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. Morbius
    Daniel Espinosa’s Morbius, a misbegotten, artistically bankrupt bid by writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless to fuse a gothic horror edge to the MCU, is the nadir of comic book cinema.
  2. The Contractor
    The Contractor is decidedly Pine’s film. His performance is as efficient as the script, which Saleh mirrors with a crisp, smooth aesthetic. There’s nothing particularly showy about the style, but it serves the story of this professional warrior working his way through an unfamiliar place.
  3. Nitram
    It’s with a gut-wrenching helplessness that we watch the ingredients assemble for what has become our seemingly most preventable modern scourge — someone far gone, armed with what’s all too available.
  4. Jane by Charlotte
    No one else could have elicited these responses from the songstress other than her own daughter, and for that this is a worthy, if historically vague, effort.
  5. King Otto
    King Otto features a lot of thrilling old footage from the pitch, along with new interviews that dig into the ways this real-life Ted Lasso used a cultural gap to his advantage, counting on his players to raise their game whenever they couldn’t understand what he was saying. It’s a great story, crisply told.
  6. You Are Not My Mother
    This at once deeply creepy and strangely moving movie is ultimately about a girl in distress, unsure of what to do when the change she’s been desperate for turns out to be worse than the misery she’s already learned to handle.
  7. So Cold the River
    The film has a striking look, filled with deep shadows, shimmering light, and flashes of color. “So Cold the River” also captures the ethical complications facing a reporter who begins to realize that the nature of her assignment may keep her from telling the public what they really need to know.
  8. Black Crab
    The movie is less successful at making its plot feel genuinely meaningful, rather than a simple delivery device for chases and shootouts. Still, for those who could use a break from real explosions on the news, the fake ones in “Black Crab” are well-crafted, exciting and mostly harmless.
  9. Topside
    While Topside is without a doubt a film that lives within its own immediacy, it also feels somewhat entrenched within the hopeless inevitability of its own story.
  10. Mothering Sunday
    It’s an unhurried reverie that’s sometimes as wonderfully sustained as a fermata but also occasionally stifling due to filmmaker Eva Husson’s dedication to that tonal approach above all else.
  11. The Lost City
    The poster made it look kind of fun, and lo and behold, it is. It helps that the pairing of Bullock and Tatum — now that sounds like a law firm I’d hire, or at least a hoity-toity restaurant I’d eat at — is as delightful as you’d expect from two actors of such goofy charm and combustible energy.
  12. Everything Everywhere All at Once
    Crammed with ideas, jokes, laments, non sequiturs and some terrific actors you’ve seen before (if not nearly enough), the movie comes at you like a warm hug wrapped in a kung fu chop: It’s both a sweet, sentimental story about a Chinese American family and a wild, maximalist sensory assault.
  13. 7 Days
    Despite occasional dips in energy that usually coincide with the root-worthy characters’ own flailing moments, 7 Days remains a buoyant and involving jaunt.
  14. How to Survive a Pandemic
    It’s a globe-trotting look at the worldwide response to COVID-19, with an emphasis on the unprecedented effort to get a safe, effective vaccine quickly into billions of people.
  15. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
    The larger point of this movie is that our own pasts sometimes seem like a fantasy — a dream we half-remember — where what actually happened and what we merely imagined both now seem equally impossible.
  16. Infinite Storm
    This is a daring and memorable depiction of trauma, compassion and resilience.
  17. Intregalde
    The sly genius of Întregalde is how readily its characters — who can be cruel and decent, self-serving and well-meaning, often in the same instance — encourage the viewer to take their own moral inventory.
  18. Windfall
    Windfall is, throughout, a top-notch actors’ showcase.
  19. Master
    Master ends up a genre film in which the outlandish generic elements — the witches and the maggots, the fizzing bulbs and out-of-sync shadows — are far less frightening than its portrayal of this real, everyday world in which racism isn’t a long-dead bogeyman; it’s alive, breathing, banal.
