth
    The film is strictly straight-to-video action movie stuff, albeit with dialogue in iambic pentameter.
  30. Funny Games (2008)
    In the end, the difference between "Funny Games" and Hollywood schlock horror may only be a matter of breeding. Funny Games is "Saw IV" with a PhD.
  31. Jack and Jill vs. the World
    Bubbly to the point of indigestion and mechanical about ticking off the romantic trajectory.
  32. Anamorph
    Director H.S. Miller thinks he's made something broodingly visionary when you're more likely to be aesthetically shaken up by one of Mad magazine's Fold-Ins.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Remember the Daze
    If you swiped the most insipid dialogue of the teenage-angst movies of John Hughes and Kevin Smith and Amy Heckerling, you would still have a script -- and a movie -- far superior to the newest of the genre, Remember the Daze.
  34. Deal
    The direction by Gil Cates Jr. is inept at best, and the script by Cates and Marc Weinstock seems to operate under the assumption that trafficking in flabby clichés -- the kindly call girl, the scrappy youngster, the angry dad -- will somehow smooth over the underdeveloped characters.
  35. Harold
    Where "Superbad" found something raucously winning in hanging with adolescence's loser elite, Harold is a disingenuous, one-note underdog portrait.
  36. America the Beautiful
    With so many pointless detours ripping you away, the film feels as lamely digressive as the proverbial one-track guy whose head won't stop turning as each new temptation walks by.
  37. Let Them Chirp Awhile
    A movie where the only conception of life seems to come from other movies makes for no kind of movie at all.
  38. C Me Dance
    Unfortunately, the movie is so rudimentarily written, acted and directed, and its more earthly concerns painted with such a broad, superficial brush, it's hard to be convinced of such key story elements as Sheri's advanced leukemia, her love of ballet and the fact that she and dad Vince (Robbins) are actually father and daughter.
  39. New York
    Kabir Khan's New York -- part Bollywood potboiler, part overwrought examination of the war on terror -- is a slice of the Big Apple that you should skip.
  40. Paa
    The film is no more than a tedious, over-long Bollywood soap opera.
  41. The Strip
    There's certainly no energy surge in writer-director Jameel Khan's effort, which is a collection of lazy, look-who's-stupid-or-pathetic vignettes so loosely assembled and laugh-deficient they play as if you're thumbing through a sketch reject pile.
  42. The Killing Jar
    Benson is so terrible her close-up line readings feel as inconsequential as the insert shots, and Madsen, it must be said, finally looks exasperated with playing grumbly psychos. At times he looks as helpless as his hostages.
  43. Paper Man
    Every time Kudrow exits the picture, imagining her fed-up character's life away from the twee therapeutic noodlings of Paper Man makes for its own time-killing retreat from dull indie-film reality.
  44. You Again
    The girl world found in crass comedies such as You Again, movies that reduce women to sad clichés and a uniform level of bad behavior that would appall the cast members of "Jersey Shore."
  45. Stolen
    A leaden murder mystery with a clunky structure that swings back and forth between 1958 and 2008, Stolen wastes the talents of a reasonably good cast.
  46. Love Ranch
    The grand Mirren is, truth be told, miscast and Pesci is misdirected as Grace and Charlie Bontempo.
  47. Halloween II (2009)
    What you won't feel is genuine horror, because unlike John Carpenter -- whose original 1978 film is a sly game of nerve-racking peekaboo -- Zombie isn't out to engage fans of the genre with a slaughterhouse bonbon like "Halloween II."
  48. Twelve
    Consider Twelve its own memory-retarding narcotic.
  49. Little Fockers
    It is incredibly tempting to resort to the implied off-color word play made possible by the Focker name and suggest that this third edition is totally - but I won't.
  50. I'm Still Here
    Fake or not, I'm Still Here is no fun to watch, and in fact Phoenix's situation comes off as so dire that it becomes a reason to doubt the film's authenticity. Filming someone having a mental breakdown is embarrassing and exploitative at best.
  51. My Soul to Take
    Sadly, there's not an ounce of tension or a single decent scare to be found amid any of this convoluted mayhem.
  52. Black Swan
    Not just any kind of trash, it's high-art trash, a kind of "When Tutu Goes Psycho" that so prizes hysteria over sanity that it's worth your life to tell when its characters are hallucinating and when they're not.
