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. Falling Overnight
    Comes off as formless and inane.
  2. Supercapitalist
    The dull, hectoring financial melodrama Supercapitalist has all the spark of a high school assembly skit about not letting friends drive drunk.
  3. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure
    For the sake of the children, The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure should be allowed to quietly float away.
  4. 186 Dollars to Freedom
    The trouble is that it's hard to care about poor Wayne when he seems so empty-headed and naïve - civic unrest in Peru on the eve of its first democratic elections in 1980 is the setting - and when the movie itself seems so unfocused.
  5. I Will Follow You Into the Dark
    Muddled by a setup with a religious bent that's never fully explored and an instance of euthanasia that's only tenuously related to the central plot.
  6. A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
    Feels like a failure on all fronts - unpleasant to look at, needlessly in 3D, drearily unfunny and worst of all an incomplete portrait of the person to whom it is ostensibly paying tribute.
  7. Ride Along
    The laughs here are lazy, and any sense of logic is definitely on the lam.
  8. A Dark Truth
    For all the attempted intrigue and mayhem, the film is dullsville, mired by a poky script, unremarkable action and, the hard-working Garcia aside, uninspired performances.
  9. Shady Lady
    The worthy, potentially exciting subject matter would certainly have lent itself to either a straight-on documentary or a seriously budgeted narrative feature. Instead, producer-director-editor Tristan Loraine (he also cowrote the dreadful script with Viv Young) clumsily tries to meld the two approaches - minus the big bucks.
  10. What a Man
    With its stock characters and low-expectation high jinks, the German import What a Man could have been fabricated on the Hollywood rom-com assembly line.
  11. The Purge
    A routine home invasion movie more interested in B-horror tropes and bloodletting than a thought-provoking look at "Hunger Games"-ish class warfare.
  12. Machete Kills
    Machete Kills winds up a slightly camp, tinny parody of bad action movies, playing out with the same sense of tedium as a genuine bad action movie.
  13. Knife Fight
    The underwhelming, would-be political satire Knife Fight plays more like a failed network TV pilot than the savvy feature it clearly set out to be. Think: Aaron Sorkin-lite, uh, really, really lite.
  14. Jobs
    There was a time when the slack storytelling, stock characterizations and general by-the-numbers feeling of the film could be put into perspective by saying it seemed like a TV biopic. But even TV movies are done with more verve than this these days.
  15. Inescapable
    Inescapable is like "Taken" without the tension.
  16. The Condemned
    A good idea for a ghost story is dead on arrival in The Condemned, a would-be thriller whose intended horror-tinged chills register as ho-hum hokum.
  17. The Power of Few
    Writer-director Leone Marucci has a scratch-worthy itch for plump visuals and flashy camera moves, but a limp way with dialogue and story, and — despite his cast — no grip on directing actors.
  18. Hunky Dory
    Laurence Coriat's shapeless script...pads its overlong running time with standard teen trauma — band squabbles, girl betrayals, skinhead brothers — that saps the audience's energy before the grand finale.
  19. Mental
    Writer-director P.J. Hogan may have based Mental on an actual incident from his childhood, but the crazy quilt of a movie that resulted feels anything but real.
  20. Annie
    Director Will Gluck's glam, grim re-imagining of the Depression-era musical about the hard-hearted rich man and the little girl who melts him, is truly depressing.
  21. Adventures of the Penguin King
    The inherent cinematic potential of one of nature's cutest animals rescues the film from being a total waste of time.
  22. Erased
    Erased is eminently forgettable.
  23. The English Teacher
    The English Teacher is a tragedy masquerading as a comedy and doing a disservice to both.
  24. Silver Circle
    There's plenty of action, some ping-ponging romance and even a bit of tension as Silver Circle spins its muddled tale. But it's all so overwhelmed by the rudimentary, computer-generated animation (characters don't so much walk as lurch and glide) that, well, the medium becomes the message.