  20. Alice
    Even when Alice doesn’t work, it remains gripping. Ver Linden underdevelops her “what if” scenario, but thanks in large part to Palmer the film is a fascinating character study.
  21. The Torch
    It’s a nice story of master and protégé, and in many scenes the bond between the irrepressible, humorous Guy and the quiet, observant Sullivan seems genuine.
  22. Umma
    Think more classic Gothic horror than ghastly over-the-top occult. But that’s plenty to keep viewers such as me, who frighten easily, on edge as the story progresses.
  23. X
    It would be a mistake to call X a misfire — in its artisanal, period textures and delight in old-school atmospherics, it’s too well made. But it’s better at teasing than following through.
  24. Cheaper by the Dozen
    The new Cheaper by the Dozen feels less like a feature than a lengthy sitcom pilot. It’s an assembly-line product scrubbed clean of personality.
  25. The Outfit
    They don’t often make them like this anymore, a story cut, folded and stitched together with care. So “The Outfit” is worth slipping into and savoring.
  26. Deep Water
    Slithering along as deliberately as one of Vic’s snails, Deep Water runs hot and cold; it’s sometimes a self-aware hoot and sometimes a disjointed drag.
  27. Jujutsu Kaisen 0: The Movie
    The environments are impressively painted. The film’s framing, light, shadow and color are expressive. The creatures are creatively designed and occasionally just bizarre enough to be funny.
  28. A Tale of Love and Desire
    Throughout, we share in Farah’s frustration, as Ahmed’s behavior suffocates the film, exponentially raising the necessity for a narrative catharsis. And in that regard, the director’s intent is effective, given that she waits until the very end to provide this release.
  29. Song for Cesar
    Though often roughly assembled in its sweep of archival footage, witnessing and performance, as a celebration of a monumental figure in politics and culture, A Song for Cesar doesn’t need to be slick to reveal its beating heart.
  30. Great Freedom
    A film that both treasures the life span of a lit match and respects the patience it takes to endure a prison term, “Great Freedom” makes an exquisite case for the impossibility of caging the heart, even when love itself is criminalized.
  31. Ultrasound
    The film’s overall tone is a bit dry, and the narrative lacks tension, aside from its central mystery. But the performances are strong, and the points the filmmakers are making about the slipperiness of memory do resonate.
  32. All My Friends Hate Me
    This movie is uncompromisingly discomfiting, meant to remind people of all those drunken nights where they overreacted to every well-intentioned joke, and woke up choking on the stench of burned bridges.
  33. The Adam Project
    The first half is the more intriguing as older and younger tussle with each other and ask the tough questions, figuring out their mission together. But it all falls apart in a hackneyed third act.
  34. Turning Red
    There’s something particularly pleasing about the harmony that Turning Red achieves between the lyricism of ancient Chinese legend and the synthetic creaminess of teeny-bopper pop.
  35. Huda's Salon
    Working with cinematographers Ehab Assal and Peter Flinckenberg, Abu-Assad continually boxes his female leads into tight corners, visually and dramatically. Nearly every scene takes the form of a single unbroken shot, a technique that sometimes pulls you in and sometimes merely calls attention to its own virtuosity.
  36. Fresh
    It doesn’t just offer up the most palatable aspects of horror as a genre; instead, it pushes it to its limits through a complete, and undoubtedly satisfying, reworking.
  37. Fabian: Going to the Dogs
    It takes some getting used to, and there are sequences more awkward in their motley-ness than pointed. But overall, it’s an effectively crashing intimacy created by the performances (especially the fizz and warmth Schilling and Rosendahl have together), Claudia Wolscht’s restless editing and Hanno Lentz’s camerawork.
  38. Dear Mr. Brody
    As with his 2016 documentary “Tower,” which recounted a 1966 mass shooting in Texas, director Maitland is most concerned with those whose stories get buried beneath the headlines.
  39. Lucy and Desi
    [An] absorbing, entertaining and lovingly crafted documentary.
  40. The Batman
    It’s a movie of alternately promising and frustrating half-measures, in which Reeves’ shrewd storytelling instincts and the usual franchise-filmmaking imperatives repeatedly fight to a draw.