  53. Kalamity
    This hollow downer about deep wells of male anger, wallowing regret and mental disintegration is ultimately a thematic cop-out.
  54. The Warrior's Way
    South Korean filmmaker Sngmoo Lee's debut feature is less a genre-spanning romp than a tiresome lab experiment in computer-generated tropes and green-screen oppressiveness.
  55. The Taqwacores
    As a misfit-centric slap at religious conformity, the story's premise couldn't be more primed for trenchant social comedy, but screenwriter Knight and director Eyad Zahra opt for maintaining a thin veneer of tiresome obnoxiousness over exploring the contours of an emotionally complicated subculture.
  56. The Nutcracker
    Your Thanksgiving turkey has arrived on schedule and it's called The Nutcracker in 3D.
  57. GhettoPhysics: Will the Real Pimps and Hos Please Stand Up?
    GhettoPhysics undercuts its approach with too much cant, too much rambling and too much that is self-evident.
  58. Ong Bak 3
    Gone is the scrappy, brutal wit of the original - nothing more than an unfettered showcase for Jaa's talents - and in its place is more of the overwrought myth making that sunk "Ong Bak 2: The Beginning."
  59. Dead Awake
    A poorly structured and even more poorly shot mixture of a gothic suspense thriller with a vanilla romance filmed in Des Moines, Dead Awake never comes close to springing to life.
  60. Season of the Witch
    Season of the Witch is at its worst when it tries to be a straight-ahead action-adventure film. The early sequence set against the epic battles of the Crusades is almost brazenly bad with its unconvincing "300"-style special effects.
  61. Arthur
    Meanwhile, Mirren, that grande dame of cinema, just seems tired. And who could blame her? She's in the midst of this disaster, literally and figuratively dying right in front of us. Made me want to cry, just not for Arthur.
  62. Mother's Day
    When Rebecca De Mornay shows up as the criminals' fiercely doting matriarch, the ready crackle of her studiously demonic performance brings welcome distraction from this otherwise crude litany of torture and wretched death.
  63. The Other Woman
    This soapy drama manages to be both half-baked and overcooked.
  64. Immigration Tango
    Eventually, Immigration Tango throws away what little credibility it has in going for a finish of total improbability and silliness.
  65. Cowboys & Aliens
    A leaden mash-up of western and science-fiction elements that ends up noisy, grotesque and unappealing.
  66. The Smurfs
    This animated-live action hybrid is really more 3-D disaster than family comedy. Even Neil Patrick Harris, who has proved he can save just about any sinking ship, cannot make this boat float.
  67. Larry Crowne
    Larry Crowne is an inside-out movie, acceptable around the edges but hollow and shockingly unconvincing at its core. When that core is two of the biggest movie stars around - Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts - it's an especially dispiriting situation.
  68. One for the Money
    Most depressing is the spectacle of Debbie Reynolds in the de rigueur Betty White role - Hollywood having relegated seniors to the category of adorably "outrageous" while it caricatures single women as desperate updates on romance-novel heroines.
  69. The Sitter
    I'm going with the filmmakers as the folks most responsible for perpetrating this terribly unfunny and overwhelmingly raunchy film that stars the normally likable, or at least comically forgivable, Jonah Hill. He is neither here.
  70. The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    Six has in essence backed himself into a rhetorical corner, leaving as perhaps the only option for his next stunt something in which the filmmaker Tom Six winds up with his mouth surgically attached to his own anus.
  71. Jack and Jill
    In the wake of "Bridesmaids," Sandler's lipsticked tomfoolery - and inability to share the screen with genuinely funny women - feels particularly regressive and stale. Both movies have diarrhea gags, but only one feels defined by such humor.
  72. Project X
    The only way to describe this movie's trio of party-throwing protagonists is numbingly predictable, as if writers Michael Bacall and Matt Drake had "Superbad" on a loop in the background.
  73. What's Your Number?
    A not very good romantic comedy made somewhat bearable by Faris.
  74. Peep World
    By turns flat and strained, Peep World is a collection of personality disorders in search of a story.
  75. Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil
    Hansel and Gretel are this movie's breakout stars, but it's not enough to make Hoodwinked Too feel like anything but a storybook hurled straight at your head.