  25. Beverly Hills Cop II
    It's hard to believe that the group who came up with the hard, clean edges of "Top Gun," sleek and unfeeling though it may have been, could make a picture as crude, as muddled, as destructo-Derbyish as this one. If Beverly Hills Cop II is its opening salvo, this is going to be a long, smoggy summer. [20 May 1987]
    • Los Angeles Times
  26. Detour
    For all the ways Dickerson vigorously dramatizes the stages of solitary confinement — nervous humor, fear, rages, survival ingenuity (including a nifty breathing apparatus) — it's never enough to explain why this particular individual's story is worth telling.
  27. Bert Stern: Original Madman
    Though the photographs are memorable, the photographer is not.
  28. Only God Forgives
    The Danish filmmaker's latest theater of the macabre is brutal, bloody, saturated with revenge, sex and death, yet stunningly devoid of meaning, purpose, emotion or decent lighting. Seriously. Artful shadows can certainly set a mood; too many and it merely looks like someone is trying too hard.
  29. Paradise: Love
    The film is, perhaps, intended as a deadpan burlesque of race and class and beauty ideals...but it plays more as a boorish, overextended punch line.
  30. Slacker
    Aside from preserving these folks for a presumably grateful posterity and convincingly depicting Austin as an open-air lunatic asylum, Slacker does not offer much to anyone who likes to stay awake.
  31. Stranded
    Stranded stops at being merely seriously dull and trite, rather than tipping into train-wreck silliness.
  32. Think Like a Man Too
    Mostly, the movie swings wildly between mania when Hart is on-screen and relative serenity when he's not. It gives the film a multiple-personality feel that does not work in its favor.
  33. When the Game Stands Tall
    A true tale of high school football achievement becomes a strained, by-the-numbers grab bag of uplift in the Christian sports drama When the Game Stands Tall.
  34. Walk of Shame
    Even without the queasy racial stereotypes, Walk of Shame feels perfunctorily assembled, its obstacles straining even screwball logic.
  35. One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das
    Insights are few in this fan letter of a documentary.
  36. The Guillotines
    An action fan could be forgiven for the medicinal taste that this slick but dissipating exercise leaves behind.
  37. 33 Postcards
    The climactic collision of agendas is even more contrived than everything leading to it.
  38. Blood
    Blood feels perfunctory, needing something besides fussy plotting to jolt it to life.
  39. Devil's Due
    We're more than 45 years out from Roman Polanski's director-controlled masterpiece in gestating terror, and yet no gimmick in Devil's Due — no point-of-view shock cut or shaky-cam "realism" — is as dread-inducing as tracking the grim revelations on Mia Farrow's face.
  40. Vampire
    After the quiet, dread-filled punch of the first half-hour — when it seems vampire culture is going to get turned on its head — Iwai's character study mostly descends into a pretentious slog.
  41. Hello Herman
    We're not sure what director Michelle Danner, who plays Herman's defensive mother in an uncredited role, wants us to get besides a reminder that angry boys act out for a host of half-defined reasons.
  42. Ready to Wear (Prêt-à-Porter)
    Not clever or polished enough to be successful as farce, unwilling to supply any reason to care about any of its characters, unable to make the points about the role of fashion in society it thinks it is, "Ready to Wear" is madness without the usual Altman method.
  43. The Frozen Ground
    Although writer-director Scott Walker seems committed to not overly exploiting his lurid subject matter, the movie is just too dreary, disjointed and generically creepy to be persuasive.
  44. Between Us
    The performers fully commit to their unlikable parts but, at least as written, even the best actors couldn't create compelling, relatable characters out of this messed-up bunch.
  45. Stepping High
    Stepping High is both a trifle and an impassioned argument that dance is a direct route to character, ethics and world peace.
  46. The Secret Disco Revolution
    The movie feels like a flakey, off-the-cuff blog post that somehow transmogrified itself into a feature-length documentary.
  47. Just Like a Woman
    All that's missing from Just Like a Woman, Rachid Bouchareb's salute to "Thelma & Louise," is the quality.
  48. L.A. Superheroes
    Spotty acting, flashes of crass dialogue, some questionable camera work and awkward storytelling — including a surfeit of phone conversations — further sink this well-meaning effort.
  49. Terminator Genisys
    Terminator Genisys could be Exhibit A in why the current line of thinking in Hollywood regarding sequels/reboots/remakes often leads to terrible decisions and worse films.