  41. The Automat
    [A] lovely, deeply nostalgic tribute.
  42. The Burning Sea
    The film as a whole, though, never hits as hard as it should. The characters are too stock — generic enough that their personalities won’t distract from the looming apocalyptic trouble.
  43. No Exit
    Director Damien Power occasionally tilts the movie into horror territory, with some particularly grisly violence that might shock viewers who think they know where it’s going.
  44. Cyrano
    Cyrano slips in and out of that realm fitfully; it’s not always the most graceful retelling of this oft-told tale, and its ardent defense of love for love’s sake can feel paper-thin one moment and swooningly sincere the next. What gives the movie its sustaining pulse is Dinklage.
  45. Studio 666
    The jokes are stale, the energy is stilted, and the whole thing feels like a misbegotten vanity exercise cooked up in the pandemic to keep them occupied.
  46. Downfall: The Case Against Boeing
    There are plenty of disturbing revelations, but it’s the totality of Boeing’s self-sabotaging, money-grubbing descent — starting with a post-merger change in leadership in the 1990s — that brings home how irresponsible corporate stewardship is a global harm worth correcting.
  47. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    The 1974 film was a nightmare that felt too close to reality, but this is merely unpleasant — and not in a good way.
  48. The Cursed
    This period piece is slow-paced yet peppered with enough gory attacks and smartly staged scare sequences to appeal to horror connoisseurs.
  49. The Unmaking of A College
    While The Unmaking of a College stands as an important document of Hampshire history, it lacks the practical skills and vision needed to allure outside audiences.
  50. A Banquet
    Muted and ambiguous — sometimes to a fault — “A Banquet” is well acted and well crafted and should resonate with viewers who have had experiences similar to those of the movie’s perpetually anxious mother.
  51. Playground
    No one in this movie has a complete understanding of what’s going on, but Wandel proves that a sensitive enough camera can provide a fuller picture than most.
  52. Strawberry Mansion
    Strawberry Mansion is one of the most unique American independent films to open its doors in recent memory. Only time will tell if it can attain the cult status that its charming idiosyncrasy most definitely merits.
  53. Ted K
    A little of Ted Kaczynski can go a long way — especially at two hours — even as one’s appreciation for Copley’s intensity and cinematographer Nathan Corbin’s artful shotmaking never wanes. But in the well-trod realm of forensic examinations of the notorious, Stone’s considered hike into the life and times of a very American-made extremist does have undeniable power.
  54. The Pact
    Deftly mounted, shot and scored, The Pact is a master class in ensemble acting, led by Neumann in a visceral, deeply layered and knife‘s-edge turn.
  55. Uncharted
    Uncharted is fine, and entertaining enough, but while some moments are inspired, others are completely inert. It’s oddly neutered and bloodless, the stakes negligible. It feels like a project with so much potential that never fully achieves liftoff, stumbling when it should soar.
  56. Catch the Fair One
    That “Catch the Fair One” can’t imagine more for its characters, for the world it shapes, is its most glaring fault, and one that will likely leave many taking a deep breath as the credits roll.
  57. Brighton 4th
    Preferring to maintain his focus on the tender relationship between father and son, as well as the gently amusing camaraderie that exists among groups of males in both countries, Koguashvili challenges conventional notions of masculinity to often delightful effect.
  58. Indemnity
    This is a B-movie with the pretensions of a prestige drama; and frankly, the less ambitious version would’ve likely been better.
  59. Blacklight
    The kind of low-wattage, paint-by-numbers thriller that usually signifies a perilous turn toward the action purgatory that is cheap, direct-to-nowhere fare.
  60. The Sky Is Everywhere
    While undoubtedly a uniquely creative and singularly emotive film, it can be all just a little too, too much.
  61. Minamata
    Like Smith’s pictures, this movie is direct, compelling and hard to dismiss.