  76. Shark Night 3D
    Stay past the credits, though, and you'll find a tongue-in-cheek rap video recap with the cast - and directed by star Dustin Milligan - that carries the kind of spoofy insouciance missing from the main attraction.
  77. 47 Ronin
    Rinsch, making his feature debut, shows the shortcoming of someone coming from the image-based world of commercials and advertising. There are moments of genuine beauty and a few terrifically eye-popping effects, but no feel yet for storytelling.
  78. Ouija
    The ghost scenario that this boring, CW-ready, "Scooby-Doo" gang uncovers isn't nearly as shocking as the blasé attitude they have toward friends dying off.
  79. Dylan Dog: Dead of Night
    Brings vampires, werewolves, zombies, detective noir and spoofy comedy together for a murky genre gumbo with barely any flavor.
  80. Jack the Giant Slayer
    With some momentary exceptions, Jack the Giant Slayer simply isn't any fun.
  81. Meeting Spencer
    A lame, tedious comedy.
  82. Wrath of the Titans
    The film lacks inspiration or zest in storytelling, performance or action. This is pure product, a movie desperately without energy or enthusiasm of any kind.
  83. Footprints
    This often risible head-scratcher never cracks the surface of its muddled ambitions, largely wasting its iconic settings on a series of motley interactions, Tinseltown trivia and self-conscious philosophizing.
  84. The Art of Getting By
    Unformed protagonists don't come more wallowingly irritating and contradictory than George.
  85. Dirty Girl
    Writer-director Abe Sylvia slathers on the cartoonish characterization and neon-colored '80s pop - Benatar! Joan Jett! The Outfield! - for an easy-bake mood-setting, which is tedious enough. But his attempts at situational humor on the road - including a stripping scene for Dozier as coming-out metaphor - fall embarrassingly flat.
  86. House at the End of the Street
    Lawrence's natural, disarming screen presence is ill-suited to something as mannered and labored as House at the End of the Street, and at moments it's as if she freezes up, unable to simply throw on a scared-face for no good reason.
  87. Movie 43
    How many directors does it take to screw in a star-studded piece of aggressive stupidity and call it a movie? An even dozen, and there is no punch line.
  88. Gone
    Gone is also your hard-earned money if you buy a ticket to this slack piece of work, a movie that makes "Murder on the Orient Express" feel like "The Silence of the Lambs" by comparison.
  89. The Lone Ranger
    The Lone Ranger exists without a convincing sense of jeopardy or, more critically, any place for audiences to emotionally connect.
  90. A Love Affair of Sorts
    Though the title hints at a tale of infatuation, Levy sheds little light on interpersonal conflict or why we're such an addictively self-documenting modern society.
  91. R.I.P.D.
    The entire film has an oddly underdone quality to it, as if aiming not for greatness but to simply be passable.
  92. The Host
    The story goes slack onscreen, so much so that the movie's two-plus hours will seem an eternity.
  93. 11-11-11
    If only 11-11-11 had arrived a little closer to Thanksgiving - the turkey connection would have been entirely appropriate.
  94. The Big Wedding
    To be fair, there are moments that earn their laughs and nostalgic memories for the marriage that was and the relationship that is that are sweet. But like many big weddings — a lot of things go wrong and not much goes right.
  95. Bunraku
    No image or moment is grounded – every shot is augmented with restless animation, smart-ass narration or video game sounds. The artificiality of it all is smothering.
  96. Sarah Palin: You Betcha!
    The barbs feel stale at best, squandered at worst, and the ominous music that accompanies each sounds as if it has been lifted from the silent movie era.
  97. Brother's Justice
    Sure, this frequently improvised spoof isn't intended to be taken seriously, but it's also not funny or incisive enough to counter the unappealing persona the actor-comedian has concocted here: an impulsive, clueless narcissist on a journey to reinvent himself as an action star.
  98. A Kiss and a Promise
    A pair of detectives lingering on the periphery of the story help provide a twist at the end that is well-handled and carries an unexpected irony, but it is really too, too little coming far, far too late.
  99. The Catechism Cataclysm
    A grating and witless would-be spoof of religion, male-bonding and, it seems, horror movies.
  100. 5 Star Day
    Frankly, it's hard to imagine even George Clooney making such ill-used screen minutes interesting. But the movie around those moments is even worse.
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