  50. The Canyons
    The Canyons is a bad accident everyone saw coming, and now it is here.
  51. The Time Being
    Not to be glib, but sitting through the art-centric chamber piece The Time Being is truly like watching paint dry.
  52. Tiny Times 1.0
    Is it good? No. Is it fun? A little. Is there a makeover montage? Of course.
  53. Scenic Route
    While the narrative spins in place, Kyle Killen's script throws out one uninspired gambit after another to extend the film to feature length, eventually climaxing with dual endings, both contrived.
  54. Winnie Mandela
    Like many a biopic before it, Winnie Mandela shoehorns an exceptional life into the standard template of a highlights reel, lurching from one Important Moment to the next.
  55. Standing Up
    It's unclear who this blandly titled drama is aimed at — devoid as it is of humor or any real hazard and lacking the provocative undertones of its source material.
  56. C.O.G.
    For Sedaris fans, C.O.G. is a regrettably patronizing washout.
  57. The United States of Football
    A structural, chronological mess of information and emotion, so chaotically shot and edited to move from stat to image to sound bite that it suffers from its own concentration issues.
  58. 36 Saints
    The bloodletting is blandly demure and the identity of the malefactor telegraphed too early.
  59. American Milkshake
    The script is short on details and insight, and when asked to comment on this condition — or the script's sketch of a culture on the cusp of the Internet revolution — the film, like its dirtbag protagonist, just shrugs.
  60. Ass Backwards
    The scenarios in Ass Backwards, which director Chris Nelson contributed to by filming in focus, feel arbitrary rather than organic, as if the creators' list of humor targets — lesbian bikers, trailer trash, drug-addicted reality TV stars, pageant world denizens — were picked out of a hat.
  61. McCanick
    Familiar paternal regret gets ratcheted up here with an illogical and gratuitous investigative exercise.
  62. Chavez: Cage of Glory
    Good intentions go just so far when a movie is hobbled by such risible, place holder dialogue, contrived plot points, wildly uneven performances and awkward camera work.
  63. A Strange Brand of Happy
    Any one-man crusade is likely to fail, but a rom-com character's war against sincerity is doomed from the start.
  64. The Green Inferno
    The film is measured and executed effectively to satiate horror fans' bloodlust, yet its underlying messages are just so repugnant.
  65. I Spit on Your Grave 2
    There are glimmers of thoughtfulness here in the initial characterization of Katie and in her long, slow recovery before she can exact her revenge, but they're ultimately snuffed out by this mound of toxic trash.
  66. Addicted
    Addicted doesn’t know whether it wants to be a modern-day bodice-ripper, a morality-tinged cautionary tale or a serious snapshot of sexual compulsion. Whatever the case, it fails on all fronts.
  67. Cleaver's Destiny
    Cleaver's Destiny" is an earnest but ultimately amateur production on all fronts that misses an opportunity to deal seriously with topics writer-director-star Karl Lentini obviously cares about.
  68. Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
    Perry can now knock these films out in his sleep, and with “Madea Christmas” he certainly seems to be dozing at the wheel.
  69. CBGB
    In its stylistically flailing stab at authenticity, CBGB ends up merely a mess of caricatures.
  70. I'm in Love with a Church Girl
    Suffers from the same ills as too many movies that preach to the choir: a laborious length, formulaic plot and dialogue and, disappointing for a film that stars a rapper, a stock score. Content aside, Molina's testimony isn't good cinema either.
  71. Girl on a Bicycle
    Jeremy Leven's attempt at old-school romantic comedy, set in a postcard-pretty tourist's vision of Paris, is more of a foolish plod than a weightless rollick.
  72. Victor Frankenstein
    For much of the movie's running time, I wished I were watching Mel Brooks' classic take on Shelley's yarn, "Young Frankenstein." At least that one was intentionally funny.
  73. Breakfast with Curtis
    Beyond this general outline, plot and character development are afterthoughts, or maybe never-thoughts.
  74. Angels Sing
    The juxtaposition of such country-music icons with the story's cringe-worthy treacle has one siding with Michael's bah-humbug attitude.