  62. Give or Take
    If only co-writers Paul Riccio (he also directed) and Jamie Effros (he stars) had dropped some of their story’s quirks and shaggy-dog bits for a deeper, more authentic dive into their main characters’ truer selves, the film might have taken off in a more distinctive and memorable way.
  63. I Want You Back
    Despite I Want You Back’s heaping helping of the usual rom-com balderdash, both Slate and Day provide enough underdog charisma to make us root for their characters, if not their wrongheaded quests.
  64. Kimi
    Soderbergh, shooting and editing under his usual pseudonyms (Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard, respectively), has a gift for satirizing corporate mundanity, and for making everyday minutiae mesmerizing. He can turn typing fingers and blinking cursors into the stuff of quietly engrossing drama.
  65. Why Is We Americans?
    If Morris and Aloni’s film is unfocused and weak in its patterning and construction, it is equally an important record of a living history that refuses to mythologize itself.
  66. The Wolf and the Lion
    Scrolling through internet videos is generally regarded as a waste of time, but watching 100 minutes of cute animals on your phone is preferable to sitting through the laughably bad The Wolf and the Lion.
  67. Death on the Nile
    Christie’s story, one of her finest, is hard to screw up, even when Branagh and his returning screenwriter, Michael Green, seem bent on proving otherwise. Their movie is an often fussy, hectic confusion of old-timey pleasures and 21st century sensibilities, a mash-up that makes for some especially incongruous visual choices.
  68. Book of Love
    Despite being often preposterous, the cross-cultural comedy Book of Love is an entertaining watch. Just don’t scratch even the slightest bit beneath its glossy, super-contrived surface.
  69. The Conductor
    While The Conductor isn’t redrawing the documentary form, it’s nevertheless pleasurably illuminating as admiration cinema about a feminist hero who bucked tradition and broke rules to make herself — and the significant music she’s curated — heard on her terms.
  70. Ghosts of the Ozarks
    Ghosts of the Ozarks is an often fascinating puzzle, but once the explanations for what’s really plaguing Norfork start rolling in, any remaining narrative tension dissipates quickly. Even before then, the lack of scares and action proves detrimental.
  71. Last Survivors
    The story doesn’t really develop organically. There are logical gaps and narrative lurches that are hard to ignore.
  72. Breaking Bread
    It may not be so quixotic as to suggest the Middle East conflict could be resolved over a plate of creamy hummus, but the vibrant culinary documentary Breaking Bread nevertheless makes a mouthwatering case for dinner table diplomacy.
  73. Moonfall
    Moonfall is stupid, in other words, but I don’t mind admitting that it feels, at this point in time, like my kind of stupidity.
  74. Jackass Forever
    Jackass Forever transcends the body horror to achieve a kind of nirvana: The crew invite themselves to laugh so they don’t cry, and ask the audience to do the same. It’s a reminder that pain is temporary but friendship is forever.
  75. The Falls
    For all the grief that the leads undergo in Chung’s most recent work, the result yields a life-affirming reminder to look across the room and see the other.
  76. Plaza Catedral
    For all the commendable directorial moves Benaim makes, it’s the miraculous casting of first-time actor De Casta that propels Plaza Catedral into exceptional territory.
  77. GameStop: Rise of the Players
    This documentary has its limitations, both as a piece of reporting and as cinema. Tulis and his editors rarely give the viewer a moment to breathe and reflect, as they race through a blitz of images from internet chats and cable shows. Their approach to the documentary form is merely functional at best, and sometimes is visually unappealing.
  78. Introduction
    Introduction’s economy is deceptive, its staying power surprising.
  79. Clean
    Clean is so lean, it’s as if the story itself was sacrificed for atmosphere. Clean brings the cold, moody vibes and extreme violence, but narratively, it’s a mess.
  80. Rifkin's Festival
    Overall pacing is flaccid and too many scenes peter out when they should punch. But perhaps the movie’s biggest infraction is that there’s hardly a chuckle in it.
  81. Sundown
    In one sense, Sundown is a bleak window into the corrosive effect wealth and privilege have on relationships and the psyche, and even with a final reveal that fills in some of why Neil is the way he is, it still doesn’t feel that explanatory. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for this taut, confidently unsettling film.
  82. Simple Passion
    There is potential to say so much more about sex, love, partnership, feminism and shifting sexual mores across cultures, but Simple Passion lets the bodies do the talking, and after a while, they run out of things to say.
  83. A Taste of Hunger
    Greis-Rosenthal delivers a fantastic and fierce performance as Maggie, and it’s impossible to take your eyes off of her, even when she shares the frame with Coster-Waldau. Thanks to her compelling screen presence, and Boe’s dramatically dazzling aesthetic, A Taste of Hunger is a delectable cinematic treat, one that deserves to be savored.
  84. Unsilenced
    Informed by actual events, the unfailingly fervent Unsilenced overcomes some problematic scripting and evident logistical challenges to emerge as a moving portrait of conscious resistance in the face of political oppression.
  85. Salt in My Soul
    Salt in My Soul is emotionally affecting, but its ordinary approach hamstrings the story of a woman who seemed truly extraordinary.
  86. The Pink Cloud
    If you’re game for an emerging filmmaking talent’s stingingly uncanny foretelling, The Pink Cloud is an arresting examination of what it can look like when existence is misshaped into a compromised destiny.
  87. Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom
    Opening the doors to a land and people most Westerners know little about, the director crafts a crowd-pleaser in stunning, mostly unseen locations whose charms weather even its most idealistically patriotic and overly saccharine notes.
  88. Munich: The Edge of War
    It wants to be a high-toned nail-biter, an important history lesson and a roiling friendship drama. But because Schwochow and screenwriter Ben Powers would rather jam the components together than braid them into a cohesive whole, the movie fails at all three, straining logic (especially the poorly handled spycraft) and flattening out the emotion at every turn.
  89. Donkeyhead
    Caught between confrontation and compassion, the familiar but still heartrending Donkeyhead acknowledges that the hurt others inflict on us, though never excused, may indeed derive from their own unexpressed and unresolved trauma.
  90. Definition Please
    Definition Please is one of those debuts that doesn’t fully cohere on its own but hints at the promise of what the filmmaker can do.
  91. The Tiger Rising
    The script wields its symbolic hammer so heavily that it tends to smother the story’s more authentic emotions.
  92. Stop-Zemlia
    The sensually crafted Stop-Zemlia is a fine conduit to bring forth those visceral sense memories of teenage life
  93. The Laureate
    Haddock proves the beating heart of the piece, infusing her role with a quiet strength, determination and equitability; neither plucky enabler nor long-suffering victim but something believably fresher and more heroic. Maybe she should have been the film’s true focus.
  94. Hotel Transylvania: Transformania
    “Transformania” delivers what most viewers would expect from a “Hotel Transylvania” film: frenetic energy, physical comedy and Dracula learning another lesson about acceptance.
  95. Delicious
    Should your New Year’s watching require the occasional break from grim awards fare and grimmer real-world news, you could do a lot worse than this well-intentioned tale of mirthful mouthfuls and other appetites.
  96. Shattered
    Although Shattered is a relatively short movie, it takes too long for Prieto and Loughery to put all these pieces into play — at which point the story belatedly does develop some tension.
  97. Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America
    Who We Are, a revelatory, albeit stiff documentary, anchored by Robinson’s personal anecdotes and footage of his 2018 lecture at New York City’s Town Hall Theater, uncovers startling research while surveying the country’s unimaginable racial crimes.
  98. Belle
    Despite the unwieldy narrative complications, Hosoda achieves an adroit, ultimately instructive balance of kinesis and stillness.
  99. Italian Studies
    Italian Studies is a unique curio of a film, a free sketch of time and place melting into a singular subjective experience that asks “does memory matter?”
  100. Potato Dreams of America
    Though the performers rally throughout, the film, sweet as it is, fails to strike a manageable or engaging enough tone as it treads some overly familiar territory, jarringly plays around with the Russian characters’ accents (there’s a reason, but still) and becomes too earnest and gimmicky for its own good.
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