  75. 50 to 1
    Far too much of this plodding picture is spent on odd couple Chip and Alex's road trip transporting Mine That Bird to Kentucky. Forced atmospherics, clichéd action bits and some tone-deaf slapstick weigh things down as well.
  76. The Quiet Ones
    It's a junky, unscary genre piece with a misleading title, because director and co-writer John Pogue jacks up the decibels so often to manufacture frights that you fear a punctured eardrum more than anything else.
  77. Paris Countdown
    If Michael Mann, Luc Besson and Quentin Tarantino all ate the same bad sushi together, the unfortunate end result might just resemble the pre-digested pap that is the French thriller Paris Countdown.
  78. Faust
    Alexander Sokurov's Faust is a grueling side show of a film, a morbid, mightily uninvolving piece.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Speciesism: The Movie
    The film is more polarizing than persuasive.
  80. Expecting
    The movie's early promise fades, however, as an Apatowian crassness descends upon the comic situations, churlishness gets mistaken for rawness, and sweetness starts to feel manipulative instead of natural.
  81. The Falls: Testament of Love
    Apart from Farmer's effectively stricken portrayal of a singularly conflicted man, The Falls: Testament of Love is too earnest a slog to have any impact.
  82. Caught in the Web
    Chen's grand opus about the perils of the Internet already feels obsolete.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Body Bags
    It's worth recalling here that Carpenter made two of the better horror films of the modern era (Halloween and the vastly underrated The Thing), but career-nadir Body Bags is best zipped up quickly and abandoned along the comeback road. [07 Aug 1993, p.F16]
    • Los Angeles Times
  84. Alice Through the Looking Glass
    At every turn the filmmakers have simplified, banalized and sentimentalized Alice and her psychological landscape in ways that reek of ignorance at best and cynicism at worst.
  85. Regression
    Well-intended seriousness dismantles Regression, a not-exactly-horror horror movie that's also a mystery with no mystery.
  86. Enemies Closer
    Enemies Closer suffers from wincingly bad dialogue delivered as if by jocks in a high-school play and action choreographed as if for a gymnasium stage.
  87. The Boy Next Door
    Breathless, uninspired January junk that feels like the iffiest bits of a Lifetime movie and late-night cable schlock slapped together. (And not erotically.)
  88. Live at the Foxes Den
    Live at the Foxes Den comes off like some long-unproduced Broadway musical finally dusted off when someone raised enough money to mount it as a film production instead.
  89. Big Trouble in Little China
    Big Trouble in Little China is a try at mock-Oriental movie magic that goes leaden about a third of the way through -- and finally detonates into great, whomping firebombs of overcalculated, underinspired absurdity. [02 July 1986, p.10]
    • Los Angeles Times
  90. Reasonable Doubt
    Contrived and predictable yet fairly tense.
  91. Self/less
    A depressingly slick and empty house of cards that collapses under the weight of its muddled intentions.
  92. Friend 2: The Legacy
    Little parallelism or consequence can be gleaned from Kwak's narrative that crosscuts points between 1963 and 2010. Seeing as his surrogate in the first film is absent in the sequel, the shared cultural memory has also given way to genre exercise.
  93. Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo
    Desiccated by its pretensions, it's freeze-dried melodrama.
  94. Peter Brook: The Tightrope
    So instructional is the film, directed by Brook's son, Simon, that it feels like one of those P90X or Insanity home fitness programs: Try this at home. You too can perform on stage.
  95. Hollywood Seagull
    When a director merely goes through the motions, even Chekhov can be reduced to daytime soap.
  96. Dark Places
    In writer-director Gilles Paquet-Brenner's hands, it's a convoluted, airless procedural that generates practically no suspense and little that's thematically resonant about lost souls and poisoned memories.
  97. She's Funny That Way
    [It] is it all forced and regrettably laugh-free, despite the considerable energy the actors put into it.
  98. Tusk
    This tonal mishmash is a misfire of literally gross proportions.
  99. A Walk in the Woods
    Despite Redford's enthusiasm and best efforts, A Walk in the Woods is a tedious journey to nowhere special.
  100. The Longest Ride
    The two-plus hours is mostly marked by an emptiness born of scene after scene designed to blatantly manipulate emotions rather than trigger them.
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